From Amarillo to Zurich, Alpha to Omega: A personal global alphabet

Misadventures and memories from across Canada and around the world

Alpha

For half of my grade one year and all of the next two, my family lived in Bellevue, Washington, across Lake Washington from Seattle. On the other side of our street stood a forest, to me an expansive wilderness of towering evergreens and impenetrable tangles of blackberry vines. This being the peak of the Baby Boom childhood years, the neighbourhood was filled with kids whose mothers let them loose to build treehouses, catch crawling creatures, pick berries and play endless games of guerilla warfare.

In my last year in Bellevue – I had just turned nine that spring – I wrote a story inspired by my adventures. Titled “Three Boys and a Dangerous Jungle,” it featured, well, three boys (one named Bob, the others bearing the names of my two best friends) and a jungle. As I remember it – in a tragedy for world literature, there is no extant copy – the boys are playing  when they wander through some sort of magical portal and find themselves in a dark, deadly tropical rainforest, where they are immediately attacked by bloodthirsty pygmies and must run a gauntlet of poisonous snakes and quicksand.

I’ll leave it to future literary scholars to explore the racist and imperialist sources that must have inspired the author/illustrator. What strikes me now is that at the age of nine I was so enthralled by the idea of “the jungle” that I fantasized that the place where I spent my days was more than 13,000 kilometres to the southeast. And I am struck by the fact that, despite this early fascination with tropical rainforests, it took me another 43 years to visit one. (That’s me and my son, Sam, on a hike in Belize.)

A few years after that literary debut, when my family was living in Calgary, we went on a camping trip that took us across British Columbia. I’d seen mountains before, and enjoyed the occasional family drive and picnic in Banff National Park, but what impressed me on this trip was the dry, rocky landscape of the B.C. Interior around Kamloops. Looking up from the seat of our Ford Ranger at the sagebrush-covered hills, I pictured us travelling through the American Southwest as depicted in the films on Calgary television every Saturday morning, sponsored by Ralph Williams’ Rodeo Motors. (It was years before I realized that the vast majority of these low-budget westerns were filmed in Southern California rather than West Texas or Monument Valley.) How long did it take before I actually visited the American Southwest? Almost forty years.

In the years to come, I travelled vicariously through reading. I walked through the sewers and alleys of Paris in Les Misérables, sweated in the heat of dusty fly-blown Oaxacan villages in The Power and the Glory, cruised up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness. I followed major global events of the previous half century with Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War; Dispatches, Michael Herr’s book of reportage on the Vietnam War; Joan Didion’s and Tom Wolfe’s and Hunter Thompson’s observations of the cultural and political explosions of America in the 1960s. Once I discovered the genre of literary travel writing, I went for A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush with Eric Newby. I spent time In Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin. I endured any number of comical misadventures when I ventured Into the Heart of Borneo with Redmond O’Hanlon. My reading lit another fire in me to engage with the world, with its wild places and cities, with its cultural clashes and revolutions. And yet, my actual world remained largely limited to the Canadian prairies.

Long before the phrase “bucket list” entered anybody’s vocabulary, I had a mental checklist of places I wanted to go and things I wanted to do. Trek somewhere really high, either in the Himalayas or the Andes. Paddle a small boat in a tropical rainforest. Dive in a coral reef. Wander through vine-clad ancient ruins. Speak the local language. Absorb the nuances of distant cultures. Witness global events happening in person, rather than through a television screen. Travel light. Eat unfamiliar food. Look good in rumpled, sweat-stained clothing.

And yet, for one reason or another, what travel I did required a certain amount of cajoling from others: a university friend for my first two trips abroad in my late 20s and my wife for all of my subsequent travel. For the most part, my travels outside Canada only got going once I was pushing fifty. The travel alphabet that follows isn’t especially comprehensive; I’m sure many readers have been to more varied places than I have. What I’ve gathered here are the memories, observations and misadventures of my occasional attempts to catch up in person to my years of vicarious globe-trotting.

I have not “seen the world.” But to that kid bent over a desk, printing out a jungle adventure in his cramped chicken scratch, I would like to offer a message of encouragement. Don’t sweat it, Bob, you’ll get there eventually.