The Tao of Travel

by Paul Theroux

  The Good Manners of the Muscogulges of the Creek Nation

  A [Muscogulge] man goes forth on business or avocations, he calls in at another town, if he wants victuals, rest or social conversation, he confidently approaches the door of the first house he chooses, saying, “I am come.” The good man or woman replies, “You are; it’s well.” Immediately victuals and drink are ready; he eats and drinks a little, then smokes Tobacco, and converses either of private matters, public talks or the news of the town. He rises and says, “I go.” The other answers, “You do!” He then proceeds again, and steps in at the next habitation he likes, or repairs to the public square, where are people always conversing by day, or dancing all night, or to some more private assembly, as he likes; he needs no one to introduce him, any more than the black-bird or the thrush, when he repairs to the fruitful groves, to regale on their luxuries, and entertain the fond female with evening songs.

  It is astonishing, though a fact, as well as a sharp reproof to the white people, if they will allow themselves liberty to reflect and form a just estimate, and I must own elevates these people to the first rank among mankind.

  — William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina (1791)

  C. M. Doughty Sees a Triple Rainbow in Arabia

  Late in the afternoon there fell great drops from the lowering skies; then a driving rain fell suddenly, shrill and seething, upon the harsh gravel soil, and so heavily that in a few moments all the plain land was a streaming plash …

  After half an hour the worst was past, and we mounted again. Little birds, before unseen, flitted cheerfully chittering over the wet wilderness. The low sun looked forth, and then appeared a blissful and surpassing spectacle! A triple rainbow painted in the air before us. Over two equal bows a third was reared upon the feet of the first; and like to it in the order of hues. — These were the celestial arches of the sun’s building, a peace in heaven after the battle of the elements in the desert-land of Arabia.

  — Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

  Vikram Seth on the Potala Palace in Lhasa

  When I next look out we are already in the broad valley of the Lhasa River — with fields of wheat and barley, tall trees, buildings of cement, and, from far away, the dominating vertical plane of the Potala palace, monolithic and of immense grandeur, white and pale pink and red and gold.

  In this late afternoon light it is so beautiful that I cannot speak at all. I get up and stare at it, holding on to one of the supports at the back of the truck, and looking forwards in the direction we are travelling. The hill on which it rests, and its own thick, slightly slanting walls, combine to give it a powerful sense of stability; and the white and gold add an almost unreal brilliance to the vast slab that is its structure.

  — From Heaven Lake (1983)

  Flaubert Blissed-Out on the Nile

  When we arrived off Thebes our sailors were drumming on their darabukehs, the mate was playing his flute, Khalil was dancing with his castanets: they broke off to land.

  It was then, as I was enjoying those things, and just as I was watching three wave-crests bending under the wind behind us, that I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing, and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such a joy: I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing: it was a sensuous pleasure that pervaded my entire being.

  — Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

  Freya Stark at Peace in Hakkiari, Turkey

  It was still far from daylight. The high dome of heaven was revolving with peacock colours and secret constellations among the outlined rocks. There was, of course, no sign of the muleteers. I sat there for over an hour, watching the moonlight retreat from the rocky bastions, a process of infinite majesty and peace. I felt, as Firdausi says, like dust in the lion’s paw.

  — The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)

  23

  Classics of a Sense of Place

  SOME TRAVEL BOOKS ARE LESS ABOUT TRAVEL (that is, a specific itinerary and perambulation) than about an intense experience of a particular place. It could be a wilderness area (Thoreau’s Maine), a river (Moritz Thomsen’s Amazon), an American state (John McPhee’s Alaska), or part of a state (Jonathan Raban’s “bad land” of eastern Montana) — or the whole of Wales (Jan Morris), the whole of Spain (Pritchett), or India for half a lifetime (Chaudhuri). Carlo Levi was banished to southern Italy, exiled in the hill town of Aliano in 1935, for his anti-fascist views. He rambled around the town for a year, tended the sick (he was a doctor), and later wrote with feeling about it, and he is buried there. That, too, was travel. He said it was like being on the moon. I think of this as both an inner and an outer journey: what is illuminated is the landscape and the people — the place rather than the traveller or the trip. In most of the following cases the writers are in residence.

  The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau

  IN 1846 IN Maine, only a matter of days from his home in Concord, Thoreau found the wild place he was looking for. In the chapter “Ktaadn” he defines the essence of wilderness. “It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man,” he begins modestly. Then comes his hammer stroke:

  Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.

  The book was published posthumously, and based on three pieces that Thoreau had written, about three fairly short trips to the hinterland of Maine. Thoreau made his last trip in 1857. He was forty then, and you can see by his prose style that he is a different sort of traveller: humbler, affronted by the changes he sees in the eleven years since his first visit, no longer a quoter of Milton, or a praiser of lumberjacks, or a hyperbolic observer of the mystical Indian. He is now a denouncer of the logging industry and a clear-sighted diarist. Native Americans fascinated Thoreau, and this third trip in Maine offered him his best opportunity to study them.

  Once, when Joe had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half-smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, “Tree fall.”

  Thoreau was assertively American, in a manner of conspicuous nonconformity inspired by Emerson. Thoreau’s passion was for being local, and that included being a traveller in America — to show how to care about the country, what tone to use, what subjects to address. Along the way, in adopting and refining these postures, he became our first and subtlest environmentalist. In Maine his subjects were, as he listed them in a letter, “the Moose, the Pine Tree & the Indian”. The last words he spoke on his deathbed were “Moose … Indian.”

  The Spanish Temper by V. S. Pritchett

  AS A TRAVELLER in Spain, who hiked a large portion of it and wrote about it in his first book, Marching Spain (1928); as a journalist in the 1920s; and as a passionate reader of Spanish writing, V. S. Pritchett was well equipped to sum up this sunny, old-fashioned, and enigmatic country and its people. He was unhappy about his youthful book and so he wrote The Spanish Temper (1954) when he was middle-aged. It is to me the ultimate book about Spain — not a big book but a wise, enlightened one, epigrammatic and perceptive. As a short story writer (his story “The Evils of Spain” could be read along with this book), Pritchett was a m
aster of compression. When writing on Spanish food, Franco, bullfighting, Don Quixote, and the many different landscapes of Spain, he is always original and challenging.

  Speaking about the Spanish Civil War, he recounts the gore and violence and the mass executions. “The barbarian is strong in the Spanish people,” he writes and immediately afterward alludes to the bullfight:

  The most damaging criticism of the Spanish taste for bullfighting is rather different: the bullfight suffers from the monotony of sacrifices, and it is one more example of the peculiar addiction to the repetitive and the monotonous in the Spanish nature. Many foreigners who have known Spain well have noted this taste for monotony. The drama of the bullfight lies within the drama of a foregone conclusion … The fate of the bull is certain.

  In another place, at Guadix in southern Spain, he marvels at a panorama of rock and mountain:

  It is a land for the connoisseur of landscape, for in no other European country is there such variety and originality. Here Nature has had vast Space, stupendous means, and no restraint of fancy. One might pass a lifetime gazing at the architecture of rock and its strange colouring, especially the colouring of iron, blue steel, violet and ochreous ores, metallic purples, and all the burned, vegetable pigments. These landscapes frighten by their scale and by the suggestion of furrowed age, geological madness, malevolence and grandeur.

  The Matter of Wales by Jan Morris

  A CULTURAL STUDY, a history, combining topography, language, national character, and travel, lovingly anatomized, Morris’s 1984 book describes “not only a separate nation, but a distinctly separate and often vehement idea.” Here is Morris’s disquisition on Welsh rocks and stones:

  The substance of Welsh nature is largely rock, for some four-fifths of the surface of Wales is hard upland, where the soil is so thin that stones seem always to be forcing their way restlessly through, and it feels as though a really heavy rain-storm would wash all the turf away. The softness of the valleys, the calm of the low farmlands are only subsidiary to the character of the country: the real thing, the dominant, is hard, bare, grey and stony.

  This means that the truest Welsh places offer experiences as much tactile as visual, for everywhere there are stones that seem to invite your stroking, your rolling, your sitting upon or, if you happen to be a druid or a survivor from the Stone Age, your worshipping. There are thrilling clumps of jagged stones on hilltops, and stark solitary stones beside moorland roads, and stones gleaming perpetually with the splash of earth-dark streams, and stone walls which seem less like walls than masonry contour-lines, snaking away across the mountain elevations mile after mile as far as the eye can see.

  The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen

  “IT HAS BEEN forty-five years since I took a trip whose object was pleasure,” Moritz Thomsen writes before leaving his farm in the Ecuadorian coastal province of Esmeraldas (which he wrote about in The Farm on the River of Emeralds). He was an older Peace Corps volunteer — fifty when he joined — and a rare one: he never went home. He decided to travel down the Amazon, “because there is an emptiness in my life that needs to be filled with something fresh and moderately intense”.

  He makes rules for himself in the travel: “Dollar meals if I can find them; five dollar hotels, if they still exist. No guided tours, no visits to historical monuments or old churches. No taxis, no mixed drinks in fancy bars. No hanging around places where English might be spoken.” He takes his time, floating from river to river, stopping at the Amazon ports of Manaus and Belém and finally reaching Bahia on the coast. After all the bad food and discomfort and illness, and his witnessing the distress and poverty and the fallen world that is Amazonia, he concludes, “There are no solutions any more; the continent will never recover.” In his oblique and humane and self-deprecating way, he is the ideal guide. Though he credits me as the source of his title (a line from my novel Picture Palace), the quotation is actually from Madame de Staël, in Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807): “Travel is one of the saddest pleasures of life.”

  Coming into the Country by John McPhee

  FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1977, even thirty-odd years later this book about Alaska is still the best one ever written about that enormous piece of land and its tiny population. McPhee (b. 1931) was in the hinterland, paddling the rivers and streams, before trails were blazed and the road beside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was open to the public. The book is part wilderness experience — McPhee travelling with a group of scientists and environmentalists — and part social experiment — his meeting new Alaskans and indigenous people, and examining the fantasies and contradictions. What is most impressive is how deeply McPhee penetrates to the heart of the country. Though he is always dour in manner, literal-minded, factual, resistant to any levity, allowing his narrative to sprawl, this is probably why the book has endured. McPhee’s feet are always on the ground, even when faced by a grizzly bear (twelve pages of suspense and information).

  Speaking of the provincialism of Alaska, he writes:

  In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska. Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside. They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers. They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass. They have their own lexicon. A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska. The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind. Mulchatna. Chilikadrotna. Unalaska. Unalakleet. Kivalina. Kiska. Kodiak. Allakaket. The Aaniakchak Caldera. Nondalton. Anaktubvuk. Anchorage. Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own.

  Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

  “WHAT I FELT all the way was like a scale model of immigrants to America,” Raban once said, describing this book. “It was the story of America written in one particular landscape.” In the beginning of Bad Land (1996) he describes himself as an emigrant, “trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West”. He chose an unlikely and pretty much unwritten-about place, the dry, flat expanses of eastern Montana. This is a book about a part of America that no American could have written: we don’t have Raban’s objectivity, his passion, or his sense of alienation. He is also widely read and intensely curious — curious in the way of an intelligent foreigner in America: “Bred to looking at a landscape as if it were a picture, to the posted scenic viewpoint, I was responding to the prairie like a shut-in taking his first walk across a blinding city square. It was all periphery and no centre.”

  Travel, history, biography, and autobiography, this highly original portrait of prairie America, published in 1996, is also about the people who travelled there and who learned to adapt to the rigours of the weather, the stubborn soil, the great oceanlike emptiness that inspires Raban to view the landscape as an inland sea, in which the emigrants are like solitary voyagers. Intensely observant, curious to the point of nosiness, Raban gets to know them, examines their family histories, their dreams, the images that have been painted of the land, the photographs, the guidebooks, and he describes the journey itself — the emigrant train, filled with distinct individuals, whom we come to know, confronted by a new climate.

  Dreadful though the cold could be, it was not the most destructive element in Montana’s repertoire of violent weather. In summer, the air over the northern plains is turbulent: it moves in swirls and gyres, with fierce rip currents and whirlpool-like tornadoes. Here the north-westerly air stream, blowing from Alaska and the Arctic Circle, collides with warm southeasterlies blowing from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern U.S. interior. The exposed, treeless prairie, baking in the sun by day and cooling rapidly during the afternoons, intensifies the aerial commotion.

  This is magnificent thunderstorm territory. The only time in my life when I have been seriously afraid of lightning was in eastern Montana on a dirt road miles from anywhere
… The distant storm winked and winked again. Like photo-flashes going off in the face of some celebrity on the far side of a city square, these blips of white light seemed no business of mine, and I drove on … Closer now, the lightning flashes were like the skeletal inverted leaves of ferns, and when the thunder came I took it for some gastro-enteritic flare-up in the car engine — a blown gasket or a fractured piston …

  Then the lightning shafts were stabbing, arbitrarily, at the bare ground, and much too close for comfort … A slight but audible interval opened up between the lightning strikes and the rockslides of thunder, and in the lee of the storm came hail, crackling against the windshield and sugaring the road. It lasted just a minute or two. Then the lost sun returned, the prairie was rinsed and green, tendrils of steam rose from the grass, and the dark thundercloud rolled away eastward into North Dakota.