Rosita Boland - Elsewhere: One Woman, One Rucksack, One Lifetime of Travel

Rosita Boland is a senior features writer at the Irish Times, specializing in human interest stories. She was a 2009 Nieman Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She won Journalist of the Year at the 2018 Newsbrands Ireland journalism awards.

For Lucy Corcoran

beloved niece and god-daughter

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

In the year 2000, I bought the thirteenth edition of the Chambers Dictionary, and set myself a personal Millennium project of reading it cover to cover. Sometimes I wrote poetry, and poets are always searching for words that will go deep as wells.

There are 1,984 pages in the dictionary and I got through them all eventually, a few pages at a time, pen in hand. The richest range of English language from Shakespeare to the present day, declared a sentence on its cover. As I read my way through the big red Chambers over the period of a year or so, I marked many obscure words I had never heard of; words that delighted me with the oddness and specificity of their precise definitions.

I had never known, for instance, that there is a word to describe a trail of damaged foliage created by a stag being hunted: abature. That a dream hole is a hole in the wall of a steeple for admitting light. That leal is true-hearted and faithful. That parison is a lump of glass before its moulded into its final shape. That metempsychosis is the passing of a soul after death into some other body. That mallemaroking is the carousing of seamen in icebound ships. That to guddle is to fish with the hands by groping under the stones or banks of a stream. That batology is the study of brambles. That knosp is the unopened bud of a flower. That vade-mecum is a useful handbook that one carries about with one for constant reference.

I collected all these, and hundreds of others. I made my own dictionary, by writing the words and their definitions alphabetically into a Daler A5 hardback notebook. After each letter of the alphabet, I left some blank pages, so that I could continue to add to them over time. One weekend, when I had nothing much to do, I inexpertly cut out the letters of the alphabet from gold-flecked Japanese patterned paper and glued them down at the beginning of each section.

I thought of the notebook as my own vade-mecum, and hoped I would be able to periodically trawl through it for words to use in new poems in the future. In fact, I wrote only one more book of poetry, a couple of years after I made my dictionary, and then stopped entirely. The reporting I did in my daily job as a journalist was in some way both so immersive and endlessly satisfying in its variation that I somehow strayed far from thinking in poetry. Then I was gone too long; was too far away to pick up the vanished trail of breadcrumbs and return to the deep, verdant woods I had loved to linger in.

From time to time, however, I still take the notebook down and add a word to it; new words I come across. Like fernweh.

Fernweh, my multilingual friend Brian pronounced over dinner one night when we were out. We had been talking about travelling. Thats what you have.

Fernweh?

Its a German word, he said. The pain of not being in foreign parts. A desire to travel. An ache for distant places.

Fernweh. Fernweh. So thats what it has been, all these years.

The proof of fernweh in my life stands on the top shelf of a bookcase in my kitchen-dining room: a row of black hardback notebooks. They are the diaries I have ritually kept since starting to travel aged twenty-two. I had saved up and travelled for long periods between jobs before I had a proper job. After that, I had managed lengthy periods of unpaid leave. My friend Risn once asked me why I loved to travel so much. Its about being elsewhere, I found myself saying. It has always been about being elsewhere. Whenever I came back to Ireland, the diaries Id kept while elsewhere went up on a shelf with all the others, and there they had stayed. I had never reread these diaries, but I knew they were there if I needed to transport myself again to the places where they had been written, and that was enough.

I have diaries but no photographs, because I have never travelled with a camera. What I do have are folders of paper ephemera: boarding passes, maps, banknotes, museum admission tickets, trekking passes, guesthouse receipts, postcards and many other items that individually seem inconsequential, but collectively form the palimpsest of a lifetimes wandering.

What I also have are my passports with their arcane interior mosaics of many stamps and visas. I love those various passports almost to the point of fetishism; my evidence of portals to elsewhere. I even searched for years for a special box to keep them in, eventually finding it by chance a few years ago in an art gallery in Ennistymon, Co. Clare.

It is a small rectangular wooden box made by the artists husband from salvaged wood, which she had then painted deep shades of cobalt and midnight blue, interspersed with silver stars. The main image is of a wingd red-haired woman, wearing only boots, on a silver horse, flying through the blue starry night. I have red hair. It is corny as hell, but I didnt care. This box was meant to be mine. I bought it without knowing if the passports would fit or not. They did: dropping cleanly into the empty box and filling it perfectly, like the missing piece of a puzzle. The box now stands on a shelf in my living room, and every time I look at it, it makes me feel happy.

In the days after that dinner, I found myself constantly repeating the perfect new word Brian had given me. Fernweh. I could not get it out of my head.

One weekend, not long after our dinner, I was visiting my parents. It was a Sunday, and Sundays mean my fathers delighted tussle with the fiendish Sunday Business Post crossword that he rarely fails to complete, despite now being into his nineties. That day, he had a dictionary beside him on the table, the one that had belonged to his mother.

I recognized this book. I had often taken it from my fathers study as a child to look up some word for homework. My grandmother had died long before I was born, but I knew this had been her book, and as it was one of the very few things in the house that I knew had belonged to her I had always regarded it with particular fondness. That Sunday, as I lifted the dictionary from the table to look up a word for my father, I realized with a surge of pleasure that it too was a Chambers.

Katherine Bolands dictionary was the third edition of the Chambers, and had been published in 1909. It was a faded red hardback, now missing its spine, with a stylized art nouveau cover. The flyleaf read: Pronouncing, explanatory, etymological, with compound phrases, technical terms in use in the arts and sciences, colloquialisms, full appendices and copiously illustrated. The copious illustrations were tiny, exquisitely detailed line drawings scattered through the pages: a spiritsail ship, a quincunx arrangement, a marquiss coronet, a gargoyle, a jesters bauble.

That afternoon, as I carefully turned its pages for the first time in decades, I realized with a jolt that someone had marked the word