Alberta Review: Travels With Myself and Another
The drive to travel can be, conversely, the same that makes us want to stay at home
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I have an extreme case of topophilia, the love of a particular physical geography, and it is matched with an intense love of the familiar. They’re the core reason, most likely, for my conservatism; policy preferences aside, I love the land of my birth and feel most comfortable with the nature of living my life in and around first Alberta, then Canada―from the way we order at restaurants to the intricacies of driving the QEII.
That being said, this has, thankfully, not devolved into a fear of the unknown. That’s a common trait of those who lean more conservative (in the attitudinal sense, not political). I am curious about the world, and I love discovering those new customs and ways of life that make travel so interesting. Being so obsessed and comfortable with my surroundings here at home is why I have such a need to see the different ways people live, interact, and navigate their own world; how their own love for their cultures, geographies, languages, and religions informs their outlook. I’m not a sightseer; I’d much prefer to set up shop in a community, develop my own daily habits informed by the locals and, in turn, observe their own.
These two attitudes of mine can seem to many to be a contradiction, but to me they’re just a balance. And, I think, this is why I enjoyed a book I just finished, Martha Gellhorn’s Travels With Myself and Another. It is a memoir of sorts, told through five or so trips, of a woman who is sadly most remembered for being one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives, but in her own right and in her own time was a world-renowned war correspondent and novelist.
The internal contradictions she puts on display, like a love of places not her own, a hatred of bad travel experiences while understanding and accepting that all good travel experiences were profoundly bad in their own unique way because, and this is implied, not made explicit, it is through those bad experiences that you truly learn, mirror many of those confusing personality traits I’ve come to recognize in myself. Good travel stories, she claims, also do not make for interesting storytelling: “The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.”
Her perspective on home is in direct contradictions with my own, as she claims “I lived in seven countries where I established eleven permanent residences.”
But she also hated it. The stories she tells in her books are about awful travel experiences, from war-torn China to Soviet Russia. In China she took “the pulse of the nation and [grew] more despondent by the day” while in Africa what drove her mad was the guide and driver who spoke no local languages, had an intense fear of the countryside (including all men and beasts who inhabited it), and refused across thousands of miles to ever actually drive.
But despite it all, she couldn’t stay put. She, like me, was too curious about the people living in the lands she was endlessly reading about and covering in her journalism. It is a memoir of a life well-lived, if only because it was a life well-travelled.
Ms. Gelhorn found her home, and it was travelling. She was not tied so emotionally to the hills and trees and skies of her birth, like me. But it was home to her, and, as they say with such cliché, home is where the heart is. Or, and perhaps this is another reason her work rung so profoundly, home was where her typewriter was.
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