Wheels on our feet

Martha Gellhorn, Isak Dinesen, and I have something in common.

I would not deign to compare myself in almost all matters with these two astounding women. Both were dynamic, vivacious writers who succeeded in capturing the flavors of their era and the many locales they absorbed.

Both were sought after by strong men who adored them. Both survived full, long lives, Gellhorn dying at 90 in February of this year and Dinesen dying at the age of 77, in spite of a long affliction (her husband, Baron Blixen, gave her syphilis in the first year of their marriage.)

Each woman inspires me with her joie d-vivre, sense of adventure, and ability to surmount even the most destructive and passionate of relationships and disappointments.

I can’t claim most of their attributes, but I can call them kindred souls in their love of travel.

My former mother-in-law used to say I had wheels on my feet; she couldn’t understand why I had a lifelong itch to see other parts of the world. As a matter of fact, I don’t know where I got this hunger. My family never traveled farther than the 400 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco. People of that era and income rarely thought of travel as pastime.

Nonetheless, when I was 19 and spent a summer working with villagers near Quito, Ecuador, I was bitten by the bug. From that first experience I sensed the exhilaration of jumping into the viewpoint of another culture.

Two years later, when I traveled to India, I added to my world view the profound encounters I had with a non-western country whose behaviors and philosophies were radically different from any I’d known.

Although I’ve voyaged to many places since, I still haven’t traveled as much as I’d wish.

I seem to have settled down in one of the finest corners of the world, and I count myself lucky. Every time I head over the hill to go to work in the morning and see that vast spread of mountains and changing colors, I exult. I have no wish to leave here on any extended basis.

And yet, it’s still there, that wish for movement. I can’t deny my craving to visit other interesting places.

I tell people that the only reason I’d like a bit more income is so I could experience the freedom of going where I want to go when I want to go and the luxury of seeing the people I love when I want to see them.

It’s probably a bit more. I still have some of the romantic imagination in me; I have a hard time giving up the desire to see places I’ve read about or revisit those I’ve enjoyed. The thought that I may never explore the hill towns of Italy or experience the Kundera-world of Prague or touch base one more time with Tawatchi and his family in the village of Nong Sua, Thailand, is too depressing to contemplate.

I don’t’ wish for castles and luxury. I don’t need Plaza Hotels or villas on the Cote d’Azur. Just give me some cobblestone streets, a fishing village and good people anywhere on the Mediterranean, for example, and I’d be happy.

I actually prefer plunking down somewhere for awhile; Cyprus would do, with perhaps a simple whitewashed cottage for a season. Actually, lots of places would do.

So we all have our dreams.

I think it’s interesting to note that both of these well-traveled women didn’t get wanderlust out of their systems either.

The recent "Summer Fiction" double-issue of the New Yorker printed excerpts from Martha Gellhorn’s letters. From Spain, at the age of 76, she wrote a friend, " The fountain of youth is not a little spurt of water but travel…I have only to go to a different country, sky, language, scenery, to feel it is worth living."

Later, at 88, she wrote, "Most people do not live as long as I have and certainly not without any grievous health problems and no money anxiety, so I ought to count my blessings, but instead I feel trapped and limited and disgusted and only hope that travel, even limited as it is now, will not fail me, will still relieve me, because it is change, because there is a chance of newness."

Isak Dinesen, too, looked upon travel as her salvation.

Contemplating a trip to America (a country she later said she adored), she translated one of her favorite Latin aphorisms; "To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself."

The writer of Out of Africa never lost her yearning for that country and for the adventure it epitomized. "I went to Africa a Dane," she related, "and came back a Masai."

Travel alters one.

Although I am determined to relish each day even if I spend it in the same place, I too love the excitement and the unknowns of travel. I feel sometimes like one of Dinesen’s elephants.

Describing the beauty of Ngong and her early safaris, she writes of "seeing a herd of elephant pacing as if they had an appointment at the end of the world."

Sometimes I too pace even my beautiful space awaiting a chance to see the ends of earth.

I’ve never been to Africa, but I’m ready.