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. 

Surviving Rome

I wanted to rent scooters in Rome for a reason so embarrassing that I'm going to admit it once and then never again.

Mary Kate and Ashley.  

Let's get this over with: the Olsen twins have a movie set in Rome where they meet boys and the boys rent scooters and zoom them around the city and to me it looked like fun, okay?  If it's any excuse, I watched it in the van on a cross-country car ride.  And I have a younger sister.  Sorry for being a good big brother!

My reputation thoroughly shattered, let me tell you -- there is nothing "Mary Kate and Ashley"  about driving in Rome.  

Rome was the last city on "Troy and Eric's Backpacking Trip."  We had scheduled two nights and 1.5 days there -- a positively sprawling amount of time for our sprinting travel style (we'd spent 6 hours in Switzerland and called it "visited.")   

I wanted to end the trip on a bang for several reasons.  First of all, as wonderful as old buildings are, there's really only so much you can take.  Troy has a "One cathedral per country" rule that, by the trip's end, was wisdom on par with Lao Tzu ("A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.")  or Mike Ditka (“You have to be tough.”).  

Secondly, we had missed seeing Auschwitz.  The Holocaust is a new fascination of mine.  I'm taking a graduate English class on Holocaust poetry next semester.  So I desperately wanted to visit the camp.  Unfortunately, the day we spent in Krakow, Poland was Easter Sunday.  Auschwitz is closed on Christmas and Easter.  That didn't stop Troy and I from taking a two-hour train to the camp, walking a mile to the entrance, and getting as close as we could.  But we had missed out on the tour, the museum, the experience.  I was very disappointed.

Mostly, though, I wanted our Eurotrip to stand out.  This might be even more unforgivable than the Mary Kate and Ashley comment, but here it goes: by the time you've been trekking across Europe for three weeks, trekking across Europe isn't enough.  Being in Rome isn't enough.  It's the norm.  It's level zero.  It's Rome, yes, but it's also "the next stop."  When yesterday is Vienna and tomorrow Venice, novelty becomes normalcy.  

This is a difficult sensation to express, and perhaps even more difficult to understand.  I imagine, someday, looking back on this post during a lunchbreak at a 9 to 5 job, I'll shake my head at calling Rome "the norm," a term that connotes the sense that being in Rome just wasn't enough.  (To that future version of me: Shut up and eat your carrot sticks.)  Seeing the sights wasn't enough.  I had to do something thrilling.  Dangerous.  In that sense, I didn't just want to rent scooters, but had to.  

There's one more reason, then I promise I'll talk about the miracle of Troy and I surviving the scooter day.  That reason: I needed to earn a soundbyte -- something to take care of the question waiting for us as soon as we returned: "How was the trip?"

This question is a problem for me.  There's no good way to answer it.  I can say "Great!  We had a blast."  Or I can list all the cities we went to.  But far and away the best and most honest way to answer that is to tell people a story.  Humans respond to stories more than lists or banal descriptions of pleasure.  And believe me, there's no story like this one.

Roman traffic is a free for all.  Everyone attempts risky maneuvers for selfish advantages.  Fearless pedestrians walk against red lights (at the intersections that actually have stoplights) while sipping coffee and chatting.  Drivers change lanes suddenly to shave off a few seconds.   It's madness.

The scariest part is that you can't be passive.  Being passive is a recipe for disaster.  Drive too slowly, and suddenly angry motorcycles are whizzing by you and a chorus of horns are blaring. And you never want to enrage an Italian behind the wheel.  Very quickly, I discovered the best strategy was to try to blend in, even if that meant weaving in and out of stopped cars or gunning it to slip through a rapidly shrinking gap between a bus and oncoming traffic.

None of this compares to the roundabouts.  Roundabouts are spinning circuses of destruction.  Traffic merges in from seven different ways at once, vehicles weaving in and out of one another The first time we approached one, I felt like that kindergartener standing at the top of the highdive and looking down the million miles to the pool.  Except here, there was no turning back.

I survived out of instinct.  There's no time to step back and analyze or look for a protective pocket in the chaos.  You just go, and trust that you're good enough and lucky enough.  

I said quite a few prayers that day.  And remarkably, we not only survived, but the biggest hiccup was the navigational frustration of trying to get to the Pantheon from the cafe where we had lunch.  

Later, after we had returned our scooters, I asked Troy what he had thought our odds were of A) having something -- anything -- go wrong, whether an accident or a dinked bike or a scraped knee and B) getting seriously hurt.  If the Olsen twins or the "norm" of Rome made it beneath the censorship radar, his responses most certainly will not.

Later I told my friend Ben that I drove scooters in Rome.  Ben had been to Rome on a University trip last winter.  In order to go on the trip, he had to sign a contract saying he would not rent any motorized vehicles.

I think the definition of a "story" is anything worth wasting breath on.  Which means to obtain a story, you have to do something that deviates from the norm.  The bigger the deviation, the bigger the story.  This explains our fascination with stories about tempting or defying death -- of going to the edge and coming back to live and talk about it.  I don't know if you could say that Troy and I tempted death.  That seems a bit dramatic.  But we certainly deviated enough to get that "soundbyte."

So when people ask me how the trip was, I say: "Great.  I toured Rome on a scooter and am living to tell about it."    

Most of it, anyway.

Backpacking Across Europe

Forget the floozy-shmoozy lines I scribbled on my Bristol applications.  Spare me the intellectual enrichment and cultural adaptation curves.  And one big nasty Cheerio Sucka! to all personal development poetics.  Really -- down deep where that thrillseeker in me revs his Harley and guns for the next big leap of adventure -- really, I came to England for this:

Bristol, Madrid, Sevilla, Cordoba, Madrid, Barcelona, Lyon, Geneva, Zurich, Munich, Regensberg, Prague, Krakow, Vienna, Venice, Cortona, Rome, Vatican, Turin, Bristol.

Or something like that.  From March 30th - April 18th, or something like that.  After Lyon, France, where Troy and I stayed with my former French Exchange family, the cities blur.  My memory flips from a contrite destination-based sequence pedantically inserting push pins into a mental map of Europe, to a swarm of episodes, unpatternable, frantic, linked together only by the tenuous sinew of the odd overnight train.      

I thought for a long while how to write about backpacking across Europe trip.  I considered top-10 lists or a country-by-country breakdown.  But those means of representation all seemed too academic.  Too orderly.  Too eager to take what was a tangled glorious mess and loosen the knots.  Too quick to find value by shaking the memories until something glittery falls out.  

In the end, I want the travel narrative to mirror the trip with an honesty that's as sharp as a scalpel and as selfish as a Barcelona pickpocket.  Because let's be clear: although categorized under "vacation," backpacking across Europe -- at least in Eric and Troy's city-snapshot style -- is more like climbing a mountain than sunning in the Caribbean.  

Backpacking across Europe demands a different sort of thinking altogether.  A sort of thinking that awards patience and tolerance, but also ruthlessness and decisiveness.  Because there are plenty of unknown characters and situations watching from the fringes.  Some turn out to be delightful and enriching additions.  Others...well, I'll get around to the others.

Barcelona:

I would love to see what Weird Al would come up with if he ever got a hold of these seedy Barcelona street vendors.  He could make a pretty mean song out of their catchphrases. They're everywhere.  First, there's the black Mediterranean Rustafarian-looking guys asking "Smoke weed?"  "Smoke weed?"  "Smoke weed?"

(Once one of our group, instead of just ignoring them, responded with a "No" and the vendor said "Neither do I."  Go figure.) 

Then there's the Indian beer vendors.  They frequent the middle of Barcelona's main boulevard, interrupt sunbathers on the beach, and pop out from dark corners wielding 6-packs of the cheapest passable beer and saying "Cerveza, Beer?"  "Cerveza, Beer?" "Cerveza, Beer?"

We were curious why exactly anyone would buy a can from them, so we stopped and asked. Apparently, their economic plan was to stockpile cheap beer for when the supermarkets closed and the much more expensive bars opened.  At that point, beer got expensive, so their "Cerveza, Beer?" "Cerveza, Beer?" was the only thing able to quench the late-night cheap beer thirst.  

And quench it did.

Troy and I met up with an Indiana University guy studying in Milan and traveling by himself across Europe.  During the day, we didn't travel with him much because he was testing out the nude beach (and shouting "No, don't you understand NO!" to an old Asian woman wanting to give him a massage -- only 5 euros for the back)  while we were exploring the city.  But at night, we met up with him to go out for Subway.  Afterwards, we walked down the main strip, peppered with requests for "Cerveza, Beer?" "Cerveza, Beer?"  

Well, he bought a beer from one of these vendors.  Good travel buddies never let another drink alone, so I bought one, too.  As I sipped mine, this guy, with a vow to show Barcelona how "we do it in America," borrowed a key from Troy and shotgunned the beer in the middle of the main strip.

(Shotgunning a beer involves puncturing the base of the beer, putting the hole to your mouth, then popping the tab so the beer gushes out of the hole.  Apparently, the beer he got was a bit shaken.  When he punctured it, a stream of beer jetted out, splashing the guy who sold him it.  As far as I know, Troy's room key is still sticky.) 

So that's "Smoke some weed" and "Beer, Cerveza."  The two most common sounds of the night

 

There be rarer and more frightening species in the woodwork, too.  Once I accidentally made eye-contact with a middle-aged man riding a bicycle.  His head snapped to mine like something out of the Exorcist as he said: "Want some crack?" After that, I learned to admire the scenery rather than the people.

Thievery, drugs, and cerveza.  

Ahhh...Barcelona.

Pickpockets in Barcelona

If looks could kill, that pick-pocket would drop dead. 

His grizzled and half-burnt sepia skin was like crinkled leather.  His lips curled into a mocking snarl.  He reminded me of a ragtag junkyard dog scrapping around for selfish advantage, although I hesitate giving him that much credit.

His look is burnt into my mind, where I’m free to sublimate my revulsion onto his visage, where I’m at liberty to recreate the situation except this time I’m a black belt in Jiu Jitsu and as I catch his grubby fingers going for my wallet, I roundhouse him in the chin and send whatever gold teeth he has left scuttling across the Metro station.

In every way, he looked the part he played.  And so – almost – did I.

Because he and his posse came this close to pick-pocketing me.

Troy and I had just arrived in Barcelona.  We booked our next trains and went to the Metro to get into the city.  I was wearing cargo shorts.  My wallet was in one side pocket.  My passport was in the other.  The train arrived. 

Troy went into the railway car.  I was following when a short Spanish guy cut me off.  I tried to get around him but he blocked my way.  Nothing physical.  Nothing overt. Just enough to stop me.

Then I felt the smallest nibble at my right pocket ­– the one with my wallet with about $200 cash in three currencies in it.  My reaction was automatic.  I grabbed my pocket as the hand retreated.  I felt for my wallet.  It was still there.

I looked up.  And saw the scowling junkyard face of the thief.  He grabbed his shorts and uttered bursts of faux-panic, mocking my quick reaction that thwarted him.  I stared straight into his eyes.  I don’t know why.  I was on autopilot at this point.  The adrenaline was burning through my veins, pumping sharp acuity into my senses, probably shaping my face into a look that said I know you did it, I hate you, but I’m better than you, so you’re not worth my hate.

I turned and paced several coaches over.  When I got on, my legs were trembling even though they felt like stone.

This all happened in the span of the Metro doors opening and closing.   Ten seconds.  Maybe less.

The incident pissed me off.  I wasn’t apoplectic, but I was raging, stinking mad.  I took some deep breaths.  I took some more.  It took another few hours to begin to see things on the bright side.

The bright side?  Well, I hadn’t been harmed.  And I had perspective.  It’s as soon as you let your guard down that those junkyard dogs get you.  It was stupid of me to put my passport and wallet in unzippered side pockets.  Especially at the train station where tourists come out.  Especially while wearing a big backpack.  I had certainly let my guard down.

Except I wasn’t gotten.  I’m not sure how close it was.  The only reason I reacted was because I felt the most insignificant little nibble on my side pocket.  Barely perceptible.  And I do know that once the wallet breathes open air, it’s gone.  These dogs work in packs.  One grabs the wallet, passes it to his buddy who scampers to another coach.  Pathetic.  Masterful.

I was more careful for the rest of the trip.