By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
July. Vacation time, when Americans leave home to visit places that other people are leaving to go someplace else.
A certain restlessness resides in the human spirit, a desire to experience what’s on the other side of the mountain.
The restlessness missed me. When my younger sister and I were children, our grandfather, with whom our family lived, described me as a homebody. I was happy at home with library books for adventure.
To be fair, I must say that we two had very little travel experience. Our family took exactly one vacation trip during our pre-teen years. We journeyed from our northern Rhode Island village to Cape Cod and we stayed overnight! I don’t know where it was, but I remember we slept in a cabin at the edge of a wooded playground where we enjoyed a huge seesaw. That’s what I best remember, the seesaw, and the fact that I had to sleep with my sister who turned out to be a nighttime thrasher. She remembers the seesaw, too, and remembers not caring that she caused me bedtime inconvenience.
It’s lucky for me, a confirmed homebody, that I married a man who wanted to see what’s on the other side of the mountain. Otherwise, I never would have gone anywhere. And even though I had no desire to leave my dear home, I was always glad I went.
The poet of Amherst, Emily Dickinson, who hardly ever went anywhere herself, wrote, “There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away…” Of course I agree with Emily about books. But, with all due respect to Emily, by reading a book you can’t see the desert sky at night, or smell the mountain air, or taste British cream teas, or hear the ocean roar on a rocky shore.
The first year of our marriage, Dick, a research engineer, attended two back-to-back technical conferences, first in Geneva, Switzerland then in Manchester, England. He had the urge to see new places. He took vacation time before the Geneva meeting so we could rent a car and drive around Switzerland and Germany. I would never have thought of taking such a trip – or have thought of wanting to – but I went because he asked me to and I wanted to be a good sport.
For the first time in my life I had to – yikes! – get on an airplane. I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed that part of any trip, no matter how often I’ve done it. My way of coping is to immerse myself in a good book and pretend to be someplace else.
But on that first trip, once we landed in Luxembourg and got into our little rental car and we were on our own, we had a fine time.
And so it was. I had no desire to go any place, but I went anyway, once a year for decades – England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Paris, Peru, Costa Rica, many places in the United States and Canada, usually on combination hiking/driving trips. Enjoyed them all. Learned a lot. Met interesting people.
Now, though, Dick is gone, and I am alone. I can go or stay, as I wish.
I play a little game with myself when I see people saying goodbye to travelers at our local long-distance bus stop. These voyagers are leaving to catch a plane or a train or another bus. I ask myself, “Would you rather be the person staying or the person going?” The answer is always the same: I would rather by the person who is going home.
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