by Matt Gross
Back home, I talked to my editors and friends. I told them I was slowing down, that I wanted to take fewer trips so I could write longer stories. And I did. The summer-long adventures ceased; six months away per year dwindled to two months, maybe less. I began turning my memories into essays rather than features, so I wouldn’t have to leave home, and when I did leave home, I made sure it was to take a trip I really cared about: running in the highlands of Kenya, say, or eating my way through newly open Myanmar.
But something else had shifted, too. After nearly eight years of intense travel—months away, fifty or sixty countries bagged, hundreds of articles written—there were few places left I needed to go. Sure, there were many destinations I wanted, and still want, to visit: New Zealand is appealing, and Patagonia, and if Mali weren’t collapsing into chaos at this moment, I’d love to take my family there and have our portrait shot by Bamako’s renowned Malick Sidibé, the photographer whose work I’d discovered with Jean in Paris all those years before.
Desire, however, is not the same as need. Need is what brought me to Vietnam all those years ago, need is what dragged Vivian the Volvo twelve thousand miles in twelve weeks, need is what always helped me overcome jet lag just in time to set off, two weeks later, on another epic voyage. In a handful of years, I’d circled the globe, sampled backyard wines in a dozen backyards, met Darjeeling tea kingpins, Puerto Rican pot dealers, and hard-drinking Chinese Communist Party officials, mended my relationship with my brother, and learned three ways to spell my family’s true name. I’d gone from a naïve, bumbling, unworldly adventurer to an experienced traveler who, while he continued to make the same mistakes and suffer the same consequences, was slightly more aware of what he was doing (and doing wrong), and comfortable enough in that identity that flying halfway around the world was now as easy and thoughtless as riding his bike to the butcher shop. After all that, what was left?
What was left was to stay put.
I figured this would be impossible. I figured the wanderlust would rise up in me within days, and I’d book a flight, or that some editor would suggest I visit Chile or return once more to Paris, or that, well, I’d run out of money and start pitching stories and my life would go on as it had for years, with me barely touching down in New York before I was back on the A train to JFK.
At the end of March 2012, I returned from the annual family trip to Taipei resolving to go nowhere for as long as I could hold out. I had some writing to do, a few checks coming in, and no new stories assigned, but still, I doubted this self-imposed period of stasis would last long. Surely something would intervene, and I’d fall back into my old habits.
But all those years of brief “vacations” at home had prepared me for this longer one. My days were boring—gorgeously boring! I helped Sasha get up and ready for preschool in the mornings, I drank my coffee, I went running three days a week in Prospect Park. I’d write in my office, near the Brooklyn waterfront, all day long, fielding e-mails and chatting with my officemates and complaining about the poor lunch options in the neighborhood, and then, at precisely 5:20 p.m., I’d hop on the F train or, if the weather was fine, ride my bike over the Manhattan Bridge and pick Sasha up from school. On the way back to Brooklyn, we’d stop in playgrounds so she could cavort with her little friends, and their parents and I would sometimes grab a beer, and I’d pick up affordably dry-aged steaks at the local butcher, or six pounds of chicken wings to marinate (Jamaican jerk or Thai, that was the perennial question), and I’d cook dinner and wrestle Sasha into bed, and give Jean, now pregnant again, a back massage, and we’d watch TV and read and fall asleep well before midnight. And on weekends it was just the same, with a longer run and no school, and maybe we’d ride the train to New Jersey to see friends who’d given up on the city, or we’d have other pals over for dinner.
I watched the seasons change. In April, the dogwoods on our block burst with pink flowers that, after a heavy rain in May, made an eerie glowing carpet upon the sidewalk. At the end of the month, I started scouting the mulberry tree in our neighborhood playground, squeezing and tasting the fruits and planning to harvest them for jam when they were good and ripe. I loved checking on the mulberry tree. It reminded me of Montenegro, where in 2006 my local friends, Dave and Tomas, after driving me around the countryside for hours, chanced upon an isolated grove of fruit trees. Murva, they said the fruits were called, or dudinja. I’d never seen them before: nubbed like blackberries, but white with tinges of green and pink. The riper ones tasted sweet, intensely so, while the immature ones were grassily tart. We ate a few, then took off, and I didn’t see dudinja again—not until I noticed these fruits hanging over Sasha’s playground.
As Memorial Day approached, I could wait no longer. Jean, Sasha, and I tramped out to the playground with a colander we’d found on the street and, standing on benches, plucked not-quite-ripe mulberries from between the leaves. But there, in the shade of the mulberry tree, mosquitoes thrived, and they dove at our legs and ankles, and we finally fled, with barely a pint to show for our itchy wounds. That pint wound up in our refrigerator, where I failed to remember to turn it into jam, and by the time the mulberries on the tree had fully ripened, I’d lost my will to harvest. Next year, though, I swore—next year I’ll do it right!
And then it was August, and my birthday, and I barbecued a thirty-three-pound pig for a few dozen of our friends, and I realized it had been four months since I’d boarded an airplane. It didn’t feel like that long, though; it could have been just last week that I was in Taiwan. Hell, I could be there next week, and today, this Saturday afternoon, would feel no different. I knew what was coming. The next morning, I’d go running around Prospect Park, and I’d spot that rail-thin, bearded speed walker I always saw—Luis Rios, a former marathoner with more than two hundred thousand miles under his belt—and maybe this time Luis would give me a little wave of recognition. We’d never spoken, and surely he’d seen a thousand runners indistinguishable from me, but it was something to hope for, a minuscule sign that my endeavor to stay put had lodged me not only firmly in my own rhythms and routines but in those of strangers. It would be proof that I existed in a way I never had before.
The next day, Luis did not wave at me.
But a few days later, he did, just a little half-gesture as I passed by, and there was eye contact, I’m sure of it. I may even have said hello.
And before long it had been six months since I’d boarded a plane or embarked on an ambitious journey. (A week’s vacation in Cape Cod? An overnight in D.C.? Hardly counts as “travel,” I’d say.) The only odd aspect of this interlude was how normal it felt. When I mentioned this to a running buddy, he responded, “Welcome to the rest of us!”
And he was right: This stable, sedentary life was the kind of trouble-free existence most people strive for—a life occupied with friends, family, fulfilling work, decent meals, and very little drama. I began looking for a full-time job. We even renovated the bathroom! In Augustinian terms, I had surrounded myself with greater good. I’d done so, moreover, the same way I’d done everything in my travel life—on my own (mostly), by trying not to try too hard, and letting events unroll as they happened to unroll. If the trick to traveling well, which I’d figured out slowly over all those years, was not to care so much—to let go of my anxieties over sickness, loneliness, and superficiality—then I suppose I’d now done just that to travel itself. I wasn’t traveling, and I simply didn’t mind. I could even go on like this, I realized, working at home, tending to my family, running and cooking and reading and living the perfect New York upper-middle-class life for as long as I wanted—another three months, another six, and then it would be a full year since I’d traveled. (A Gross family record?) Maybe by then I’d have that full-time job, and my vacation days would be vastly restricted, and that annual family trip to Taiwan would be the only one I could possibly take: two adults, two kids, rocketing in aluminum tubes across the planet for twenty hours at a shot, jet-lagged and cranky and regretting ev
erything until the day we’d have to return, regretfully, to our gloriously boring lives back in Brooklyn.
And maybe then I would learn what I’d always sought to understand as a travel writer, but never quite could: what it’s like to travel as a regular person, with all of a working civilian’s restrictions and responsibilities. Maybe I would even write about that one day . . .
Still, I know something else is bubbling up within me—the absolute rejection of all this. Gloriously boring it may be to take my kids to school and work a stable office job, and fulfilling, too, but when I step back to look at it, I see more boredom than glory. Is this the life I want for myself and my family: steady, stable, with well-controlled twice-yearly adventures overseas? And how stable anyway? Journalism is in decline; layoffs are common. The New York City public school system is a mess—a mostly functional mess, but not the kind of mess I relish navigating. Give me a crumbling medina, an Asian megalopolis! Watching cable and eating in-season tomatoes are lovely, but that kind of life is vacation life, and vacations always come to an end. One of these days, I’ll need to go “home.”
To be perfectly clear, I’m not yet at the point of picking up and leaving. Indeed, I may not reach that point for months, or years. But if my homecoming experiences have taught me anything, it’s that one of these days I will realize that I’m ready, and have been ready all this time, and that I can once again leave without regrets. It could happen tomorrow.
I don’t yet know where the Grosses will go, though Asia—Tokyo? Saigon?—is a likely bet. In Taipei, for example, we’d have Jean’s family close by. All I know is that I want to live somewhere I’ll have to relearn everything: how to cross the street, how to order coffee, how to deal with people whose modes of thinking are utterly, intriguingly foreign to my own. I want to be uncomfortable, to be an outsider not just in my own mind but in the eyes of everyone who glances at my awkward, bumbling self. I want to figure it out all over again, to savor the small good moments, and I want those tiny triumphs (and inevitable failures) to mark my days, and I want them to add up, over the years and the miles, to a far, far larger victory—that of experience, memory, and language over the unstoppable decay of time.
This is not wanderlust. Travel is not something separate from the rest of my life, something I need to “get back to.” For me, I’ve come to understand, travel and life are so intricately braided together that they cannot be teased apart. After all, it’s been this way in my family since my family began, the day that sixteen-year-old Moshe Grosmütz left Marijampolė behind. Why did he leave? What was he fleeing—the poverty of the shtetl or the hovering threat of his Gentile neighbors? Had the czar’s army come demanding his service, or did he bristle under the restrictions of Orthodoxy? I may never know the reality, and so in its absence I will fantasize: Moshe left because he could, because he had to, because the door was there and his legs were restless and the world called out to him in a language beyond words, offering him immeasurable riches if only he’d submit to its gravitational command: onward!
Index
Adams, Bryan, 72, 144
Afar magazine, 15–19, 201, 221–226, 245–246
Aguirre: Wrath of God movie, 105
Ahmed (Somali refugee), 159–162
Airfares, 20, 124, 132
AkzoNobel company, 69
Alcoholism, 241, 242, 243
Ali, 145–147
American Indians, 241–243
Amherst, Massachusetts, 23, 26, 53, 60, 67
A-Mui, 197, 199, 209–211, 217
Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 46–47, 151
Arab Spring, 224–225
Back to Back, Face to Face movie, 106–107
Background
childhood experiences of traveling, 22–25
high school friendships, skateboarding, 26, 30, 67
culinary, 48–50 (see also Food passions)
See also Family
Backpackers
in Cambodia, 153
districts in Saigon, 28, 42, 101
lifestyle, 102–103
of Pham Ngu Lao, 73, 101–103
tales of intestinal ailments, 44–45, 58
vs. tourons, 227–228
Bakut (Kyrgyzstanian guide), 31–34, 37
Bangkok, Thailand, 101, 141, 231
Bao Ninh, 14
Barth, John, 34–35, 75
Baudelaire, Charles, 105, 177, 178
The Beast Within (Zola), 163
Being There movie, 13
Belkhodja, Abdelaziz, 223–225, 245
The Belly of Paris (Zola), 164
Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 18, 224
Berries (wild), 60–61, 65, 259, 268
Billboard magazine, 109
Black Hills of South Dakota, 76, 240–241
Bodhi Tree café expatriates, 69–70, 84, 86, 88–89, 107
Bokor Mountain, Cambodia, 114–115, 116
Bologna, Italy, 94–97
Bourbon, 78, 81
Brehm, Klaus, 61
Bridgeport, Connecticut, 23, 258, 260
The Bridges of Madison County movie, 103
Brotherly connections with Steve, 193–196, 201–205
Buber, Martin, 262
Buchanan, Cassady, 63–66, 90–91
Burma. See Myanmar
Calais, France, 157–163
Cambodia
arrival from US, 113–115
depressing Pailin, 238–240, 244
film festival during political instability, 31, 144–145
under Hun Sen, 148–149, 151
millennium celebration by monks, 46–47, 112
Car calamities, 11–12
Carthage, 223, 225, 262
Case, Neko, 75, 76
Chatwin, Bruce, 262, 264
Chez Trinh in Williamsburg, 40, 41
Children as travelers, 22–25, 187–189, 205–206, 216–217
Chongqing, China, 173, 183–185
Chowhound.com, 20, 133
Columbus, New Mexico, 130–132
Columbus, Ohio, 113, 206
Co’m bình dân, 54–56, 109
Concord, Massachusetts, 192, 249, 256
Confessions (St. Augustine), 223, 262–263
Copyediting
as employment, 228–229
in New York, 111–113
for Viet Nam News, 104–110
Costs of traveling
cheap traveling tips, 132–134
expensive destinations, 116, 124
on limited income, 112–113
not as important as why, how, 135
prioritizing, 134–135
on story budgets, 22, 117
CouchSurfing.org, 18, 19, 83, 132, 224
Cu Chi Tunnels, 42–43, 229
Cultural adaptation
to illness when traveling, 44–47
understanding how to eat, 40–42
to Vietnamese culinary world, 54–56
Cybercafés, 72, 124
Cyclos, 29, 104
Danielson, Dave, 68–69, 103, 227–228
Debord, Guy, 177–178
Denmark, 23–25, 166–167
Diarrhea. See Giardia
Douglas (pseudonym)
introduced, 73
as big brother, 74, 86
helps form writers group, 89
language skills, 229–230
in Phnom Penh, 144–146
post-Saigon life, 90
Dr. Who, 23, 24
Duong Thu Huong, 14
Duras, Marguerite, 253
Dylan, Bob, 76, 85
ELT Lotus teachers, 68–69, 101, 103
England, 25, 159–161, 174, 191
English as a foreign language
teacher training, 99
teaching employees, 69
teaching in Vietnam, 12, 14 (see also ELT Lotus teachers)
Ethical considerations
concealing/revealing Times identity, 32–33, 65, 90–91, 127–131
the dilemma of severe poverty, prostitutes, beggars, 138–
142, 148
policies against press junkets, 125–126
of traveling in Third World, 7
Ethics in Journalism Policy (New York Times), 125–127
European Frugal Grand Tour, 124, 256
Expatriates
cafés in Saigon, 30, 42, 69
in Cambodia, 137, 138, 150, 154
friendships among, 69–70
glamorous professionals in Saigon, 102
Lucy Hotel circle, 84–90
Saigon Writers Workshop, 89, 109
as semipermanent vs. backpackers, 102–103
Somali, 160
in Tangier, 176
as Viet Nam News audience, 104–106
Exploration as purpose and longing, 73, 134, 229, 253
Facebook, 8, 18, 19, 83, 133, 250
Family
acceptance by in-laws, 207–209, 212, 216, 217
and Asian public–private identity distinctions, 197–199
daughter (see Gross, Sasha Raven)
enjoyment of food, 48–49
father, 23–25, 166, 191–192, 199, 255, 256
Grandma Rosalie, 12, 249
Jean’s family in Taipei, 196–197, 200–201, 205–208, 215–217
mother, 15, 48, 191–193, 195–196, 199
siblings (see Gross, Nell; Gross, Steve)
as travelers, 22–25, 187–189, 191–193
wife (see Liu, Jean)
Family origins, 254–260, 271
Farmwork. See World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms
Fasigyn (tinidazole), 57
Film festivals, 31, 103, 104–107, 144–145
Fish, Stanley, 235–236, 237
