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| The travelers who came before us, our legacy |
If I stay on Palms Boulevard going west, I reach Sepulveda Boulevard, and I have my choice of directions, straight ahead to Santa Monica, where my mother was raised, to my right the old township of Sawtelle, my father's hometown, or to my left, north, toward Culver City and Venice, where many of my relatives once lived. Some claim Sepulveda Boulevard, named after Francisco Sepulveda, the patriarch of one of Los Angeles’ founding families, is the longest street in Southern California, 43 miles, reaching to the north end of the San Fernando Valley and south to Long Beach.
Usually, my morning cruise, followed by a zesty walk takes me about one to two hours, so I stay relatively close to home, sometimes just heading to Venice Beach and walking along the shore before the tourists arrive. There is something in my blood that gets me going when I think of travel, whether it's on a jet somewhere or just cruising local neighborhoods. Maybe, like many American, it's because my grandparents traveled from somewhere else to make this their home, unless I go far enough to a time when this land was also my ancestors' land, so there's a part of me that feels I belong here.
No matter how many times I drive past a familiar location, I see something new, something I missed, and I’ve lived here most of my life, so it surprises me when this happens. In her classic book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion wrote about driving L.A.’s freeways, both a travel and a cultural expose of L.A.’s freeway system and its effect on people.
Before covid, I’d buy the Best American Travel Writing, a compilation of the finest essays on travel, the stories taking me to all parts of the world. It’s something I enjoyed about Ron Arias’ novel, The Road to Tomazunchale, a Chicano surrealist trip from Los Angeles to Cuzco, Peru, and back to Los Angeles.
Travel writing goes pretty far back, consider the Iliad and the Odyssey or the Bible, filled with travel writing like the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden and sent into the wilderness.
In Exodus, the Jews traveled from Egypt to the promise land, and the story of the Prodigal Son whose father welcomes him home after returning from a life of vice. Actually, most of the Old Testament is about travel, in one way or another.
I read the New Testament as a travel journal, Joseph and Mary fleeing Bethlehem to Nazareth, the three wise men in search of the Messiah, and the apostles crisscrossing the Middle East spreading the word of God. It's reported Peter and Paul made it all the way to Rome.
Can’t forget Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the pilgrimage of thirty travelers and their adventures on the way to the tomb of St. Thomas of Beckett, or Cervantez’s Don Quijote, about old man Quijana’s travels through the dry, desolate plains of La Mancha and Castilla, not to forget Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and the wild sea adventures of Moby Dick.
When I lived in Granada, Spain for a year in 1977, I carried James Michner’s Iberia, something of a Spanish travel Bible and Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, whose enchanting stories I read each time I took a walk up to the old Arab castle, in the days when a traveler could pay a couple of pesetas and take all the time needed to wander through the ancient fortress.
One semester, I had a night class inside the walls of the Muslim alcazar. There, an old professor chased us from the classroom and told us to go explore the palace and gardens. We ended up underneath, walking through mysterious passageways, lifting cannon balls and entering dusty rooms, which gave life to Irving’s tales, a lot like the magical stories of Ali Babba in the Thousand and One Nights.
One of the most magical tales for Americans comes from Mark Twain and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a vast travel tale of a young boy taking a slave to freedom up the Mississippi River, all the while questioning the morality of right and wrong, of keeping the law or breaking it, of his love for another human being. Then there was Twain's travel story as a river boat captain in Life on the Mississippi.
Of course, I suppose for Americans, the mother of all modern travel books is Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, a book Steinbeck wrote about his journey in a pickup truck and camper across America with his small dog, Charley, meeting strangers and encountering adventures along the way. I thought the book read more like a novel, which one of Steinbeck’s sons thought also. He knew his father as an extremely shy person, in public, and couldn’t imagine Steinbeck initiating encounters with complete strangers as he described in his book. We’ll never know.
The book still stands as a tribute to travel in search of America, along with William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways.
I can’t read Steinbeck’s small book without getting the urge to move and take a trip somewhere, even if it’s only for a cruise around the neighborhood. The first lines always get to me, like an upbeat song, sending shivers through my legs, get up, drive, walk, anything, just move.
Steinbeck writes: When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cut this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts from a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on an ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
So it is, nearing eight decades on earth, last year, I still had the urge to travel, Colombia my destination, with twelve friends, from Medellin to Santa Marta and the gates of old Cartagena de las Indias, which today our president is threatening to bomb. I don’t get it, beautiful people, friendly and accommodating, music in the streets, good food, and a lot of history. Drugs? If we'd stop using, they'd stop supplying.
I question how many more of these journeys I have left in me. My spirit soars when I hear others my age still hitting the road, like my fellow blogueros Michael Sedano and his “walkabouts” each morning or Ernest Hogan and his rasquache, gonzo trips across town or across different states, stopping to take pictures of America’s eccentric folk art hanging on walls, lining the highway, or sitting on someone’s front porch.
The greatest trip awaits us all, as in Dante's Divine Comedy, and his travels through purgatory, heaven, and hell, some argue the true model for Christianity’s belief in an afterlife. For many Mexicans, how can we not follow Juan Preciado, the main character in Juan Rulfo’s classic Pedro Paramo, who travels into the mythic underworld “Comala,” looking for his father, not unlike Homer’s Telemachus, son of Odysseus, searching for his father who’d been away at war for twenty years or Carlos Fuentes’ the Death of Artemio Cruz, and the memories of an old man in bed dying and, in his mind, traveling back to relive his life, bad, good, and evil.
Then there are the travel stories of the greatest indigenous Palestinian Jew, Jesus the Christ, traveling each day on foot, by donkey, or in a small boat, spreading the new word, an abomination to orthodox pharisees and rabbis, a story he and his followers believed to be the truth, until the Romans convicted and sentenced him to death, marching him up to Golgotha where he was hung on a cross.
One more travel story among life's greatest travelers, Confucius, Buddha, and Mohammed, who, like the rest of us were searching for answers, only to find, on our return from our journeys, the answers were right here all along, close to home.
