Michael's Secret

Odysseus's Secret (Stephen Dunn)

At first he thought of home, and Penelope.
But after a few years, like anyone on his own,
he couldn't separate what he'd chosen
from what had chosen him.
Calypso, the lotus eaters, Circe;
a man could forget where he lived.
He had a gift for getting in and out of trouble,
a prodigious, human gift. To survive Cyclops
and withstand the Sirens' song -
just those words survive, withstand
in his mind became a music
he moved to and lived by.
How could govern, even love, compete?
They belonged to a different part of a man,
the untested part, which always spoke like a citizen.
The larger the man, though, the more he needed to be reminded
he was a man. Lightning, high winds,
for every excess a punishment.
Penelope was dear to him,
full of character and fine in bed.
But by the middle years this other life
had become his life - that was Odysseus's secret,
kept even from himself, when he talked about return
he thought he meant what he said
Twenty years to get home?
A man finds his shipwrecks,
tells himself the necessary stories.
Whatever gods are - our own fearful voices
or imitations from the unseen order
of things, the gods finally released him,
cleared the way.
Odysseus boarded that Phoenician ship, suddenly tired
of the road's dangerous enchantments,
and sailed through storm and wild sea
as if his beloved were all that ever mattered.


Yes, it's true: Odysseus is the alter-ego of my fantasies. Twenty years... four months? Sirens... yellow polo shirt guy? Cyclops... bed bugs? Pretty much the same story, right? If only I wrote my blog in iambic pentameter, it would probably be required reading in freshman English. In my first journal entry of the trip, I literally compared myself to Odysseus, which proves that - at the very least - I have the requisite arrogance of a Homeric hero. Here are those words, written on the flight from Logan to JFK, "I expect this trip to bend me and push me into dark rooms where I will grope the walls in panic for the light switch until I realize that the point is to sit in the darkness. At times, the trip will feel like something to be endured - a test of my mettle. At times, I feel like the point of this trip is to be done with it, to say I did it, to return home triumphantly like Odysseus." Something to be endured, or - in the words of Dunn - survive, withstand. In the words of a character from "Love in the Time of Cholera", Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can because these things don't last your whole life.

I doubt that Dunn, García Márquez, or I had bus rides with Air Bud in mind when we wrote those words. In the end, though, surviving the buses was not nearly the ordeal I expected it to be. A twelve hour bus ride can seem delightful when you’ve psychologically prepared yourself for the worst experience of your life, and after "Air Bud", "Rocky Balboa" looked Oscar-worthy on the ride from Arica to San Pedro de Atacama. On the twenty-four hour voyage from San Pedro to Santiago, I was spared a Sandra Bullock movie marathon thanks to the use of headphones instead of speakers. Tur Bus even served three meals. The first two were identical - a churrasco sandwich and a snack size soda. A churrasco is essentially a steak-ums. Remember school lunch steak-ums? mmm... I loved steak-ums day because they taste exactly like school lunch hamburgers, but the line was always much shorter than on hamburger day because - this is just my best guess - steak-ums isn't a name that inspires a whole lot of confidence. It's not nearly as frightening as "American Chop Suey", but that's not saying much. A churrasco is thinly sliced beef in a hamburger bun, served with some combination of cheese, tomato, avocado, mayonnaise, and ketchup. The Tur Bus churrasco is one slice of cold beef-ish meat, served in a vaguely damp, spongy bun, and vacuum sealed in plastic. Now that is a sandwich worthy of the name "steak-ums". I washed it down with an orange Crush at lunch and a Canada Dry lemon soda at dinner. The distinction of "worst meal of the trip", though, has to go to breakfast, which earned the honor with a Nescafé instant coffee-esque beverage and an individually packaged chocolate chip cookie. Aside from hunger, it also left me with a question. What would it take to complete this breakfast? (You know how cereals always claim to be "part of this complete breakfast"...)

In the Colca Canyon in Peru, I met an Australian man named Ian, who had also been traveling alone since early January. A gregarious and likeable man with bright eyes and a self-effacing sense of humor, he entertained me with stories of his current travels in South and Central America as well as memories of his adventures in Europe fifteen years ago. In 1993, Ian was a twenty-one year old in love and away from home for the first time. He smiled as he recalled the nearly-archaic romance of the handwritten letter. "They’re at home in a box," he told me. "I haven't looked at them in a while, but I still have every one of them. I think that she might have burned mine when we broke up, though." It was not the rambling, wistful reminiscing of a man who had been alone for too long. Without judgment or desire, he compared travel today to travel fifteen years ago, and decided that the biggest change has been communication. "Then I called home once a fortnight," he remembered. "Now it's two or three e-mails a week." I tried to imagine this. No internet. Not even slow internet. Not even internet with a sticky keyboard and an overly-sensitive mouse. In 1993, travelers took photos with cameras that used rolls of film and wrote letters home. In February of 2008, when Isabel asked what my home is like, I sent Mom an e-mail requesting that she take pictures of the house, my room, Greenfield, and then e-mail them to me. The very next day I received an e-mail with an attachment of digital photos which I downloaded onto my pen drive. On Isabel's laptop, we watched the slideshow, and I saw exactly how much snow had buried my Subaru the day before. Who could have imagined that fifteen years ago? Maybe Al Gore, but not Ian.

My conversation with Ian prompted me to imagine what travel might be like fifteen years from now. In 2023, what incredible stories will I share with a future generation of travelers? The actual forms of transportation themselves will be radically different. Teleportation will have replaced the twenty-four hour bus ride and pretty much everything else. Buses and planes will still exist, of course - like ships and trains today - as quaint, nostalgia-inducing alternatives for tourists who aren't in a hurry (this will be a small market) and want to see the landscape (mostly desert obviously). This probably isn't radical enough because this vision is based on the huge assumption that there will be reason to travel in 2023. Given that television/internet (it will be the same thing) will be fully interactive by then, and given that "there" won't be very different from "here" (no matter where "there" and "here" are), the desire to travel will be limited to the young, who - lacking any other form of initiation - will go out in search of suffering in the hope that they might find something to survive, something to withstand. And, in that sense, they might not be so different from me, or Ian, or Odysseus.