A few years ago, I thought you needed money to travel. I’ve never been particularly interested in making a lot of money except for that purpose. But being forced to travel without much money has been one of my greatest blessing, because it taught me this: money is the enemy of true travel.
Because traveling without money gives one the delusion of independence, and therefore the lack of need. When you pay for something at a cash register, you’re not grateful to the cashier who’s handing you over the food; it’s their job to give it to you and your job has been done. The goods are simply your due. The interaction, therefore, becomes completely impersonal; it might as well have been conducted by a machine.
And this was the state of my interactions between cashiers over the last two months, because food and supplies were the two things I allowed myself to buy. But when it came to the actual hitchhiking, to staying in people’s homes and accepting people’s gifts, there was a complete opposite interaction.
And that interaction was empathy, empathy not as a sign of the goodness of my nature but a necessity for my survival. Because when you accept an act of charity from someone (and again, I’m not talking money or goods but a real action) you have to accept the person themselves. When you enter a stranger’s car you enter their life and their world for a bubble of time, however brief. And because everything they’ve done, thought and experienced has lead them to this moment in which they’ve picked up two strangers from the side of the road with no inducement but the goodness of their hearts, then you have to accept all that they are.
Of course, I’m no saint, and therefore judge people a lot. Judgmental voices go on inside my head constantly, even with the people I most love and respect. But normally, in the real world, some opinions would lead me to reject them and their experiences completely; I would simply stop reading the article, or amuse my friend with the story of that crazy person I met at a party who thought they could write a computer program to prove the Immaculate Conception (true story, by the way.)
But by needing, one forces oneself into a state of empathy otherwise unimaginable.
Take for instances, two days ago. I was getting a ride from a guy named Quintin, a Texan who was taking me from Louisiana to Georgia (about a twelve hour ride.) We got into the subject of the prison system, one that is very personal to me as the daughter of a public defender.
“They live better than they could out in the real world in there, and on our tax dollars,” he said. “Free room, free board, and they don’t have to work.”
“But prisons are hells,” I said. “You get raped, and beaten, and have your rights taken away.”
But Quintin very much disagreed with me about the issue of rape in particular: “Only child molesters and rapists get raped,” he said.
Getting slightly annoyed at a discussion of the prison system by someone who seemed not to know the first thing about it, I asked if he spoke from personal experience. And in a sense, he did: as a child he’d been raped by his uncle for six years. The uncle had gone to jail for it, only to be released again.
“Well, when he was released he couldn’t find a job, he couldn’t go five hundred feet around a school or a playground, he was hated by everyone who knew what he’d done. So he raped another child and called the police on himself. He wanted to go back to prison because he had no place in the world anymore.”
Now, I didn’t bother pointing out the inconsistencies in Quintin’s logic (that prison is simultaneously better for prisoners and also a place where child molesters get raped) or point out that it was part of the failings of the judicial system that lead his uncle to have no place in the world once he got out. Because when you hear someone’s personal story attached to their reasons, you have to respect that, especially when you encounter their pain. Even now, in his late forties, Quintin slept with his back against the wall when he was sleeping, still terrified of hands coming to grope him in his sleep.
Now I have ridden with drug dealers and Big Foot believers, with hunters and ex-convicts, with born again Christians and raving atheists, with gun wielders and people who read John Grisham. And let me tell you, it was far more comfortable riding with someone who was similar to me. But the conversations I remember were with people who’s views widely differed from mine. And that might sounds like hippy hogwash, but I swear it’s true.
I can’t write off any of these people with a wall of identity: “I’m anti-guns,” or “I’m a militant vegetarian.” Because when I needed them, these people helped me, and so their experiences are now a part of me. And as always I believe that the experiences I’ve had lead me forced to take up certain beliefs. But with that understanding comes the opposite: that certain experiences have lead people to always disagree.
And let me say, it can be hard, to see the humanity of those you disagree with. It’s easy enough with politics, but it gets worse with racism and sexism, worse with militant xenophobia. It is hard to respond to someone who is disrespecting the black people of this country, and still respect their humanity. It’s hard to be a vegetarian because you respect life, and respect the life of someone who hunts animals for fun.
But traveling is not about seeing beautiful things. Driving into any city you will pass exhaust-filled highways with roadkill scattered like confetti; you will see the flashing signs for “gentlemen clubs” and syringe-filled underpasses and dead butterflies. But seeing the beautiful without the ugly is seeing neither for what they are: the kind of people who want that are the kind that want to want to travel more than truly travel. They want to collect lists of checked sites and pictures. They want to be unexposed.
But travel is exposing. And the more you need the more you become. I feel soaked full of stories like a used-up sponge. And I feel I could go on like this forever, but the true traveler returns. Now I just have to find a place to return to. For me it’s less scary going to a new place than calling it home. Where home will be, I’ve yet to find out. But I hope to do so and do it soon.
Only by joining society can you ever hope to pay society back.
Wish me luck, folks.
this is real this is fiction 