Welcome to the snap count: nine days before we shove off, give or take. Our schedule is flexible, perhaps excessively so. But then, we just graduated college after sixteen years of formal schooling–why burden ourselves with more structure?
Still, practical matters must be addressed. After all, how does one prepare for a trip with no charted itinerary, no definite timetable, and no explicit objective? When I was young, vacations were carefully managed affairs. We would fix a departure time, usually early in the morning so as to avoid traffic. Flights and taxis would be arranged, hotel accomodations would be called ahead, recreational activities researched and pre-selected, all for the sake of achieving leisure as efficiently as possible. We knew what to expect; it was all bought and paid for. This time, I have no idea what to expect, which I find at once thrilling and unnerving.
On Tuesday, I bought a giant map of America, which is about as specific as I am ready to get as far as preparations go. It is approximately 3-by-3.5 feet, laminated, and colorful. I also bought a book that an English professor of mine had recommended I read before leaving, called “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck. It is a memoir from a three-month trip the writer made “in search of America,” with his dog, in the fall of 1960. I am through only about a quarter of it, but I have already found it useful, if only for the knowledge that Steinbeck suffered many of the same apprehensions prior to his own cross-country sojourn as I am having presently–particularly with respect to planning and preparation. His final words on the subject are either comforting or not. I have settled on the former.
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters it and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and and go along with it. Only then do his frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
Nine days, and counting.
Posted from my mom’s kitchen, Concord, Massachusetts.
