The Desire for Something Else

It lies back in there somewhere, deep in the recesses of early memory. The sweet smell of an attic, the cardboard boxes with the outdated logos of various American conglomerates and long-defunct department stores, and the endless piles of old magazines.

In the detritus of industrial America, I knew I would find something, some answer, some key. It was a belief I was never able to articulate, but that always lurked in my consciousness, like the feeling of looking out on an empty yard and not being able to recall where one last saw light of this quality, this hue.

So I looked through the magazines. Certain places evoked an immense exoticism: the scented jungles of Southeast Asia, vast, snowy islands in Northern Canada, the windswept steppes of Central Asia. Places at the margins of what we deem to be "civilization," where the experiences of positivism fray. They remained vast territories where death came from the primordial landscape, where human life still occurs in strict tandem with the season cycle and where animist myth still holds greater credence than the laws of planetary motion.

And there was my lifelong love of the map-- a beautiful tool that has been eclipsed by the admittedly more precise and useful version offered by Google. Maps of my own era were fine, but I was more interested in the earlier versions: maps with odd corners of Africa and Australia still marked "unexplored"; maps of old American entities long since passed into obscurity, the Lincoln Highway and the Gulf, Mobile, & Ohio Railroad, Western outpost towns with names like Aladdin, Wyoming and Kremlin, Montana; the old nations and cities that conjured up a more romantic era of travel-- Cochin China and Austrian Galicia, Danzig and Adrianople-- and those sepia-postcard spellings like Roumania and Tokio.

It wasn't so much that I was nostalgic for another era, but, as I grew older, more that I wanted to radically negate my surroundings. The more standard breed of teenage nerd stuck to Dungeons and Dragons or Final Fantasy VII or whatever, but I had an 1898 atlas prefaced by the stern face of President William McKinley.

But of course, this vision has little to do with the exigencies of real travel. Those hours spent with maps and photos have nothing to do with the hardship, the occasional bouts of sickness, the insectarium cheap hotel rooms, the occasional scams and cons, the terminal boredom of long waits at rundown train stations, the ugly habit of fat package tourists being waited upon by native servants, the even uglier habit of young backpackers looking to drink rum-and-Cokes on every continent and still have the gall to call it enlightening, and the awful recognition that you are probably not much better yourself.

***

I was sitting in a nowhere zone somewhere in Nong Khai Province. Red mud and intermittent rain and the butts of cheap Thai cigarettes stomped into the dirt. We were waiting for the border to open, in the humid pre-dawn. It was too dark and I was much too tired to read. I tried to fill the mindless void, but ultimately was alone to confront it.

But times like that are good for reflection, when you're far form home and wondering how you got there, how the hell it is that you've arrived in this godforsaken place on what was once the front line of the Cold War, where now there are groups of men sitting silently in the dark, smoking and staring.

I cycle back through my memory, through the chain of events that led me to this one specific place. And inevitably I arrived back in that attic, back to the thoughts of a blonde-headed kid in snowbound Iowa who saw a picture of a Papuan perched in a treehouse above the rainforest and wondered if, some day, he might sit there.