REFLECTIONS ON A LIFE IN TRANSIT

by Diana Anhalt

I have spent much of my life traveling—“in transit” are two of my favorite words— but I have probably devoted more time trying to pin down my experiences than to the travel itself. Writing things down helps--sometimes. Of Egypt I wrote: “Everything I’ve seen is blurring into a pyramid-temple-sphinx hodgepodge merging with desert, and we haven’t even left the country yet.” (But at least I got something down on paper.) You can learn about the voyage when the traveler cares enough to record it; but to learn about the voyager you must understand what drives him, be it necessity, pleasure, change, escape or renewal.

At one time I believed I was compelled to travel for the same reason I write with my left hand and crave chocolate, because it was in my blood. After all, I am descended from a long line of travelers, perpetual immigrants who changed addresses more often than they changed shoes and left behind no mark more permanent than a pencil scrawl.

“Our family reunions take place in bus terminals and train stations—or at funerals,” my grandmother told me when I was a child. I would sit at her kitchen table in my pajamas eating raisin bread toast and honey and let her voice wash over me. She sang to me in Yiddish about the little bird that abandoned its nest, and said, “We were born with wheels on our heels, like taxicabs.” She knew what she was talking about.

At the beginning of this past century, during the pogroms, the officially sanctioned persecutions of the Jews, she fled Poland for the United States. In 1950 during a pogrom of another sort, Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts targeting suspected Communists and fellow travelers, my parents fled the Bronx for Mexico, where I still lived until recently. So in my family we knew what it meant to travel, but it was travel born of necessity.

Not until the early ‘60s, once the State Department had restored their passports, would my parents take off, as I do now, strictly for pleasure—at least that’s what I tell myself. I sometimes wonder whether pleasure is what it’s all about. At some level, I believe we travel for the same reason we get married, have children or build houses—because we’ve never been there before. We think traveling will change, not only our surroundings and our family structure, but ourselves, and turn us into entirely different beings. All this is magical thinking, of course—infantile and irrational. Yet as well as I know that a change of location might not alter me significantly, there is something within me that sees it as conducive to change, in the same way owning a full length mirror is conducive to losing weight.

From the moment we leave home we can choose to leave behind our obligations and constraints, to escape them. We are disencumbered. Have you ever noticed how people become more boisterous, more playful, more self-indulgent when they travel? Because ones inhibitions dwell in the familiar places—in ones office or at home—I know that if I can just step away from my life I will be able to keep my personal demons at bay, leave myself—my true self—behind and live in the moment. (I even write more freely when I travel.)

As a result, trips seem more like beginnings and renewals than endings. They’re both, of course. (I personally prefer beginnings waiting to be filled with happenings like so many empty gift boxes.) There’s an element of magic to them. I never regarded them that way until I ran into the little girl in the de Gaulle Airport some nine years ago. I was waiting to catch my flight to London. She was wearing blue jeans, a pink tee shirt, a baseball cap and gold sandals. From her backpack protruded a “fairy wand”—a shiny rod all glitter and sequins and crowned with feathers. I didn’t want to forget her so I wrote her down on the back of my plane ticket and, even then I recognized that I too travel with my own magic wand––a notebook and pencil.

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