Having been in travel mode more or less constantly since last Friday, I’ve begun to collect a voyager’s vocabulary. What words do we use when we talk about travelling, and where do they come from?
Our word “journey” is from the Spanish jornado, a desert term that meant the distance between watering holes, or the maximum distance one could safely travel in a day. To “depart,” derived from the verb “to part” (as in “parting is such sweet sorrow”), does not mean to un-part but rather the opposite: the “de” is an intensifier, as it is in “defend,” which means to fend off more vigorously. To depart is to separate completely. And “to arrive” is from the French, and means to land on the shore (à rive): i.e, to go “a-shore.” The word “voyage,” from the Spanish viaje, is based on the Latin via, which means “by way of,” and so to voyage means “to go away.”
The word “travel,” which has followed us through three countries in a a week, is cognate with “travail,” and arrives via the French travailler, to work. It seems that people have always associated work with leaving the house, or to travel. (Which may be why it has taken us so long to recognize “housework” as work.) All travel, as we’re finding this week, is hard work. We try to reduce the amount of travail in travel by planning: setting precise departure times, booking flights, hotel rooms, ferries, googling restaurants and gas stations and coffee shops, always trying to know in advance where we’re going to be at any given juncture in the voyage. Or at least, reducing the opportunities for chance to step in and make a nonsense of our carefully laid plans.
Some of us, however, welcome that element of chance. As the saying goes, if you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans. Sometimes it’s better not to make plans. William Least Heat Moon, when he set off on the road trips that formed the basis for his books Blue Highways and Road to Quoz, wrote that he never had an organizing principal for his journeys, except in the sense that “sometimes not having an organizing principal is an organizing principal.” His books are delightful accumulations of serendipitous encounters. (I would quote from them here, but I’m on the road and don’t have them with me.) Some of us are willing to accept the lack of amenities such as hot water, fresh towels, wifi (not only promised, but actually delivered), coffee makers, and bedside lamps in exchange for unexpected conversations with people who have no professional interest in talking to you.
I left our motel room this morning to find a coffee shop, and in the nearest Tim Hortons, I stood in line behind a young man (scraggly beard, marijuana tattoo on his upper arm) as he tried to pick up the young woman serving at the cash. “Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked her, apparently oblivious to the fact that she worked in a coffee shop. “No, thanks,” she said, “I don’t drink coffee.” When it was my turn to order, she shook her head and said, “Oh, that guy, he tried to buy my friend Debbie a drink last night at the Frosty Mug, and she turned him down, too. One of these days someone’s going to tell his wife.”
You can’t schedule such encounters, you can only leave yourself open to them.
The great photographer Dorothea Lange, before departing for one of her photographing journeys, said that “to know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is limiting.” I think, though, that to make the non-organizing principal work, you have to do some organizing in advance. Lange certainly packed her equipment carefully before setting out to photograph America. Garry Winogrand, another fine photographer, shot 700 rolls of film during one jaunt on the streets of New York: he had to know where he could get 700 rolls of film, but he couldn’t have predicted what he would capture in each of those images.
Merilyn and I are on our way to Pelee Island for our annual birding weekend with friends with whom we’ve been doing this for more than 20 years. In order to get there, we (mostly Merilyn) have had to book this motel room, buy a weekend’s worth of groceries, book the ferry, reserve the cottage on the island, pack the binoculars and the bird books, and generally anticipate the journey to the island along specific organizing principles.
Once we’re there, however, the birds take over. Birding is the opposite of an organizing principle, unless, as per William Least Heat Moon, wandering all over an island looking for a rumoured Willow ptarmigan can be called an organizing principle. It can, I suppose, in retrospect: we can later say that we went where we believed the Willow ptarmigan was. But at the time, we were just caroming from wetland to Carolinian forest to grassy field looking for whatever we might find there, including a bird that wasn’t supposed to be farther south than the Yukon.
When Geoff Dyer wrote The Ongoing Moment, his book about photography (from which I pinched the Dorothea Lange quote), he set out to look at as many photographs as he possibly could without determining in advance what he would see. Only when he looked back on the photographs that excited him did he discern a pattern in his looking. At one point he realized he was drawn to photographs by different photographers that all had hats in them. After that, he began looking for hats. “As soon as I realized I was drawn to hats,” he writes, “the idea of the hat became an organizing principle or node.”
For us, this weekend, the idea of the bird will be our organizing principle, but we aren’t averse to making the gods laugh.
Thanks Peter. You get something similar to the "de" in Spanish, with the prefix "re." Refried beans doesn't mean fried again, it means really fried. Don't we love language?
Hi Pam, tusand takks for your comment. I've spent time in Tromso, too (waiting to board a research vessel to go up into the Arctic Ocean. I loved Tromso, amazed that a city so far north could have trees and lawns. I'm glad my writing contributed to your enjoyment. Enjoy the rest of your trip.