When I tell people what I do for a living, the reaction is almost always the same, some variation on: "What a great job! I would love to be a travel writer."
I used to try to explain, after my initial agreement, that it's not like they think, that I'm not on vacation, enjoying the sights; I'm trying (sometimes futilely) to meet interesting people, learn new things, find a compelling story.
But I've stopped doing that. Now I look at the person with interest and ask: "Really? What was the last travel book you read?"
Thursday morning found me at a bar in the Charlotte airport watching the epic John Isner and Kevin Bacon - I mean Nicolas Mahut - match. A man pulled up a chair next to me and ordered a beer. He looked more like a NASCAR than a Wimbledon guy, but a TV screen, no matter what's on it, is a powerful thing; his gaze lifted toward it. The score at the time was 62-62 in the fifth set. "I'd say those two," the man observed quietly, "are pretty evenly matched."
I spent the weekend traveling with three journalists, one of whom was rarely seen without her BlackBerry. She texted and tweeted constantly: during bus rides, during meals, during concerts.
Forget taking time to reflect on your experience; she was so busy expressing herself that she wasn't able to have an experience. Much of the city passed by her unnoticed, so focused was she on her toy keyboard. One morning one of the other journalists said to her: "I know you're on your second cup of coffee from reading Facebook," and I couldn't decide who was the more lame: she for writing that news bulletin or he for reading it.
The more time passed, the more annoyed I became with her. It wasn't just the rudeness, preferring communication with imagined readers to interaction with the people around her. It was the aura of industriousness that she created. Tapping away on the bus, while the rest of us gazed out the window, she looked like the diligent one. She made me feel idle, observing and taking mental notes of the city while she sent off inconsequential tweets.
And even if I was idle, at least I was keeping it to myself.
The news of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is too painful to read, so instead I'm dipping into one of my favorite books about the region, Frederick Turner's A Border of Blue.
In the early 1990s, Turner traveled the Gulf's rim - from Key West to the Yucatan - and produced a beautiful travel book. Unlike some travel writers, he didn't depend solely on chance encounters; he sought out knowledgeable locals like Robert Davis, the creator of Seaside on the Florida Panhandle, and Barry Ancelet, the authority on all things Cajun.
On the Mississippi coast Turner wrote that he felt none of the "profound and unrelieved sorrow" he tended to associate with the state:
Partly, it was the presence of the water, which always offers at least the illusion of freedom or escape. With the wind blowing in off a wide, watery expanse whose horizon is apparently limitless, it is possible to believe that fate may be avoided and that if need be you can change your circumstances.
Of course, he hadn't imagined fate coming, inexorably, in the form of black water.
One of the most difficult aspects of freelancing is coming up with ideas - especially for travel stories. I can understand a magazine's reluctance to send me somewhere not knowing what I'll write, but how do I know what I'll write until I've been there?
When I was my own editor, I'd pick a place and find my story once I got there. This made it challenging, but it introduced an element of surprise and, I think, verisimilitude. If you go somewhere with an idea in mind, that's what you focus on, blocking out other, often more important stories. Also, you may uncover a lot, but it's in service to a story that's already been written (which is how you learned of it in the first place).
I used to arrive in places unbound by expectations. That's how I found the Cajun Woody Allen in Lafayette, Louisiana; the Dubrovnik sculptor known as Pero Limunada (because he once ran a lemonade stand); the beautiful young woman in Penang whose goal in life was to "upgrade" her husband. No one had written about these people, at least not in English, and I felt a real sense of discovery that gave my stories, I thought, a certain freshness. Now, journeys have to be plotted and planned, objectives stated, sources given, scenes sketched out before they happen. It robs travel of one of its most lauded features (serendipity) and makes it just another predictable, programmed activity. Is this why travel writing is suffering?
You know travel writing is in trouble when one of the books included in the New York Times Book Review's summer reading round-up is titled: Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, With Recipes. This book was followed by The Spice Necklace: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating, and Island Life and Ginger and Ganesh: Adventures in Indian Cooking, Culture and Love.
The word "adventure" is now so overused in travel writing that it has become a cliche. (For years I've been telling students to avoid it.) And the culinary adventure seems like an inevitable development now that food shows dominate the Travel Channel. We no longer eat to travel, we travel to eat.
Granted, this is not new. A.J. Liebling wrote passionately about food. Between Meals is his belt-tightening chronicle of overeating in the City of Light. (His only love affair was with the things on his plate.) And M.F.K. Fisher blurred the line between food and travel. But they didn't call their experiences "adventures." Their forays in eating were integral to, and inseparable from, their study of the culture. They were not produced to feed a market niche.