Adventures Not Had

On the other end of the video call, crowing roosters, twittering songbirds, and fluttering greenery form the backdrop to my husband’s voice. He tells of reckless moped traffic, locals sporting bright handwoven clothing, and humorous language mishaps. For the past handful of weeks, he’s pedalled his heavily-panniered bike over wincingly steep topography, been delayed while a travelmate battled a parasite, and sipped handroller-ground coffee fresh from the field. All the stuff of adventure.

By contrast, I sit comfortably in my preferred couch spot, the thin winter light casting leafless shadows on the dormant landscape outside. Did I choose wrong, opting to sit this one out? I think back to the previous year when the two of us met a fellow bikepacker cheerily taking on each day’s rugged terrain and cultural interchanges while his wife stayed home, apparently not up for this style of travel. I’m sure she’s lovely, but does she lack gumption, I wondered, or the basic appetite to get out and experience new things? Lame, is what a part of me thought.

A sampling of my stay-at-home winter reads

And here I was, the wife who stayed back, who when my husband explains my absence will no doubt be judged markedly uncool against his adventuresome grit. Lame, in other words. Yet, as we spoke further with our friend last year, that easy dichotomy was complicated in learning that his wife was in fact busy with her local community back home, mobilizing against the sinister policies of their new US federal administration. While her husband cautioned her from afar not to make them a target, she was sticking her neck out in opposition, rightly aghast at the political turn her country had taken. So, not a lack of gumption after all.

Travel seems to enjoy our unequivocal endorsement as a means to life enrichment. But what if, along with a long list of other things our culture celebrates – endless productivity, corporate ladder-climbing, influencer fame, eternally youthful appearance – the virtues of globetrotting are due for a rethink? Setting aside the kind of travel that takes place in an all-inclusive bubble or that’s mostly a photo-collecting mission for social media curation, we often trek to new places with a genuine desire to experience another culture. We want to witness lifeways that spring from that place, people who reflect what it’s like to live in a land not our own – we want authenticity. This is what draws us to traditional cultures (like the Maya people of Guatemala my husband is currently amongst), but equally to artisanal food producers in Italy, a local fiddling party in Newfoundland, or a tea ceremony in Japan. We’re enamoured by the social, spiritual, economic, artistic, and agricultural practices that arise when people are deeply enmeshed in place. We’ll pay good money for a guide who can give us a glimpse of it.

Given that glimpse, would we then think, Gee, this nomadic herder could really improve himself with a few trips abroad? No, because we understand that acquired wisdom and richness of life don’t depend on the sheer amassing of air miles. If we concede that worthy lives exist everywhere from Argentina to Greenland and that, in fact, we’ll go to some length to marvel at people who’ve likely never left their own country, why then do we consider our own lives not fully lived without travel? I wonder if the inverse might actually be true – that there are lessons for us in deliberately staying put, in cultivating the very thing we admire in others: a depth of experience born of the place and community right around us.

Guatemalan men in handwoven pinstriped trousers

Still, I recognize how rewarding travel can be. I know from my own experience that excursions into the unknown can act like a stir-stick, loosening thoughts from their routine patterns, prodding atrophied faculties into use through physical or logistical challenges. Creativity can be jostled awake, our senses given something very new to process. To acquire perspective beyond our own four walls, our own borders, our own ways of being is no doubt a good thing. Yet, can we really say that, as a rule, the well-traveled are more enlightened people, more inclusive people, people who make better, more thoughtful and empathetic contributions to the world? I know of many for whom each new trip is mostly another notch in their belt, the experiences sought out like collector’s items. But to try to untangle the merits and failings of tourism in all of its forms gets complicated, and maybe to wander outside the lines that bound one territory from another is a perfectly natural human impulse. This isn’t a treatise against travel; it’s a reconsideration of its place in modern life. 

Skepticism, mind you, isn’t the reason I’m not eating tortillas with canned tuna and avocado on the side of a dusty road right now with my husband, consulting our phone maps for campspots or accommodation. There are times in life when adventure is called for and times when your soul just needs the gentle rejuvenation of the familiar; to spend mornings putting pen to paper and evenings by the woodstove. This was one of those times for me. But mostly, what stopped me was a feeling of deep incongruence with taking an international flight – whose carbon footprint would be roughly equivalent to a year’s worth of driving – to a place I had no need nor special desire to visit. No, I don’t think units of carbon are the only way to measure the relative virtue of every action, but this use of them felt wholly unnecessary. I also don’t wish to bypass a good chunk of what I consider to be our most formative and, at times, beautiful season. Like a seed that requires cold stratification in order to respond appropriately to spring, I take winter’s annual rite of passage as part and parcel of inhabiting the place I do.

Lunch in Kananaskis

Over these weeks, my most intimate acquaintance has sometimes been with the weave pattern of the wool rug I do my stretching on. But I’ve also welcomed guests to the B&B, participated in a local drum circle, twice spent a Wednesday evening learning-by-doing with a volunteer bike repair group, skied with winter-smitten friends on a handful of occasions, and met with neighbours around a campfire. This is how the shorter, darker days become a shared experience, the collective warp that holds the weft of more buoyant times of year. And when snow comes, fresh and glittering, it’s nothing short of a delight to see and move through this magical substance, a substance that makes every tree, mountain, and seedhead a new thing overnight. These are the nuggets I’ll be taking away, like souvenirs, from my January and February.  

My husband sends photos of donkeys and corn fields he’s cycled past, of buses decorated in all manner of shiny bling carrying locals along with their chickens, of tent sites and dingy motel rooms. That’s all neat, it really is. But I can live without seeing it. I’m okay to let a lot of places remain unseen, not because I’m too lame to get off my couch, but because we have to be choosy about where our time, our money, our attention, our share of the planet’s resources is spent. We each need to decide how we can best participate on this earth, how we define a life well-spent, and how to recognize what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “enoughness”. At a time when everything’s on offer (for a price) and seemingly no place has been left unexplored, maybe the boldest thing to do isn’t to trot the globe “making memories”, but to say no thanks, I’m good. At least some of the time. At least this year, as the pale sun slowly gains strength outside and I see what I might learn by covering very little ground instead.