A series of photos from Mississippi (3)

Orrery in the University Museums

Make haste
for the days are passing swiftly
unslowed by our neglect.

Traveling again

In a little over five days from today I will be taking a trip. It will be much like the road trip I took with Jon just about one year ago. In fact, my sister is here for the week on Olivet’s spring break, and if this year’s spring break lines up with last year’s, that means one year ago this week Jon and I were somewhere on the road between Swartz Creek, MI, and Adrian, GA.

This year’s spring break road trip (perhaps a tradition is beginning) will be a bit different from last year’s. For one thing, I will have no traveling companion on the road. I’ll see Jon again, but this time Howell, which was where connections were made last year that have taken him and his wife there, will only be a stop on the trip. I’ll be alone.

The trip will also be different in the fact that it will not be taken in a car. In that sense I’m trading one kind of freedom for different and, I hope, deeper kind. Jon and I last year had my Firebird and the open road, and we certainly felt free. We had a loose kind of agenda, but we took our time getting where we were going, wandering, seeing what we wanted to see. This year there will be no car, so in a sense I’ve traded that freedom for a series of train and bus tickets and a locked-down agenda I can’t change. But I’ll be traveling across (well, kind of up and then back down) the country without a car, and I think that’s something important and significant. I’ll be hitching rides, as it were, crashing on friends’ couches, visiting with old friends in new places. I’ll be traveling light, and that’s what really excites me.

Because I am quite excited about this trip. I love road trips. I love traveling. A friend was over today for dinner, and I was trying to explain to him why I would travel by bus and train instead of simply flying there and back. Flying is great, I will admit, but when you fly the object is simply to get from one place to another in as little time as possible. Trains, busses, cars, and (what I truly long for) endless succession of steps, are what let you feel the distance. You can see things out the windows. You can watch the land pass and try to understand just a little bit of it.

I can’t wait to travel. When people say wanderlust, I know what they mean. I long to stretch my legs on a road that I’ve never seen before. I am thrilled at the prospect of shuffling from city to city, being lulled to sleep by the sound of wheels on pavement or on rails. The power lines jog up and down along the highway like strings plucked on an instrument I’m too small to understand.

This is America, they seem to say.
This is the wonder of the miles.
This is the bigness.
These are the places to see.

God, I want to see them.

Prelude to road trip . . .

If I Were Another

If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back,
I would have said what one traveler said
to another: stranger! awaken
the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road
may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued
from our story together: you are so much yourself. And I am
so much other than myself right here before you!

If I were another I would have belonged to the road,
so that neither I nor you would return. Awaken the guitar
and we might sense the unkonwn and the route that tempts
the traveler to test gravity. I am only
my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm.
If I were another on the road, I would have
hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem
would be of water, diaphanous, white,
abstract, and lightweight . . . stronger than memory,
and weaker than dew drops, and I would have said:
my abyss is this expanse!

If I were another on the road, i would have said
to the guitar: teach me an extra string!
Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier--
that's what my new song would say. Whenever
the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two
on this road . . .

Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Fady Joudah