Forging the Frontier

The English novelist Graham Greene, one of my literary heroes, has a thrill-seeker's mentality to challenge that of Michael Crichton.  While at Oxford, Greene combatted boredom with Russian Roulette -- a game he deemed in his 1969 BBC interviews to be merely "a little risk."  In those same interviews, Greene discusses his travel life, saying: 

"I've always had a certain itch to get away for a while from my ordinary surroundings, combined with a curiosity to see the frontier."

In his cavalier accounts of using opium in Indo-China, one wonders just what "certain itch"  Greene was scratching.

Nonetheless, Greene's interview made me wonder a few things:

1. To what extent is a "travel-itch" a sign of some sort of psychotic, or at least mentally severe, behavior?

2. Is there such a thing as a "frontier" anymore, particularly in the Western world?

The second question first.  

Western Europe is certainly an adventure.   But is it a frontier?  Young Americans like treating it as one.  I know because on my recent backpacking trip, I did, too.  I romanticized Europe as "fresh ground."  I imagined a place where history thrives all around me, a place where I, in tramping through, can stitch my thread -- however small -- into its rich, bloody, fabric.     

In my mind, Troy and I conquered liter beers for lunch (and dinner) in Munich.  We persevered on a rattling train from Krakow to Auschwitz, only two granola bars to sustain us, braving a 20-minute queue snaking out of the ice-cream shop.  We survived an overnight bus from Madrid to Seville, parrying all it threw at us: crying babies, snarky bus drivers, Bob Marley music.  We discovered a way around pricey public restrooms in Venice.  We gritted our teeth through achey feet as we progressed through the painfully long trek to see the Sistine Chapel.  No pain, no game.  

But let's not kid ourselves.  Frontier?  Europe?  Western Europe? Uh, no.  A frontier, I think, means danger.  Think Wild West.  Think Louis and Clark.  Think ploughing forth into mapless territory, or journeying to the end of the earth when the world was still flat and sea monsters waited jaws-wide at the edge.

Outside the occasional thief, it often seems the greatest danger in Western Europe is 3.50 Euro cokes and fat European pigeons who, upon approaching, take so long to flap their flab off the ground that if you don't slow down, you'll get a face-full of feathers.  No joke: it's fun to treat Western Europe like a tiger, but stripped of imagination, Western Europe is as tame as a kitten.  Feed it some Euros, and it'll allow you to mistake its pur for the roar of the wild.

And yet...

As far as containing sights the first-time backpacker has never before seen, it is a slew of new stuff.   No, crossing a major touristy bridge in Prague will never be a frontier. Being stuck in and part of the thronging sunburnt faces listening again to a street performer jam Canon in D on accordian is a version of unpleasentness that belongs in the torture museum we visited in Cordoba.

And yet...

Backpacking was a challenge.  Great, yes, but difficult.  Emotions become compressed gun-powder that a simple spark -- say losing at a card game -- can really, really tempt.  In that sense, a frontier is not so much an unexplored physical space, but an unexplored region of your own expectations, temperment, and self-image.  Doing what you didn't think possible.  Being where you, one year ago, could never see yourself.  Pushing the horizons of expectation even farther with new experiences and then again pushing them even farther.

In that sense, Europe is a frontier.   Even if it is all in your head.

So in that sense, regarding the first question, we're all a little crazy.