Travels

From whiskey river:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes
among
things that change. But it doesn’t
change.
People wonder about what you are
pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s
unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, may your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

(Edward Abbey, “A Prayer for the Traveler” [apparently not a title Abbey himself used: source])

Not from whiskey river:

I had a presentiment that the “travelling” phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a résumé of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.

Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.

Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages?

…

Could it be, I wondered, that our need for distraction, our mania for the new, was, in essence, an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn?

All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a “wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world” — the words are those of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor — and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road.

My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence on the origin of our species. What I learned there — together with what I now knew about the Songlines — seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us — from the structure of our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe — for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert.

If this were so; if the desert were “home”; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigors of the desert — then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal’s imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

(Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)

And then I came across this, from 1994: the band Rush, live in Michigan.  I confess to knowing very little about Rush. They seem to be one of those groups which people end up either loving or hating, and I have no idea which camp I’d fall into if I knew more of their music. This particular number, however, slides so smoothly into place with this Friday’s theme — especially on the heels of the Chatwin quote — that I couldn’t let it pass. (Lyrics below.)

Lyrics:

Dreamline
(words by Neil Peart, music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson)

He’s got a road map of Jupiter
A radar fix on the stars
All along the highway
She’s got a liquid-crystal compass
A picture book of the rivers
Under the Sahara

They travel in the time of the prophets
On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun
Like lovers and heroes, and the restless part of everyone
We’re only at home when we’re on the run
On the run

He’s got a star map of Hollywood
A list of cheap motels
All along the freeway
She’s got a sister out in Vegas
The promise of a decent job
Far away from her hometown

They travel on the road to redemption
A highway out of yesterday — that tomorrow will bring
Like lovers and heroes, birds in the last days of spring
We’re only at home when we’re on the wing
On the wing

When we are young
Wandering the face of the earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we’re only immortal —
For a limited time

Time is a gypsy caravan
Steals away in the night
To leave you stranded in dreamland
Distance is a long-range filter
Memory a flickering light
Left behind in the heartland

We travel in the dark of the new moon
A starry highway traced on the map of the sky
Like lovers and heroes, lonely as the eagles cry
We’re only at home when we’re on the fly
On the fly

We travel on the road to adventure
On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun
Like lovers and heroes, and the restless part of everyone
We’re only at home when we’re on the run
On the run…

_____________________

Note: The illustration at the top of this post is by Walter Crane, from the 1879 (first?) edition of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, by Robert Louis Stephenson. During Stephenson’s journey, he spent a night among the pines:

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet.