Bumdom.

I'm going on an adventure!

I decided to revive the old blog just in time to jet off on a new adventure. To catch everyone up, I'm still here in Cape Town (where winter has set in with a vengeance - hence the epic bundled-up self-portrait below, taken in the middle of a wind and rain and hail storm). I'm about 3/4 of the way through my Masters, and am just starting the last leg: my dissertation. On Friday I take off for Rwanda, where I'll be doing field research for 6 weeks. I'm heading back to Nyagatare, where I lived and taught school in 2009 for a year, and my research will look at the role of urban planning in post-conflict and post-migration urban settlements. At the end of July I'll come back to Cape Town (in time to catch the last month or two of winter) to analyze, compile, and write my heart out until the deadline at the end of October. Which leads to graduation in December and a return to Seattle just in time for Christmas. 

Self portrait with hot water bottle

It's been a busy past few months, with a full semester of course work, planning for the dissertation, and then a surprise trip home briefly when my Grandpa unexpectedly passed away. His birthday is the day after mine later this month, and we've always been close. He will be sorely missed. But in traveling home to remember him with family and friends, I remembered how proud he was of all his kids and grandkids and all the many varied things we've done with our lives. He was born in Oklahoma, and when the Dust Bowl desiccated their farm he and his family migrated to California with nothing but a pile of belongings on the back of a pickup truck. He saw electric lights for the first time on that trip - in a motel along the way. In California the family started from scratch, and despite such humble beginnings my Grandpa and each of his seven siblings grew up to get a college education. Grandpa always loved learning and I know he was proud of me for continuing my education. He also loved to hear about my travels, since he always lamented not traveling more himself. I think as he grew older and less mobile he took great pleasure in living vicariously through his children and grandchildren.

Grandpa Roy

So Grandpa, this one's for you!

I picked up a used copy of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley when I was home and read it on the flight back. It's a great travelogue about a solo road trip (with his dog) through America that Steinbeck took when he was nearly 60 years old. I love the opening passage, so I'll share it here: 

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.  

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it. 

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.