“Well, here we are, just the four of us that started out together,” said Merry. “We have left all the rest behind, one after another. It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.”
“Not to me,” said Frodo. “To me it feels more like falling asleep again.”
On several of my trips (most notably my first solo journey), I have felt like Merry. While washing dishes in my kitchen, it’s hard to imagine that I had ever eaten sweet corn and chicken with a couple of kind Lutheran-Buddhist strangers after hiking around an island off the US/Canadian border in Washington. The memories fade into dreams on the flight home.
However, on a few of my trips— especially my trip to Florida last winter and my tour this summer— going home feels the way Frodo describes it. Travel feels realer than anything I have ever experienced. When I’m at home, it’s too easy to be dragged into routine, in the horror of the ordinary. Travel flips all that on its head, and doing laundry and washing dishes become extraordinary.
Here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote my family when I was on tour, which I think sums up the intensity of travel (without any regard to grammar, I might add):
*
The past couple weeks have been a crazed blur, a conglomeration of deep emotions and passing thoughts, of earth tones and the reek of alcohol and dark folk music played through rusty-sounding van speakers. Waterfalls and ocean, white-foaming— salty breath, mist tossed into the air like snow that has forgotten to fall to earth. Back alleys, concrete beds in rest stops, dry air on the plains. A trailer in a Portland suburb, eight of us crammed in it eating pasta at one in the morning with white sauce from a can— a bottle of orange-mango juice passed from bandmate to bandmate, and I take a swig even though I’m allergic to mangoes. The past couple of weeks have been putting granola on my PB&J for breakfast and lunch. Passing out on a stranger’s carpet. Taking walks through the Seattle ghetto with a new friend. Curling up in a torn red booth after midnight and wishing more than I have ever wished anything that the guy who turned a snow shovel into a guitar would just stop playing so we can go back home and sleep.
I don’t think I was ever so aware of my youth as I am now. Sometimes it feels so amazing to be young right now that I can barely stand it. I punch Tyler and Zach a lot and throw pillows at them because I’m so happy, and I hug Adrienne and Amanda often and tightly. I skip for joy and sometimes I sing, and sometimes I just sit quietly and soak up the place I’m at and think about how I’ll be thinking about this moment when I’m old. I’m tired a lot, and my neck absolutely kills me some days, but they seem insignificant compared to the wonder of an anemone’s tentacles, or sleeping in a cramped livingroom with all six of my bandmates, or evergreens straight and tall in the Mt. Baker National Forest.
Late sunlight pours through the van windows. The speakers buzz; there’s no CD in the player. Eastern Washington breezes by, open farmland not unlike Oklahoma. We’re almost to Spokane for another night of music, of glorious uncertainty, and of the quiet magic that I have come to know as touring.
*
~Lisa Shafter
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