Women’s Travel E-Mail Roundtable, Part Eight: The Home Dilemma

Speaker's Corner: All this week, four accomplished travelers -- Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Liz Sinclair, Terry Ward and Catherine Watson -- talk about the rewards and perils of hitting the road alone as a woman.

10.10.07 | 4:57 PM ET

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From: Catherine Watson
To: Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Terry Ward and Liz Sinclair
Subject: The Home Dilemma

Happy birthday to Terry and thanks to you all for being so candid. These most recent postings have, for me, just pushed this whole already-good discussion from interesting to comforting.

To answer Terry’s question: As travelers, especially women travelers, especially women travelers who write—YES, I think we ARE on the fringe of normal American society. At least, I’ve always felt I was. It’s comforting to be talking with other women who get it about my life, far better than friends and family do here at home.

There’s a great comment from Pico Iyer at the beginning of a recent travel anthology called “Growing Up Global,” in which he talks about being one of a new breed of people— what he calls Transit Loungers—people who grew up shuttling back and forth between continents and thinking it was normal. I could identify.

I feel more like a stranger—or a misfit—in America than I ever do on the road. On the road, I am supposed to be a stranger—that’s what a traveler IS—and I’m a good stranger.

Like Liz, though, I also seem to crave the stability of home—I have two dogs, a cluttered house, a big mortgage, and a couple of close friends here. But the result is like having two lives: one at home, one Out There. And that means two different personalities.

I miss home when I’m gone, especially if the trip has been long, and I’m always glad to see the familiar highways and rivers unfolding below me as the plane comes in (right below me, in fact: The Minneapolis-St. Paul airport is at the lip of a high bluff overlooking the Minnesota River, which puts a certain Third-World thrill into landing here).

But for days after a trip, I feel as if my feet have suddenly been nailed to the floor, but my body and my soul are still traveling onward. It’s like falling in a big arc, in slow, slow motion. And when I finally hit the floor, I turn into someone else. My values revert. My curiosity shuts down. Pretty soon, I’m watching the Home and Garden Network on cable, snacking too much, putting off doing the laundry and wondering why I’m depressed.

Yet I keep coming back. I really envy those of you who made the commitment to build homes elsewhere, however temporary. It sounds like the best of both worlds.

Lest this turn into a big whine, I need to say that I wouldn’t trade my travel-writing life for anything. Not one minute of it. Like Stephanie, I believe this is what I was born for. I’m grateful to have had a lot of readers to talk to, all these years, and a few well-traveled friends, and my patient ex-husband, who really will listen to my travel stories. 

As for never seeing a beach—or having friends believe you’re not really working: I once came back from a six- or seven-week assignment and ran into one of my bosses as I labored down the hall to my desk, arms full of notebooks and bags of film. “You’re not tan,” he said, apparently under the impression that I’d been on vacation. I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t had time to get tan.

One more thing: That quote from Terry’s reader—about people who really love each other not feeling a deep desire to travel on their own—is chilling. That guy must have been pretty young. (What? 12? 14?) Grown-ups who really love each other, at least in loves that survive, learn to give the other person space to be happy in. “Release instead of bind,” one of my favorite meditations says, “for thus you are made free.”

I’ve been lucky in that regard: My guy (who has been my best friend for 30 years, despite our six stressful years of marriage in the middle) doesn’t much like to travel, and we always fought when we tried to do it together. We once had a huge fight in the train station on a one-day stop in Venice over whether we should store the luggage so we could walk around freely. He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Travel is hard for you, isn’t it?” Amazingly, he managed to keep on being my friend when I told him the truth: No, it’s only hard when I’m with someone.