Kevin Oderman - Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel

Also by Kevin Oderman

White Vespa

Going

How Things Fit Together

Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium

2015 by Kevin Oderman

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:

Etruscan Press

Wilkes University

84 West South Street

Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766

(570) 408-4546

www.etruscanpress.org

Published 2015 by Etruscan Press

Cover design, interior design, and typesetting by L. Elizabeth Powers

The text of this book is set in Adobe Garamond

First Edition

15 16 17 18 19 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Oderman, Kevin, 1950- author.

[Essays. Selections]

Cannot stay : essays on travel / Kevin Oderman. -- First edition.

pages cm

SBN 978-0-9897532-8-9

1. Oderman, Kevin, 1950---Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Oderman, Kevin, 1950-White amber. Container of (work): II. Title.

G465.O3225 2015

910.4--dc23

2014037085

Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.

This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.

for Ambrose Oderman, father and traveler

We all walk the long road, cannot stay.

Eddie Vedder, The Long Road

Cannot Stay

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the journals where these essays first appeared: White Amber, Judith and Harold, Puppet Heads, Waiting for the Bombs, and At Kors in the Northwest Review; Time to Kill: Cambodia and A House Fitting in the Southwest Review; Selling in the North Dakota Quarterly; Colors in Green Mountains Review; Of Corse in the Tusculum Review; and Trips Not Taken in Shadowbox.

I am indebted to the Fulbright Scholar Program and to West Virginia University for time and a warrant to travel; to Phil Brady, Jackie Fowler, Bill Schneider, and the entire inspired tribe at Etruscan, who made this book possible.

A profound bow to my old mentors who, in classrooms or in letters, awakened me: Judah Bierman, Georgia Crampton, Donald Pearce, Sherman Paul, and Guy Davenport.

I have been supported in all this, the traveling and the writing, by friends. You cannot know how much your friendship has mattered. Finally, how lucky I am to have found her, my touchstone at home and occasional companion on the road, Sara Pritchard, aka Delta B. Horne.

::

Check in. A subdued line of passengers, everybody waiting their turn. Someone pushes a small bag forward, eyeing with a smirk the woman with the luggage trolley. Its always so. And yet, even that woman is traveling light, leaving behind far more than she could ever pack into a few suitcases. By necessity, the traveler gives up on things, preferring for a time the experience of going. And part of the attraction of travel, it turns out, is getting free of all that stuff, which, however desirable in prospect, encumbers you. Having left almost everything behind, you walk lighter in the new place, nothing to tend to but the few things in your luggage.

Thinking about travel, its easy to skip over the actual getting there. The hasty curbside goodbye under the sign for departures. The bout of heartache. Few people enjoy the airports and the long flights, over seas. Over there, you think, the real traveling will begin, but even pushing through the heavy doors at the airport, youve already begun to be someone else. You hardly notice, perhaps, the subtle change, the traveler emerging from behind your at-home self. Traveling by air, you suffer a series of familiar rituals. Youre searched, you wait, you pass through one straight gate after another. Youre bound to your seat. The flight attendants repeat the grave incantations. Youre asked to consider the dire what ifs. Then youre flying, actually flying, and you succumb to the Mesmer thrum of the jets. Libations are poured. In a spell, perhaps, you try to imagine your passage as seen from the groundsomething silver, needling its way through the sky. The trance deepens.

If air travel seems no more than a parody of ceremony, it works. It not only takes you to a different place, in the obvious sense, but traveling, you undergo a metamorphosis. The person you are at home no longer feels entirely convincing. Perhaps because youre a bit disoriented, your at-home self suddenly seems at least half a habit, mostly made in response to circumstances youve now left behindyour everyday life. Stepping outside the terminal, you feel it might be possible to just walk away from all that. Some feel this, I fear, as an invitation to bad behavior, to run amok out of hearing. Some do. But you might feel the real chances are inward, that in travel you have the opportunity to recall a younger you, a self less hemmed in by social identities. And you find in traveling that the world comes to you less filtered. Your senses seem sharperlike that happy moment when you try on the new glasses with the new prescription, and you find you can see again the way you did when you were young. You walk out of the terminal, the world buzzing around you, and you strike out into it, just a traveler.

About twenty years ago I was given the chance to live for a season in Thessaloniki, in Greece, and I took it, going alone. I turned off the path of the life Id been living. I traveled a great deal from Thessaloniki, on the Greek mainland, out to the islands, the Sporades, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, up to Bulgaria, and twice into Turkey. I didnt realize, as it was happening, that I was becoming a traveler, but Ive been traveling ever since. Not all the time, but often. Around the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Baltics, Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, Bali, Japan. Many places. But I hope I havent become worldly. I want to be always impressionable, and one of the things I love best about travel is that Im more impressionable abroad than at home.

This is a book of journeys. Most books about travel describe the great arc of one heroic adventure or the rewards and frustrations of digging deep in one place. Travel literature is rich with wonderful books of both sorts. While this is the kind of travel we most often read about, its not the kind of travel we often do. I travel when I can, trips of two or three weeks, a month maybe. The essays in this book have grown out of such trips, have been called up by the various worlds Ive been lucky enough to travel through. But as much as to places, these essays speak to the experience of travel, to what it means to shake loose of your at-home identity, to carry all you need of your life in a worn daypack, to step footloose into a world unfamiliar, and in doing so, to catch a glimpse of where youve come from as a strange place, too.