by Andrew Hyde
The bluff seemingly works. There are people in the backcountry of Colorado who really are looking to just gaze at stuff — I mean, me, for one. Last week I took a long drive around the area to look at the land. I was just like the poachers minus my intent to kill something or carry around a gun. I like shooting photos so much more. I prefer landscape photos of vistas and distant mountains over people pretty much any day. It is the vistas, the land, that seem to show me what the world speaks.
200 miles into a drive where I had not touched pavement or seen a road sign I came across a vehicle waiting to talk to me.
“You from around here, boy?” said the cowboy in the old model Ford.
“Yeah, I’m staying at the ranch just north of McCoy.”
“Well all be dammed, McCoy is a long way from here, what are you doing on this road?”
“I just needed a day to drive to see something I hadn’t seen, sir.” I become all too formal when talking cowboys. I don’t even really know where it comes from, but it seems like it’s a very needed form of respect.
“Well then, you have to see the gulch. It is right up here, follow me.” This appeared to be less of invitation and a little more like an order.
I think about bolting. I mean, this is a recipe straight out of some cheesy horror flick, right? With everyone in the theater cringing and screaming “Don’t do it! Why are you following a dusty, old Ford truck up to some undisclosed location!? You idiot! You are about to be killed!”
But I do follow. Formally, politely: “Yes, sir. Sounds great, sir.” There is something about the people of the rural west that I just trust. There is humbleness and honesty, it seems, that is born along with watching the weather turn its seasons year after year. Or something. Who knows really, but it’s there. We drive about a mile up a ridge where, indeed, there is a beautiful overlook into a deep gulch.
His jeans were well broken in, showing off years of work on the high country ranch he owned. His sun-weathered skin had carved deep grooves around his mouth and eyes from so much laughing and smiling. He is kind. No axe murderer here. He wants to talk about me. I tell a few stories, he laughs more than he should. An infectious laugh. He asks a healthy amount of questions about places I’ve been, books I’ve read and my favorite places to ride my horse.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” he says, referring to the land. “We live just over there” He points off to the horizon where an old barn and a porch light are becoming visible in the dimming light of sinking sun. “You should come and meet Martha, she has supper on and is going to be mad at me already for being late.”
We share a dinner of elk from the ridge out back and potatoes from the garden. It’s fantastic. We play a few hands of cards under a flickering light. The whole scene is pretty iconic. After a while, it’s time to leave: “well, it’s getting pretty late, I should get going home” I say, thinking of how I have to drive slow so as not to hit any of the deer, elk, coyotes, or rabbits that will undoubtedly be sharing my road home.
“No, no, you should just stay here, we insist. That is much to far to drive for the night. We have a bed for you” Martha offers. Plenty of beds, in fact, empty nesters that they are — having seen their kids grow up through the house.
I slowly settled in for sleep listening to the coyotes howl from inside the gulch. I think about my day and I realize what had happened. I was the night’s entertainment for this couple. I was a one man, one act play — whose fee was paid in full with a hearty meal and a warm bed. There was something in this realization that really struck me: I felt odd, perhaps even a little bad, used almost. It was a tough feeling, because it was not like the evening had been bad — it was completely enjoyable in many ways. It was more that I was so used to being the one who was the observer, the one who asks the questions, the one who gazes, and the one who inquires. Somehow these roles had flipped that night, and I was the one who was being observed. “Is this what it feels like? Is this how I make other people feel?” the whole thought made me uncomfortable, made me feel like I really wasn’t in control. I couldn’t digest it, I flinched.
The brightness of the moon combats the glow of countless stars as I drive past the gulch toward the mountains of central Colorado. I tell myself it’s important to get back to the ranch, someone, after-all might be waiting for me. I am driving slowly, but I am on my way home, if that is really what I can call it.
Did I become a cowboy after months of riding, roping, and drinking to fit the part? No. Not even close. Though my respect for the West, and the pioneers that helped settle it grew stronger. Working on a ranch is something that is a part of the DNA of the United States. Every structure and community in the West today contains the reflection of the dusty path that led those curious and adventurous groups of old to leave everything behind and strike out for something greater.
Chapter 21
BLOOD. POLICE. TOGA.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
—John Updike
NEW YORK CITY
There is something acutely powerful about being a passenger on a train, which grazes, even briefly, another train on a parallel track sharing the same speed. I sometimes think of the designers and engineers who were initially responsible for bringing such infrastructures into being, musing on how their creations have far outlived any of their abilities to control, tend, or care for what it is they incite: a neutral place where you can take a sudden, temporary moment’s view of another human being’s life. Eyes lock. Stories are told. Wordlessly, as it is an exchange that will never find voice; two people who will never speak. Perhaps you really do mean something to each other in that moment, though if you do it is probably very little. Perhaps you teach a lesson; perhaps you reform a stereotype. Perhaps. But somehow, that’s not where the power of the exchange lies. It’s more about witnessing, together, how you are both equal in the sense that you are traveling, that you are both simply going from one place to another. Equally moving through space. Equally reaching for a destination. In New York City, where the streets are held down by the texture of this energy, the energy of movement, the trains are central; they are the arteries, they make it happen. They connect us from point A to point B, but they also connect us in sharing in the movement itself. NYC, where the streets are held down by the texture of the energy of the city, the trains do this.
I had finally reached the part of my trip where I had been to almost all of the places I had initially wanted to go. My list was all scratched up and I was unsure of exactly where it was that I wanted to go next. I kept asking myself, “Where is it that I really want to be?” With the emphasis always on the “I.” For some reason my mind kept coming back to NYC — the only thing I had not done, it turned out, was the very thing I had wanted to do since I was six years old and watching Sesame Street: go to NYC and become friends with Oscar the Grouch. Only, I didn’t just want to go for a visit — I had visited a few times before — I wanted to live in NYC. I wanted to understand the neighborhoods;
I wanted to understand what it was that made the city tick; what gave it its fluidity and its order; I wanted to feel its pulse, and possibly make friends with the Grouch, of course.
Most everyone who has lived in NYC has a “moving to NYC” story. It’s an event. Life up till that moment is like being in a little tributary stream, and moving to the Big Apple is like the moment of confluence from your trickling stream into a giant rushing river: the currents are different, and strong, and you get thrown in, jostled about, turned upside down, and try not to drown. Go with the flow. Yes, everyone’s got a “moving to NYC” tale they carry around in their back pockets waiting to deploy at the perfect moment. Mine just so happens to involve a toga, the NYPD, and blood everywhere around me. “Hey kid, wake up.” Oh yes, welcome to NYC. I have to admit, that when it comes to the game of the “oddest story about moving to NYC,” I generally win.
New York City is notorious for either making or breaking you.
If you can make it there, or so they say, you can make it anywhere. Of course, more accurately, if you can say that statement about any place, you can transfer it to any other place. If you can make it in Paris, London, Barcelona, Nairobi, Los Angeles, or Tokyo you could say you could make it anywhere. The “only in this city” trope is true only if the name of the city is in first clause of the statement. “It’s raining, only in New York,” clearly does not work. Now, “I am reading a sign that says New York, only in New York!” That’s right, know what makes your area actually unique: road signs and police officer badges.
Feeling the nudge of a police baton rousing you from a deep slumber as an officer barks “this is NYPD. Wake up” is an only in New York moment. Actually.
My second night in living in NYC was a drunken, stumble-filled haze to begin with, and now my second morning involved blood and the police.
It is a proven fact that one has a six-second window of sobriety one can channel when one is drunk and forced to interact with a cop. It’s drunken science. Breathe in. Breathe out. “Evening, Officer, what seems to be the problem?” while my mind is racing: “Alibi. Alibi. Do you have a damn alibi? You’re about to be jailed, you idiot!” On a scale of “new Nickelback tour” to “finding a dead body on the L train” this was a 7.
So there is me, drunk. That is a known. I’ve got that much, and a headache to boot. Okay, scan the room. Police. Cool, they don’t seem too interested in me. Alright, good. Blood. Let’s see, a trail of blood. It comes in the door, through the living room and into the roommate-I-don’t-really-know’s room. Then back out, and to the couch where I’m sitting. He is sitting there now, with two paramedics, in pain and tears.
“My, well, my, um, my you know, my you know is bleeding” he cried. “No, I don’t know” replied the paramedic. “My YOU KNOW, fuck my penis is bleeding.” He was sobbing. As we all would. I needed a few more moments of channeled, zen-like sobriety. I cannot laugh. I cannot laugh. I cannot laugh. I start laughing.
“Sir, how do you know the victim?” The stern NYPD officer asks me.
“Well, I’m the guy who sleeps on the couch,” I blurt. Or slur, probably. “Weeellllll.
IIIII’mmmmmmmm thhhheeee…”
A moment of thinking on just how to phrase my response to the next question from Officer Jones,
“So, you two are dating?”
“Umm, what? Umm, no…” Sigh.
More sobbing. The medic had given him an ice pack and started grilling him as to just why it was that he was bleeding. The bone-chilling and unmistakable sound of a police radio echoing off the apartment walls had woken my friend Paul, who was now looking at me with a puzzled look. “What did you do?” he asked, staring at me.
Nothing! Nothing that I knew. Nothing that I remembered. I shouldn’t have had that last shot of tequila. The room started to spin around me. I had gone to bed in my birthday suit, and was now wearing a sheet. Worst. Toga. Party. Ever. With police, blood, and medics filling the small Village apartment, I was confined to the couch in a toga. Even though there were no blue and red flashing lights in the room — I saw them. I felt them. If I ever have a house with a mantle above a fire, an oil painting of this scene will be on display.
More sobbing. This must be a dream. Let me just wake up and, yes, yes that pinching is real. Not a dream, confirmed. The medics now have stopped the bleeding but are unsure if he can walk down the flights of stairs. I’m asked about my willingness to help him down. “But I’m naked,” was my response.
He didn’t die. Thank goodness. But my pillow that they sat him on to evaluate him did. RIP pillow. He spent weeks in the hospital and unfortunately developed an infection that gave him a chance of death at 40%. A chance of death! Poor roommate-I-never-really- knew.
A lazy brunch in Brooklyn on a Sunday afternoon pinned me with the first realization that I could never really make it in New York City. After telling the story of the NYPD, blood, and drunk me not getting arrested one friend piped up. “So, if he dies, are you going to take his room?” The man is in the hospital right now, we can’t speak of his passing with such disregard for life!
“Great location” said another brunch-mate. Everyone around the table thought it was perfectly acceptable to be gunning for a cheap room in the village if it meant a stranger’s death (at no fault of your own). Well, I would never. I mean, okay, if I found an ad on the Internet for an open room and it happened to be that one, sure, I guess I would take a look. I would, wouldn’t I? The man was in the hospital. Is this what NYC does to people?
After six weeks he had fully recovered and was released. We only saw each other one more time and we didn’t talk about that night. He moved out, someone else moved in, and life moved on. I stopped crashing on the couch and opted for a short term sublet on the Upper East Side.
The medical condition he had was quite legitimate and quite scary. I now have a fear of dying in a way the world will chuckle at when first reported. Is there a phobia named after that?
I had some business to do in Colorado, and after a week back in Boulder, I decided to not take my return flight to NYC. I never did meet Oscar the Grouch.
Chapter 22
REENTRY DEPRESSION
Constantly searching to find something new
But what will you find when you think that nothing’s true?
Maybe it’s that nothing is new
So you let me hear songs that were written all about you
The good songs weren’t written for you, they’ll never be about you
—Idlewild
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
“It is real, look it up,” a barista in Melbourne tells me: “post-travel depression.” Yep, it’s real. You, too, can look it up.
Your life on the road is vivid, exciting, undiscovered and you are free to mold your experiences as you desire. You return with a bounce in your step, a freshness of sight, a new perspective on the world and your place in it. But your post-travel world comes hurling at you with a gravity that is tough to fend off: everything feels dull, controlled, and counterproductive to the very growth you cultivated during your travels, a growth you were so sure was there to stay. That heart-opening, dance-floor-charging, elephant-riding you is now looking for a job and not getting any calls back, living in a place that backpackers would skip over as “rubbish,” and finding that the world you returned to doesn’t really care to hear about your amazing trip all that much. Adding to the complexity is that your world — your friends, family, community, job — all feel remarkably the same as you left them. Your friends still like the same music, work in the same places, and are dating the same people. That shimmering aura of radical possibility that seems to lurk behind every bend has all but evaporated. Leaving in its wake the dreaded lackluster attitude: you know, the one that lacks radiance, energy, spirit, and vitality. It’s a rough ride. And it’s a familiar story too often told. The post-travel blues. A trip with the intent of kickstarting your life is being put through a serious test: can you be alright knowing that life might look similar after your trip?
I feel as if I know less of who I was than who I am.
“The post-travel blues are the worst part of travel,” a Greek I met on the plane from Australia told me upon another return of mine to Los Angeles. “You go from living your dreams and proving wrong your assumptions about the world and all the people that have doubted you. In a week or two, they are both gone and the depression hits.” It’s true, this can happen. I have tried to end my trip three times. But every time I ended up piecing together some more money to just make ends meet so I can stay on the road for a few more months. A few more days hiking. Or on the beach. I met a traveler in Colombia that quit work after finding a $350 round trip flight to Bogota with only $1200 in savings. He could spend another week doing what he hated or living for two months doing what he loved. I envy the focus he has on where he wants to be, even if it is only drunk on a foreign beach.
I might be skilled at traveling, but I am incredibly
poor at returning back to real life. I am not sure how much that will ever change. The sound of my drummer sounds sweeter when I am the road. Which is typical, it’s what most people say. And I am pretty committed to it — I want to see where it leads me until I’m on my last bit of desire to see that final last peak, alley, or museum. I’ve spent years politely ignoring those that have told me vagabonding can’t be done, believing them when they say I’m about to fail, living just one more month until I do. Only that failure hasn’t happened. My work has done nothing but gain, and increase in value, since I have surrendered to the impulse inside me to wander. My insights are deeper the more I experience something completely new. I am more productive, naturally, when I know my work is supporting the lifestyle that truly makes my heart sing. I am more mentally and emotionally stable, when I am assured my future is still a horizon that is centered on movement and excitement.
Are the post-travel blues merely an unwelcome rhythm settling in on your new favorite song? The song you just helped to co-write and co-produce?
What is depressing to me is not that the travel-blues happen, but that people coming back from travel think their trip is done. These familiar blues are not just a symptom of the return, they are a symptom of the attitude that treats travel as an exception to life and not as its rule. Travel as an exception is part of the old paradigm. It goes hand in hand with the sentiment that travel is for the rich and the elite, that it’s a once in a lifetime event, or only for the young, the courageous, the dreamers. It’s not. Modern movement is less something you do and more about the way you do it. It’s less an event, and more of a mode. It’s as much about geography as it is a state of mind. It’s about resources, yes, but also about the permission to use them. It’s not just “over there,” but right here, right now: All. The. Time.