My Deviate podcast has been, since its inception, a pretext to explore topics I don’t typically cover as a travel writer. Granted, a majority of my episodes have nonetheless been about travel (or travel writing), but by its very name, Deviate gives me the opportunity to veer away from what I’m supposed to write about as a travel writer, and explore other topics that have captured my imagination — things like sports and movies.
Nine years into the podcast, it occurs to me that I’ve accumulated enough autobiographical episodes to explore the zeitgeist of the 1990s through the experiences I had during that era. Here are seven episodes that best capture where I was during certain cultural moments as my personal and professional coming-of-age played out in the 1990s.
1991: Making mixtapes (as a form of intimate, analog-era communication)
Though certain Deviate episodes touch on things like coming-of-age in a racially diverse Wichita high school in the late 1980s, or listening to Jane’s Addiction for the first time at a Christian summer camp in 1989, my earliest mention of an actual 1990s experience came in this episode about mixtapes. I don’t just explore the technological idiosyncrasies that came with sharing music via cassette tapes; I talk about the inherent intimacy that went into making mixtapes as I interview a couple of old friends who gave me the most affecting mix-cassette of my young life.
1992: Hopping freight trains across the Pacific Northwest (Into the Wild-style)
Hopping freight trains is hardly a 1990s phenomenon. It belongs more to the lore of the 1930s — and in fact Jack Kerouac was very much inspired by the mythos of Depression-era hobos jumping trains as he embarked on the travels that underpinned his classic 1950s travel novel On the Road. Kerouac was himself one of many inspirations for a freight-hopping trip I took across the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 1992 (which was around the time Chris McCandless of Into the Wild fame was doing the same thing, in the same part of America, en route to his fateful, fatal sojourn in Alaska). This podcast episode details my experiences on the rails that summer.
1993: Jumping on the grunge-band bandwagon near Portland, Oregon
Music is one form of shorthand used to define certain eras of cultural history, and the early 1990s was in part defined by the rise of “grunge,” which blended heavy-metal riffs with a punk-rock ethos. Yet for every Nirvana and Soundgarden to come out of the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, there were dozens of bandwagon imitators — including Swizzlefish, an Oregon band I helped create and manage in my early twenties. What made Swizzlefish unique was that it was formed at Christian college so conservative that didn’t allow on-campus dancing — and its loud, stridently secular songs created confusion, both on campus (where we were eventually banned from performing), and in the grungy hipster clubs of Portland (that didn’t know what to make of our wholesome-looking fanbase). This podcast episode tells the story of Swizzlefish, and how it defined 1990s zeitgeist in a charmingly counterintuitive way.
1994: Embracing van-life vagabonding (long before #VanLife vagabonding)
Amid the cultural and technological changes of the 1990s and 2000s, I was an early adopter of many things that later became trends — phenomena like online journalism, travel blogging, travel vlogging, and digital nomadism. Though I can’t say I belonged to the first generation to embrace “van life” (a phenomenon that existed before I was born), the eight-month van-vagabonding journey I took around North America in 1994 did presage the improvisational, digitally connected #VanLife trend that took hold (and was popularized during the rise of social media) two decades later. This episode tells the story of that epic, life-changing vagabonding journey.
1995-96: Trying (and failing) to write On the Road for Generation X
When Vagabonding came out in 2003, USA Today deemed me “Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age” — a flattering comparison, to be sure. As it happened, I hadn’t set out to make Vagabonding channel a Jack Kerouac ethos, but — nearly one decade earlier — I had tried to write a USA travel book in the spirit of On the Road. That would-be first book, Pilgrims in a Sliding World, which recounted my 1994 van vagabonding journey, was never published (or even finished), but its failure as a travel book taught me essential lessons about what goes into writing a successful one. This podcast episode, which is something of an audiobook about a book that wasn’t, breaks down the lessons I learned by trying and failing to write my first travel book.
1997-98: Living in South Korea (an underappreciated hub of 1990s expat life)
Ever since Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others put Paris on the map as the hub of “Lost Generation” expatriate life in the 1920s, trend-spotters have sought to pinpoint which new international expat scenes have defined a given generation of artists and vagabonds. In the early 1990s, post-communist Prague was dubbed the Generation X expat hotspot — but I would wager that assessment was premature (and a tad Eurocentric). In my admittedly biased opinion, few 1990s expatriate scenes rivaled that of South Korea, which attracted hordes of young Americans hoping to make a quick buck teaching English. The 21st century rise of Korea as a technological and pop-culture powerhouse might, in fact, trace its origins to that moment of globalized 1990s synergy — and this episode explores my own experiences in the Busan expat scene around that time.
1999: Taking the vagabonding journey that resulted in Vagabonding
No single chapter of my life can compare to the coming-of-age energy that found its purest form in 1999, when I embarked on what would become a three-year vagabonding journey around Asia and Europe. This trip culminated in me settling into a rented room in Thailand and spending eight months writing Vagabonding, the book that has defined my career to this day. Many Deviate episodes touch on experiences from this far-flung 1999-2001 journey, including my attempt to crash the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, taking the Trans-Siberian train across Mongolia and Russia, walking solo across Israel, backpacking into the obscure corners of Syria, embracing hostel-life in Cairo, and traveling through East Asia with my parents. This nomadic experience is summarized (in the context of my broader travel career) in this Deviate episode, which I remixed from an episode of the Armchair Explorer podcast.