Travels in Ann Arbor

I am not a travel writer. I find it difficult to write when I am away from home. I write most freely from a settled place and travel is the opposite of settled—to travel is to purposely unsettle oneself.

But in a month I will make a pilgrimage to Kinshasa—yes, I’m thinking of it as a pilgrimage—and I want to write every day on that journey. I have traveled often and have never written well about the places I have been. As a result, I can barely remember what happened, what I saw, who I met, even how I felt. This is very strange because I love to travel and I love to write but somehow they don’t go together.

I don’t take a lot of pictures either, but pictures don’t count for what I’d like to do, which is to write a journey more deeply into my life. I write my life—I write it into being. I discover by writing that I want to go to Africa, for example, and then it comes about. I write about quitting my job and then I actually do it. I also write about my life as it is happening. If I do not write about the trip to Kinshasa as it is happening and afterward, it will be like be like a very engaging movie or book—a flood of experiences and then whoosh, back home as if it all never happened. But I am calling this trip a pilgrimage because I am prepared to be changed by it. Why else travel that far? And in order for that to happen I must write every day, if possible.

This post, then, is practice in writing away from home. I am not far, just three hours away at my daughter’s house in Ann Arbor. I come here nearly every month to spend a few days with the little precious schnookums. (Stop me before I get grandmother-gushy.) But I am tired and I am not at home and so I am not writing from a settled place. Even though Hazel is asleep and her parents are out and I really want to be here, it is not the same as being at home, you understand what I mean.

I took Hazel off her mother’s hands for the afternoon while Joanna napped (though Hazel didn’t) and made dinner. We went for a little ramble to a playground, I am tired because I had to carry Hazel on my shoulders on the way back. She had refused to go in the stroller, and the way back from the playground was very long because I got lost in the quaint nearby complex of one-story post–World War II row houses that all look alike. They share an enormous grassy commons that nobody seems to use. I’ve never seen any other children at the little playground in the middle of the field. Instead, I see little play sets here and there tucked up against the houses. People keep to themselves.

I was thinking how the structure of those rows of small houses with their huge common backyard seemed to invite community but it wasn’t working out that way. It seemed lonely. As I wandered around, looking for the way out of the complex whereby I had come in, I got a little panicky. A strange woman and child trekking over this expanse of grass that was everybody’s backyard but at the same time a kind of no-man’s land.

Maybe I can manage one scene a day like that…. I am reading Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. Now that is travel writing.