When I was growing up, my desire for exploration was defined by my interest in astronomy. I credit it with giving me what Neil Degrasse Tyson calls “The Cosmic Perspective,” the sense that we are a tiny part of the universe and yet one and the same with it. Our smallness is paired with the bigness of our desires and our imaginations. Humans already left our cradle once and we are on the cusp of leaving it forever. I firmly believe that life needs to be multi-planetary.
I doubt I’m going to be among the first 100, or even the first 1000. We can’t all be pioneers, but we can be pioneers in our own lives. Luckily, we live in a beautiful, big world that has much to offer. Many of my peers have had the opportunity to travel a lot in their lives before COVID hit. Though I have lived in the States for a full third of my life, I haven’t traveled much because for me (as with many others), life got in the way.
And now that COVID is on the wane and I have some means of my own, I find those big desires and a big imagination needling me again and again.
The desire to travel manifested in me in different ways. Books were very helpful. Kate Harris became a personal hero of mine with her book Lands of Lost Borders, which chronicles her bicycle adventure with a friend across the Silk Road from Istanbul, Turkey to Leh, India. It led me to a short phase binging on travel writing. More on that later.
Watching travel-related programming was also instrumental in giving me the travel bug. Chief among the travel programs I enjoy watching are by James May, Jeremy Clarkson, and Richard Hammond, who hosted Top Gear and now host The Grand Tour. Some of their best programming has always involved some form of motorized transport (mostly cars but occasionally boats, planes, and much more), male camaraderie-heavy capers, and exotic locations as distinct as the Arctic Ocean, Bolivia, Romania, and Mongolia.
The third way to sate my hunger for seeing the world has been Google Maps. Almost on a daily basis, I catch myself idly browsing different parts of the world. I drop the little yellow pegman into places as far-fetched as Ulanbataar, Svalbard, and Ushuaia which scratches the itch, if only for a few seconds.
And finally, there’s scrapping together some degree of actual travel time under my belt. In 2019, I rode my bicycle 105 miles to the Canadian border and in 2018 I rode 103 miles around the Puget Sound region to raise money for cancer treatment. Traveling to nearby Orcas Island and having oysters with a friend (who claims food is travel) was amazing fun as well. Last year, a (very socially distanced!) road trip across the western United States with a very special someone marked my first taste of the Great American Roadtrip. I’m very grateful for all that I have and hope to be in a position where I can pass my privileges on to others as well.
The Language of Desire
But since lockdown, I have had time to think about my own desire for travel. Beyond just the itch, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where to go and how. I’ve analyzed it abstracted a few characteristics. I can firmly say that as of now, my main desire is to experience the wilderness of nature, though cities and cultures would be incredible as well.
The physical sensation is the slight pit in the stomach and acceleration of the heart that urges me to get out and experience the world before it’s too late. It’s the panic of realizing that I may soon not be young enough to experience it. It’s also the FOMO-like feeling of missing out on a big, beautiful world by being too passive to do anything about it and regretting it at leisure. Basically, I don’t want to be 80 and contrite about my decisions.
When I am in nature and away from the chaos and concrete of city life, the feeling blooms into a feeling of connectedness and belonging. My breathing gets deeper, the sun’s light feels like a balm in the chilly air of the Pacific Northwest, and my sensory experience becomes more visceral. It’s a life-affirming feeling.
This affinity for wilderness has been given different names. One such word is biophilia. I find it clinical and unemotional since it covers neither the physical nor the emotional manifestations of the desire for travel.
For more emotional descriptions, other languages come to my rescue. Waldeinsamkeit is a compound German word from wald meaning “wood” and einsamkeit meaning “alone.” It describes the feeling of being alone in a forest, which implies elements of isolation, connectedness, and the contemplation of natural beauty.
Latin offers solivagant, describing someone who wanders or travels the world alone.
Though not explicitly associated with travel, sehnsucht describes an “internal, painful longing for someone or something.” That certainly captures the heartache of feeling like you know there’s something you’re missing that you didn’t know you could miss.
Finally, there’s fernweh, which is a longing for far-off places. This perhaps comes closest to describing my feelings.
All of these words are necessary but not sufficient to describe the feelings I have. So I have attempted to describe the different aspects of it below:
- The desire for isolation: When I imagine myself traveling, I often picture myself in a remote, cold, and far-flung place. When I close my eyes, I imagine the views and the feeling of having every nerve ending on my body being electrified. Then I feel the anxiety of “Oh god, I’m alone and if something goes wrong now, I’m done for.” While those feelings aren’t good in the moment, in nature they feel like the best way to really feel alive. And free. Freedom isn’t just the ability to do what you want when you want it. It’s also the responsibility of knowing what you want, doing it yourself, and feeling responsible enough to bear its consequences.
- The pioneering daemon: This is entirely unscientific, but I have a belief that in every arbitrary group of people, there are those who want to nest and those who want to explore. Both types are necessary for a group to be successful. And we contain these two rival daemons within ourselves.
Right now, I identify more with the pioneering daemon than the settler daemon. It tells me to see sights never before seen, to tread ground as yet untrodden, and possibly find a nugget of gold in a mound of mud.
The age of exploration has long been over since we humans have occupied every corner of the world. The rest of us still have our personal limits to discover. - Extremes: I always imagine myself in a cold and isolated place. I don’t know why this is, but my desire goes beyond even that into extremes. Northernmost, southernmost, most remote, least populated…The extremes offer thoughts, feelings, and insights less likely to be found on a well-trodden course and fulfill a desire to both feel something special and to feel special.
- Passing-through rather than settling: Kate Harris’ Lands of Lost Borders is only a couple of years old, but I can safely say that it’s a life-changing book for me. It’s the story of how she and her friend — another woman– traveled all the way from Istanbul to Leh on the Silk Road on bicycles. The story is about how “an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines.”
Inspired by her writing, I rode 50 miles around Lake Washington the weekend I started reading the book in 2018. I also issued a whole bunch of travel books from the Seattle Public Library to read them. But I stopped at Pico Iyer. While his writing was brilliant and illuminating, I was struck by how his observations were about the politics, culture, and history of a place while living there for a set period of time. Harris was about passing through as a traveler while on the way to somewhere else. So if I may be so bold as to create an addendum to the great Kate Harris, true exploration today is not just about finding a place (mental or otherwise) and settling in it but passing through on the way to other journeys.
- Externally-initiated change: The newness of travel forces you to confront your problems head-on. You may fold and it may end in disaster. However, new environments also offer the opportunity to either solve or find workarounds to your issues. Travel carries the promise that changing my external environment will change my internal environment. That I will somehow reappear a changed person — maybe more confident or more desirable or more capable.
- Forcing you to confront your issues: Sometimes, though, the real problem isn’t that travel helps change us, but it merely helps us escape our problems. That’s not bound to happen. You may leave your job, your home, or your family behind, but your anxiety, repression, and terrible posture will come with you.
So it is much better to realize how much of the problems that you have are internal and self-inflicted versus external before adopting “travel therapy” as an expensive and life-altering solution. - Sensory expansion: My day job involves staring at a screen. My off-hours are spent staring at a screen. While I have generally managed to keep relatively fit during the pandemic, there is no doubt that my sensory world has rapidly atrophied.
There’s a lot to be said about resting your eyes on the horizon. There’s a lot to be said about closing your eyes and noticing how a sound like seagulls passing by behind you makes life stereoscopic. There’s a lot to be said about a gust of wind that envelops you and lights your nerve endings up like a Christmas tree. We were not meant to live and die in sensory deprivation capsules, which brings me to my next point. - Sensory reduction: This may seem contradictory to the previous point, but being in nature provides an escape from the noisy input of city life.
Gordon Hempton is a PNW-based “acoustic ecologist and Emmy Award-winning sound recordist” who has spent his life trying to protect the planet from the growing cancer of noise pollution.
His “One Square Inch of Silence” project establishes one small “square inch” within the Hoh Rainforest in Washington State which doesn’t have any noise that is manmade apart from humans walking. According to him, “Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.”
Essentially, by the sensory reduction we experience in nature, we both experience more of ourselves and less of the noise of everyday life. - Unreachability: A desire to see what happens when I’m unreachable. We are all so connected these days. My boss can text me when he likes. My mom can bark orders at me to take care of my health. On several occasions, while hiking in a mountain or a desert, taking in the sights and breathing in pure air, I’ve been rudely buzzed by a notification on my phone on some banal matter. I can assure you, it’s extremely immersion-breaking. If you’re sitting on a mountain-top gazing across the Puget Sound to distant Canadian islands, a ping from Dave from Accounting cheapens the experience considerably.
- Simplicity: The desire to be at a place where life is simpler. I often picture some remote wooded area where self-reliance is key. This is different than the others because it’s not about passing through but settling in. But it also has the element of running away from my problems.
Here are my questions to you:
a) What are some great words to describe feelings around travel?
b) Are there some great travelers or writers I should read? I’m posting my summer travel reading list below.
I’m fully aware that traveling to some extreme environments a couple of times will rid me of my itch. Then there are quotidian matters of employability, taxation, and connection which form the plinth upon which a life well lived is built.
But being in nature or at least the desire of being in nature offers rewards that are gradually being outweighed by the desire to remain in a crowded urban area. But for now, I can dream, plan, and undertake little getaways on my own. A long bike ride here, a short road trip there. Life is all about passing through our present self anyway.
