A Weekend Traveling the World

I spent the weekend traveling the world, an event I had been training for my entire life. That training was inspired by–although I didn’t know it at the time–a talk with my mom when I was 5 or 6 years old, about the value of books. “Books can take you anywhere,” I remember her telling me. I seemed always to interpret things she told me literally, so there I was, youngster just beginning to read, and discovering just how book could take me places.

I quickly began to develop my imagination, realizing that this was the boarding pass required to turn pages of words in experiences. I drew a lot, I read more and more, I began to write my own stories. The earliest story I remember writing was for a social studies project in 3rd grade. Around that time I grew interested in airplanes and flying. I had no access to planes, but access to The Student Pilot’s Flight Manual and from that, I learned to draw control panels and would use those drawing to pretend I was flying a plane here and there.

The more I wrote, the more I read, the more my imagination improved. It was a painfully slow process day-to-day, but exercising it as I did, year in and year out, seemed to hone my imagination in to something I had more and more control over. I wrote more stories, I began submitting them, and eventually, even began to sell them. I greatly expanded the focus of my reading–from what was initially mostly science and science fiction to everything and anything that could interest me. I’ve often thought it interesting that, when reading an essay about quantum mechanics, I visualize what is being described as if I could actually see it. When reading about the death of a star by supernova, I am there, hovering at the outskirts of that unfortunate solar system to witness the event.

Stories pull me in, and the world melts away. It is a wonderful talent to have, although it has its darker side. I often envision what-if scenarios, and that same imagination makes them often feel too real for comfort.

We like getting out as family. We like road trips, both long and short, and in years past, our weekends would often be full of exploring nearby places (sometimes to the point where I needed a weekend off, just to relax). We’d drive down to Florida a few times a years, stopping a places along the way. We’d drive up to Maine in the summers doing the same. For a year now, we’ve been mostly stuck at home like everyone else, and then need to get out has been growing, even in me, someone perfectly content to stay in. It is an irony we are all currently experiencing that I am desperate to travel and cannot.

Which is how I came to Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar on Saturday morning. I enjoy travel books, but hadn’t read anything by Theroux and so first thing Saturday, after building a fire in the fireplace, I sat with the book and traveled (mostly by train) from London through the Mid-East, and into India, and then up to Japan, and across the Trans-Siberian Railroad arriving, early Sunday morning, back in London.

This was the event that I had been training for all these years since my mom first put the idea in my head that books could take me anywhere. I back in time and across and across large swaths of the world in little over a day, sitting on my couch, in front of a fire, with temperatures in the teens outside. I didn’t feel like reading. It felt like traveling, it felt like I was there. I could see it, smell it, taste it, hear it. It was wonderful.

I finished The Great Railway Bazarr this morning, and decided I needed more, so now I am making my way Theroux’s 3 collections of essays (starting with the most recent one). The weekend may be coming to an end, but my travels, it seems, are just beginning.