Wanderlust

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

“Whether the journey is emotional or geographic, Eaves again and again captures the exhilarating moment when the safe place is left behind and the new place is not yet arrived at—that ‘in between' moment that contains the thrill of the journey.”

 

 

“Even those of us who have read Elisabeth Eaves before and know what a poised writer she is will marvel at the elegance and embracing reach of
Wanderlust.
She conveys the nomadic romance of an adventurous soul traversing the vivid world and yet retains the intimacy of a voice confiding its secrets, taking you with her, smuggling you along. Once
Wanderlust
embarks, there'll be no place else you'd rather be.”

 

 

“Wanderlust
isn't as much a desire to travel as it is a force of nature that can course through a person's veins with such blinding power that there is nothing else in life more important. Elisabeth journeys into her self, and around the world, as she heeds the call of the open road—and her heart.”

 

 

“Eaves tells a provocative story that explores the question of why we travel, and how the allure of far-flung places can turn into an obsession. Smart, soulful, and startlingly honest,
Wanderlust
takes the reader on a wild ride from Paris to Pakistan—and many points in between.”

“Don't seek the water; get thirst.”

—Rumi

On an early December
morning in 2005, as the Christmas lights faded and festive dark turned to gray daylight, I loaded four suitcases into a taxi on Avenue Montaigne. I went back upstairs and stepped into the parquet hall to take one last look at what was now my ex-apartment. The living room was too perfect, with its balconies, its marble fireplace, its fashionable but uninviting white sofa. I surveyed the emptiness, then locked the door from the outside and slipped the key back underneath, for my now ex-boyfriend to find. Another life was over, and I couldn't get back inside if I wanted to.

I flew back to Vancouver, where my parents met me at the luggage carousel. My four suitcases represented the household I'd acquired thus far in life. The most overstuffed among them had split open between Toronto and Vancouver. The handlers strung it up in red and white tape, but when it arrived on the carousel, the rip still gaped ominously, contents poised to escape, the whole bundle looking dangerously close to explosion. We took the suitcase to the Air Canada counter, where they provided us with an enormous clear plastic sack, into which I dumped the remaining physical artifacts of my existence: clothing, bags, boots, books. We gave the airline the broken suitcase, and four days later a new one, larger and sturdier than its predecessor, turned up on my parents' porch.

My life wouldn't be so easy to fix. I'd woken up at the age of thirty-four to realize that I wanted to go home, only to discover that I had no idea where that was.

Wanderlust,
the very strong or irresistible impulse to travel, is adopted untouched from the German, presumably because it couldn't be improved upon. Workarounds like the French
passion du voyage
don't quite capture the same meaning. Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly; it's something more animal and more fickle—something more like lust. We don't lust after very many things in life. We don't need words like
worklust
or
homemakinglust
. But travel? Anatole Broyard put it perfectly in his essay “Being There”: “Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live . . . in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.” I spent a long time looking for the consummation Broyard describes, and the search was tied up with love itself. I traveled for love, and loved to travel, making it hard to disentangle cause from effect.

The American president Thomas Jefferson once cautioned his nephew against roaming. “Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy,” he wrote in a letter. “When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge, which they may apply usefully for their country, but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret—their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home.”

Had that happened to me? Would I never be gratified?

I wasn't so sure. It was true that I'd extended my affections far and wide. But I didn't think I would have sent home a warning like Jefferson's. I doubted that even he, who wrote to his nephew from Paris, would have traded in his own rambling.

As my taxi merged onto the Périphérique, I wondered what had propelled me. I wondered what wanderlust had done to me, and whether I'd followed it for too long.

PART ONE

“It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone, to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist.”

—John Steinbeck,
The Log from the Sea of Cortez

chapter one

I
met Graham on an airplane.
He was seventeen and off to England with his rugby team, a posse of blond boys in blue-striped jerseys sitting near the back of our jet. I was sixteen, on a school trip to Paris and London, the first time I'd be abroad without my parents. We both came from suburbs east of Vancouver, which was where we embarked. After takeoff we talked sitting on the floor of the jet, amid our respective classmates, pretending a more sophisticated knowledge of our upcoming itineraries than we actually possessed. By the time we landed in London, where our paths diverged, it was clear to me that travel without parental supervision led directly to the exchange of phone numbers with cute boys. But I was quickly caught up in my two-week trip, then exams on my return home, and didn't expect to hear from the guy on the plane. I was surprised the first time he called and asked me to go to a movie, all the more so when a month later he asked me to his graduation ball. Graham hadn't yet become unique in my mind. He was athletic and had a car and listened to heavy metal; his misbehaviors were run-of-themill, like cutting class and smoking cigarettes or pot. We kissed passionately on the couch in my TV room. He teased me about the big words I used (“insatiable”), and I made fun of the names of his bands (“Anthrax”).

I'd never been to a formal dance and was flattered to be asked; I immediately said yes. My mother altered a blue and black satin prom dress that had belonged to my cousin, and I was granted special dispensation to stay out as late as I liked. When three in the morning rolled around, and we found ourselves at an after party at someone's house, Graham volunteered to have his dad chauffeur us to our respective homes. Part of me wanted to stay out even though I could barely stay awake. I wanted to use my new freedom to its maximum, to exploit it as outrageously as I could, but I wasn't sure what that would mean. The part of me falling asleep accepted the ride and went home.

We didn't become boyfriend and girlfriend; we didn't go all the way. But we stayed in touch over the summer, while I worked at a clothing store in a Burnaby shopping mall. Graham became different in my mind from other boys, as I learned about his singular ambition: He wanted to go away and travel. Sometimes we talked on the phone about his desire, which over those first months I knew him, progressed from a hazy idea to a concrete plan. Neither of us knew anyone else who aimed to do the same thing. Many of our classmates seemed to have no plans at all, and those who did expected to go straight to university. As I entered my senior year, he scrimped and saved, working two jobs and living with his dad, so that he could buy himself a ticket to see the world. I heard less and less from Graham, until finally he called one day in the winter to tell me that he was leaving. I admired the way he'd made his own wish come true.

It wasn't until after he left, and began sending me notes from afar, that I began to really fall for him. First from Hawaii, then from Fiji, then from Australia, he mailed regular light-as-dust aerograms, those pale blue, prestamped sheets from the post office that are both
stationery and envelope combined. He wrote in a dense ballpoint scrawl about palm trees, which he'd never before seen; about scuba diving, which he'd never before done; and about his evolving plans. Once he mailed a photograph of himself, now with longer hair and darker skin, accompanied by a letter saying he was living in a trailer and picking fruit. From my circumscribed life of homework and curfews and college applications, I became so captivated by Graham's voyage—by the fact that you could just
do
that, go off into the world and let it carry you along—that after a while I couldn't be sure where wanting him stopped and wanting to be him began.

I was admitted to some Canadian universities, but chose instead to go to the University of Washington, across the border and a few hours' drive south. Going to Seattle, and the United States, represented a bigger, broader world. I immediately started taking an 8:00 AM Arabic class, during which I often fell asleep. Part of my desire to take Arabic was that it was the more distant, exotic thing. I already spoke French and Spanish, and had traveled in Europe with my family. We'd also been to Turkey when I was fourteen, and that had stoked an appetite to see what was farther East. The architecture in Istanbul had left an indelible impression. I was so awestruck after visiting the Topkapi Palace that as I gazed back at the Golden Horn from our ferry, skimming the strait where sultans had drowned their predecessors' concubines, I shushed my mother when she tried to talk to me.