Storytelling: Travel
Tonight I participated in my first storytelling event, an experiment the Austin Public Library is trying called "Adult Story Hour." This was their third of 4 weekly events. It was the idea of one of their warehouse employees named Patrick Owens who doesn't get to work with the public much, so he suggested, organized, and ran this event based on his love of other local storytelling events like Hyde Park Storytelling and Backyard Story Night. He hasn't told any stories himself, yet.
It was so much fun! It was only a matter of a week or so between deciding I'd do it and actually performing a story. I didn't think I had much to say on the theme of "Travel," but I wrote, edited, rewrote, and ran through the story enough times that I could tell it without notes. It amazes me that when I speak publicly, I don't come across as nervous as I feel. This was really my 3rd or 4th time speaking publicly, and I think I'm getting better at it. I tried to be more emotive this time, anyway. Here's what I wrote, which if you read along while you listen, you'll see it isn't an exact match. My approach is not to try to memorize what I'm going to say word for word; I think that would make me more nervous and make me stumble and falter more. I really only forgot once and just for a second or two what came next. Good times! And thanks to my lovely love for coming and supporting me. It means a lot to have a friendly, smiling face in the audience.
My travel stories are all really boring. I’ve been to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. I’ve been to Europe and to Mexico. I stayed in resorts and nice hotels and snapped photos of Buckingham Palace. I’ve strolled along the Seine from the Tour d’Eiffel to La Musée d'Orsay, and I felt so worldly speaking French to the hotel bartender. In Puerto Vallarta, I read a paperback on the fenced-in beach and went horseback riding on a bored, slow-moving horse, and I laughed at the tour guide’s joke about the local prison we passed and the visitors waiting to see their loved ones inside. He said it’s the most exclusive hotel in the region; people line up outside for days for a chance to get in.
These were safe trips. They were comfortable trips. They were more “stunning” and “amazing” and “beautiful” in the re-telling at parties, but not so much in the remembering. I don’t want “safe” and “comfortable” to be the adjectives I use to describe my life. I want to choose from a much broader vocabulary.
Not long ago, I went camping all by myself. It rained all week, soaked everything I owned. Nothing went as planned. It was perfect. One morning, when the rain slowed, I paddled my kayak on the lake. I watched each raindrop hit the surface of the lake and float there for a moment, glittering like a jewel, before sinking into the lake and fading away. I looked across the water, and there were millions of them, sparkling. That moment on that empty lake existed just for me. Later, I saw a great blue heron. He let me paddle within about 10 feet of him, and we watched each other for awhile. When he finally leaped into the air and took flight, a single blue feather drifted slowly down, a gift from him to me, and I suddenly remembered: I used to have adventures.
When I was 14, my father and I took a two-week trip to Belize not long after it had stopped being British Honduras. When strangers yelled at us now and then, “Go home, limeys!” I realized that there were a lot of colors and shades of people in Belize, but not a lot of my shade and color, and it hit me: I was the stranger. We hiked to a partially excavated pyramid site still half-hidden by the jungle; the Belizean kids suddenly whipped out their machetes -- they had machetes! -- and dashed off into the trees because they had spotted a 10-foot constrictor. I remember the glee with which they hacked it to pieces. I remember climbing up the rocks in the jungle, leaping out into the seemingly bottomless blue hole, swimming out, climbing up, and leaping again. I remember the passion the people had for World Cup futbol, which was nothing like the football for which my people back home in suburban Dallas were passionate. I remember the first beer I ever tasted, a Belikin beer. To my mind, it will always be the greatest beer in the world because I’ve never tasted it since. It was infused with the taste of chicken neck stew in Corozal, the smell of the open canal in Belize City, and all the flavors of a world unlike anything that existed before within my narrow existence.
Those are my travel stories, not anyone else’s. There is not one way to live, or a hundred ways to live. There are 7 ½ billion people in the world, and 7 ½ billion ways of understanding the world. Travel is the only way available to us to really leap into the bottomless diversity and discover the simple joys and fears and pleasures and struggles we have in common that make all of those 7 ½ billion people truly family. And that, I believe, is what the world, and I, need most right now.
