I’d missed my flight. Maybe everyone should
miss a flight at least once in their lives, just for the experience, I
thought--framing the situation like I often do, delicately sidestepping the
whole moderate financial mishap thing.
My girlfriend, always handy with an optimistic
scheme of an idea, affirmed for me that I wasn’t dying, that there were worse
problems, and then suggested booking a different, more circuitous itinerary
that would prove less squashingly expensive to re-book. The next day I got on a
plane to Vegas, where I would pick up a miraculously affordable rental car and
start driving several hundred miles to my destination of Oakland, California.
That next morning, I woke up in a campsite
that faced a mountain range of Death Valley, and the day after that, woke up
along a river near Lake Tahoe, California, until at last, I took the final leg
down the highway that runs, itself like an inevitable water, into Oakland.
Within those three days of highly unplanned travel, I’d quickly hiked a canyon
before the barometer hit 110 degrees, met a group of hippies who told me about
growing up in a nudist camp, watched cows graze on the greening mountains of
the melting Sierra Nevada snow peaks. I took notes at a small desert bar filled,
interestingly enough, with young Russians. It’s an understatement to say that
it had paid, as I realized later, to have relaxed into the initial supposed
crisis, to have done a thing I would never have otherwise planned.
Writing, I’ve come to learn, is often a lot
like this. We miss the flight. We thought we were writing a novel but we’re
writing little vignettes that we decide to turn into postcards and send to all
of our friends, and some of the friends will keep the papers forever and some
of them will gently send them to the recycle. We write five hundred pages,
believing we’re chasing some great work of our lives, and then what we’ve got
is five hundred pages of a messy, funny, poignant, moving good try, but maybe
try again.
The remainder of that summer, the almost too
dreamy three months of a break between the second and third years of my MFA,
was like one darn long extended metaphor as that lesson continued to reveal
itself in so many shapes.
---
As my girlfriend and I worked house sitting jobs
across Northern California, taking day trips to redwood forests in Marin County
and evening drives into the cities of the Bay, the beautiful-but-bootstrapped
writer’s retreat I thought I had designed for myself was clearly not quite
happening. California was gorgeous, but for the first week after I arrived, I
wasn’t really writing. (The two facts might have been a little related.)
Revising stories? I thought, sitting at the desk of a man who owned a beautiful
home in a small town known for its bocce ball tournaments and the historic site
of John Muir’s home. Someone’s revising stories? I said, staring at the blank
computer screen--and not writing.
Why this little drought? I had come a long
way, had planned and anticipated what this West Coast light and air would stir
to life, and there it was: Something in me was demanding time off.
It was unlike me to really, truly dip out of
my planned writing practice. I keep to it. For many years, writing what Julia
Cameron calls “morning pages” kept me alive to the dream of being a writer, and
it kept me alive to the truer undercurrents of my life, heart, and creativity.
It kept me, quite honestly, afloat in the uncertainty and unconventional
priorities that marked my twenties.
I sat on the porch of that couple’s house,
petting a cat who wasn’t mine, and thought: How do I need to write, now? What’s
the form? I tried to relax, avoid the self-doubt that I was no good for writing
until further notice. I tried to sidestep the fear, and search instead for
another route to the goal of staying awake as a writer.
I kept notes, journals. I tried my hand at
short short stories, realizing that the spontaneity of traveling felt more
important than the demands of a four-hour morning devotion to twenty-page story
projects that consumed the best part of my day. I shifted a little, moved into
a mode of observing and noting short bursts of stories, letting go of the daily
jobliness of my usual writing. And when I arrived back home at the end of the
summer, settling back into the place of my job, settling into the final year of
my MFA, those notes glowed and sang from the vantage point of recollection, and
I found them forming into longer pieces I couldn’t have foreseen in the midst
of the travel itself.
Writing, like love, seems to demand a constant
attentive listening, where we ask every day: What do you want from me now? What
do we need to do next?
---
When traveling, I noticed, I didn’t need to
force myself to have the same kind of writing practice. My foiled intentions to
write in a certain kind of way made me uneasy, but in fact, I owed myself a
needed release from the pressure of plans and structure. Through travel, we
have the freedom and the privilege to direct our attention where instinct moves
us, looking where we may have never expected to look, feeling from spaces and
positions and views we had never expected to feel.
After all, traveling can be a chance to refill
the well in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Driving once from Florida to my
family’s Michigan home, the distance I covered began to feel like it was
expanding my stories’ scope, suggesting a new and bigger stage from which I
began to imagine the collection I was drafting for my MFA thesis. What was
happening in this country, so big that only driving or riding by horse seems to
be an appropriate means of comprehending its scale and variety--what all was
there in the world, in Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee, in all of these cities
and towns, in all of these homes, while I had been tucked away in my small
apartment, so quietly writing for workshop in Florida? Writing about place,
writing through travel, can force us to ask ourselves and to reassess: What is
it that seems most important, most vital to observe in the world?
And yet, even as the idea of travel writing
can just glimmer with such idyllic promise, what happens when the work or the
place doesn’t quite run the blissful, easeful program we had imagined? Both
writing and traveling are big gifts to ourselves, ones that we often work hard
to afford and make space for in our lives. But when I write as I travel, I can
find myself assessing the appropriate ratios of art to life. Am I doing this
travel thing right, I wonder? Am I living the best life, the best writer life? Am
I making the most of my time?
Relaxing into what we have in front of us, the
task of listening to the instincts that say, Go for a walk now, or Talk to
the person at that end of the bar, or Scribble
that down! That thing, the purple
polka dot van converted out of an old bus!--all the notes, the thinking,
the attention, the settings and characters we jot in messy notebook handwriting
are all just as important, and sometimes even just as hard to notice and to
find a way to keep, as the desk time work of writing. And who knows? That polka
dot van could one day drive you exactly where you had wanted to go.
Cherri Buijk is a third-year MFA candidate and teacher at Florida Atlantic University. She is working on her first collection of short stories.
