1) On the deepest source of wanderlust
I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what.
2) On the intoxicating joy of long-term travel
The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn’t feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road.
3) On the uncertainties of investing one’s youth into travel
I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers, were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful, somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things – what had happened to that? Yes, I had felt compelled, almost required, to take a big surf trip. But did it really need to last this long?
4) On the simple, edgy allure of surfing
Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived. It was real.
5) On the inevitable imperfection of surfing waves
Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell. The best days at the best breaks have a Platonic aspect—they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be. But that’s the end of it, that beginning. [My friend] Bryan had no interest in perfection, it seemed to me, and his indifference represented, among the surfers I’ve known, a rare degree of realism, maturity, and philosophical appreciation of what waves are.
6) On the inevitable transformation that comes with long-term travel
I was getting interested in self-transformation. …I had come to learn, I figured, and not just a few things about some far-flung places and people. I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world. It came out in my quickness to pick up local expressions, local lore, wherever we found ourselves, and in my wholehearted admiration for subsistence farmers and fishermen, and the ease with which I fell into a kind of intimacy with many of the people we met. I had that facility with strangers, but it had a new intensity now.
7) On the Asian “backpacker trail” of the 1970s
The Asia Trail was the great snaking overland route from Europe to Bali, slogged down by thousands of Western backpackers since the ’60s. It was being broken into pieces in 1979 by the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was about to remove another poverty-ridden, dope-rich Shangri-la from our itinerary. …The villagers [of rural Indonesia] looked askance at the bedraggled backpackers. It was not hard to see why. Here was a large, awkward member of the global ruling elite who had probably spent more in an air-travel day than anyone there could make in a year of hard work, all for the pleasure of leaving an unimaginably rich, clean place for this desperately poor, unhealthy place. Here he was struggling blindly down the road under an enormous pack, disoriented and ignorant and sweating like a donkey. He wanted to see Asia from the ground, not from the Hilton height of some air-conditioned resort that any sane person would prefer. The complex ambitions and aversions that brought the poor backpacker seven thousand miles to struggle and suffer from dysentery, heatstroke, or worse in the equatorial jungle – anything to be a “traveler” and not a “tourist”! – were perhaps impossible to untangle, but it was well known that he brought so little money that he was hardly worth hustling.
8) On the joys of spending slow time in an unfamiliar culture
I loved watching people chat, even when I understood nothing, which was often, since they usually spoke Fijian. They seemed to have an enormous repertoire of gentle, intricate social expressions. They used their mouths, hands, eyes – all the usual communication apparatus – but also chins, brows, shoulders, everything. Watching people listen was even better. There was a lovely, widely shared mannerism that I couldn’t recall seeing before: a slight, jerky shifting of the head from side to side; a constant cocking of the neck, notch by notch, the way a bird does. I read it as a gesture of extreme tolerance. The listener was continually resetting his mind at different angles in order to take in different speakers, different impressions, with maximum equanimity.
9) On the limitations of international news reportage
The world was mapped in so many different ways. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal – and, at that time, the big newsweeklies. Every place on earth was part of somebody’s beat. Bryan understood that map before I did, having gone to Yale. But when I’d found an old copy of Newsweek on Captain Brett Hilder’s bridge, and tried to read a George Will column, I’d burst out laughing. His Beltway airs and provincialism were impenetrable. The truth was, we were wandering now through a world that would never be part of any correspondent’s beat (let alone George Will’s purview). It was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight.
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