I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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Let’s see, travel. I abhor it as a general rule. No, that’s not true. I like to travel. If I were rich I would probably go to Europe. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the trip into town and whether or not the brake job I did myself is going to . . . well.
When I was a kid it was different. My father was a Marine and we traveled. I hold the record among my friends for the number of schools attended: (a school counts twice if interrupted by attending another school) twenty (20).
We were stationed in Argentina, Newfoundland in 1948–50. In the winter the wind blew a hundred miles an hour. The summers were delightful with long days of hiking in the woods and fishing for trout in ponds and streams which flowed to the ocean. The salmon ate the bugs and the bugs ate the people. But it was worth it.
Don’t go there please. They don’t need to make any more tourist traps out of nice little towns and waiters out of fishermen (not that there’s anything wrong with being a waiter; it’s just that’s where the bread is when the great American Roadshow drops by). Of course, travel writers don’t care. How could anybody willfully destroy an innocent little village by telling three million people about it?
What is this turning into — a warning against traveling too heavy on the toes? I can’t imagine a reader of THE SUN traveling too heavily anywhere, on anything.
Mike Mathers