Last week my friend Ralph and I went out to lunch with the ladies in our high-flying group that he has described in a piece he read to us earlier. As the usual banter on such occasions goes, Ralph and my involvement in this writer’s group came up as part of ‘what have you done lately?’ He pointed out that it was I who had encouraged him to attend. And… he disclosed what I had told him on our way to or from here at one time or another, saying something to the effect: “Fred said that I should be able to write, because I have such varied life experiences.” Then he laughed, naming off some of my own ‘life experiences’ I had discounted. He got a laugh; he usually does.
During ongoing discussions Kay and my experience on one of our trips to Ireland came up in which we attempted to find an ideal spot to watch the sun go down on Galway Bay. We spied an old seaman trudging along the road that had narrowed down to two tire tracks by a rock wall, heading toward an old stone house up away from the inlet that opened out into the larger bay. As we passed him, I stopped the car and rolled my window down to ask if he knew anything about the castle on the other side of the inlet. He clearly didn’t know anything about it and seemed a bit abstracted. So I doubled down, pointing to my right, “what about that house up there?”
Tired of my tedious questioning, he replied, “I just got off that boat out there.” He pointed to a small to medium sized sailboat anchored offshore. “I just arrived here from Nova Scotia.”
We were all shocked and amazed. He had just got off a boat that he had sailed single handedly across the Atlantic ocean. I said the first thing that came to my mind: “You don’t look crazy!”
“Oh, but I am,” he said without breaking stride as he continued his trek to the marina behind us.
Back in our little soiree here in America, Ralph said, “You ought to write that down.”
So I’ve thought about what Ralph had said considerably over the last week both with regard to documenting the brave seaman and with why I would think Ralph had so much more to write about than I do. In retrospect, I’ve been a lot of places throughout the US and overseas but there is a lot of difference in my travels and those of Ernest Hemmingway, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence… and, may I add, those of my friend Ralph.
In grappling with that difference, I hear the refrain from my youthful appreciation of western music and Hank Snow’s deep voice in his rendition,
“I’ve been everywhere, man. Of travel I’ve a-had my share, man. I’ve been everywhere.”
Hank rattles off a seemingly endless list of the rhyming names of towns and places throughout North America. The humorous irony of the song is that the names don’t prove anything; it’s just name calling. It’s not that you passed through Selma, Alabama, but what you did while you were there that makes something worth writing about.
This touches on the difference I see in Ralph’s life experiences and mine. As a child I traveled the west coast from north of Fairbanks at the arctic circle down to the border of Mexico and east as far as Montanna. It was my parents who went there – not me. They just took me along. After university, when employed by Boeing, I traveled through many of the States in the US on my various assignments and Kay and I visited others on vacations. I ate in motels with my fellow employees between sessions when on assignment. Kay went with me on longer assignments and she took the pulse of the locality. I saw things but didn’t really experience them other than the grits, lobster, and tacos that I ate.
On our busy schedule with me working at Boeing and Kay training and racing our horses at Longacres racetrack, our family got too few vacations together in the summers, but one winter we did the Yucatan, doing Chichen Itza, New Orleans with oysters on the half shell to get rid of the taste of Mexico, then St. Croix, and finally Disney Land in Orlando for the kids. Another time we went from Monticello to New York, stopping by the monuments and the Smithsonian museums in Washington for days, Gettysburg, the Statue of Liberty, and Empire State building.
Nearing the end of my career at Boeing, I offered for an assignment at the Marconi plant located in Portsmouth, England where Charles Dickens was born. It was for three months, with Kay and I residing in a house rented by the Boeing company in Rowland’s Castle, a quaint little village north of Portsmouth. The English folks with whom I worked spoke very distinct brogues that depended on the area of England from which they sprang. Many of them had not ventured more than a few hundred miles from where they were raised and could not comprehend the wanderlust of Americans.
We got a map of the isles and marked in every road we took, going out to supper in a different burg on a different road every evening, often going a hundred miles to a pub to eat. On the weekends we traveled to more remote sites, staying in B&B’s in Devon, Wales, Cambridge, Oxford, The Lakes district, Cotswold, Salisbury, Stone Henge, Bath, New Castle, and on up from Glasgo along Lock Ness, across to Aberdeen, down to Edinburg, and home on down the M-5. On Easter weekend we went across a raging sea to Ireland with waves crashing over even the top deck of the Steena Ferry, with the aisles lined with seasick Irish kids lying on the floors, some puking on their way home for the holiday. Altogether we put on 16,000 miles on that rent a car.
Immediately upon retirement we spent a month traveling New Zealand, from ‘90 Mile Beach’ and the Tane Mahuta, last of the huge Kauri trees, at the top of the north island down to Land’s End on the south island, up one side and down the other. We did it two more times because we loved it, including Australia. Of course there was also our month in Italy that Ralph wrote about.
Why am I jealous of Ralph Webster, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Earnest Hemingway, to mention only a few? For that matter, why do I take note of the fact that I was born on the very day that James Joyce died? I have traveled – a lot. I’ve written books. A lot of books. They are not best sellers. Quite honestly, they are not sellers at all. But that is not what bothers me the most. I have written about Hall of Fame baseball players, Nobel Prize winning scientists, illicit love affairs, and terrorist situations, but quite frankly, I didn’t know what I was writing about. I have lived none of those experiences. I have seen them from the outside looking in – it’s what I imagine it would have been like. But there is no authenticity. Travelers don’t know what it’s like to live in a place.
In retrospect, unlike Ralph and many writers I respect, my traveling has all been at the whim of someone else. I’ve enjoyed most of my travels, but I was mostly just doing what someone else wanted done and I watched. It brings to mind Schopenhauer’s “You can do whatever you want, but you can’t ‘want’ what you want.” That pretty much describes my situation.
As for me, I write what I know from my ‘womb with a view.’ Limiting myself to what I know, has resulted in the narrator in my latest novel (The Ruffian Syndrome, availabel on this site) regretting that he is always standing behind the protection of a fence looking on.
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