The Language of Travel

     A conversation is underway. Eleven of us have begun gathering once a week to share thoughts on travel and travel writing. Why? Perhaps it is the word itself. Travel…six-letters flowing like melted French brie across two syllables. Travel…a variant of travail meaning a sense of toil and fatigue. Travel. A word filled with a passionate language of its own.

     The word travel is both a verb and a noun. My dictionary, as if impatient to get going, begins with the verb travel–to go from one place to another; journey: She is traveling in Europe this summer. He travels fastest who travels alone (Rudyard Kipling); to move, proceed, pass: Light and sound travel in waves; to walk or run: A deer travels far and fast when chased; to pass through or over; to travel a road.

     Then, like a seasoned traveler, my worldly multi-lingual lexicon introduces the noun travel–the act or fact of going in trains, ships, cars, and the like, from one place to another; journeying; to spend a summer in travel. She loves travel. (Indeed! I agree.) Travels–journeys: Soon after, we find him on his travels in Italy (Samuel Taylor Coleridge.) Travels–a book about one’s experiences, visits, or observations while traveling: We possess the travels of a native of India in the fourth century (Mountstuart Elphinstone).

     The various meanings of the word travel anticipate our conversation. Parsing its meanings in my dictionary, words jump off the page. Journey, Europe, summer, Kipling, Coleridge, India, Italy, alone, light, waves, far and a fast, pass through, love, experiences, visits, observations, the fourth century. Like countless travelers over the centuries who have kept journals, woven travel tales and left their footprints in the sands of distant deserts or carved into sandstone, I too could write my own travel stories with these words.

     Months ago, I talked with Lucille Salerno–the indefatigable and creative Director of the University of Missouri Extension’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute–about teaching another class on travel writing, expanding on one I had offered for the first time a year earlier. As my enthusiasm for such a class grew, I began to complete an annotated list of travel writing from the library that surrounds me in my studio at Boomerang Creek. An innocent task at first, my list has become a monumental journey of its own. Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad is one among a host of other well known writers, along with a few forgotten ones, who felt the need to capture light, waves, experiences, observations, and love as they passed through or over worlds either alone or with other fellow travelers.

     On the first day of class, our group took turns reading aloud a short travel article by master storyteller Pat Conroy. “In the last days I would ever feel like a young man,” Conroy wrote, “I went to Paris to finish the novel I was writing at the time.” After going into an “uncontrollable rapture” reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Conroy reveals, “I could think of no finer way to spend a part of my life than by writing a book in the storied, uncapturable city of literature and light.”

     Just hearing the word Paris through Conroy’s writer’s voice was an intoxicating invitation to travel. Riveted, we listened to Conroy’s delicious language of travel as it continued to work its magic on us all. As each person in our circle read a passage aloud, images of Paris entered our heads. Gamely, we tackled the pronunciation of French words, hoping not to sound like a donkey (Conroy’s own assessment of his French that summer).

      Our senses were stirred at the mention of croissants, brioche, and escargots, the Seine, the Louve, the Rue Mouffetard, Les Deux Magots, Sartre and Beauvoir. But it was Conroy’s description of a picnic lunch with friends–two cheeses, Chaource and Camembert, hard sausage, duck pate’, a baguette and a bottle of Rose’d’Anjou–that drew a collective sigh. Without a single reservation, our travels had already begun.

 

–Cathy Salter, September 2011
Published in Notes from Boomerang Creek, a collection of personal essays

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About Lori

Ever since Lori Younker was a child, she’s been captivated by her international friendships. She is mesmerized by the power of short works to inspire true understanding of the cross-cultural experience and expands her writing skills in creative nonfiction, guiding others to do the same. These days she helps others capture their life history as well as their stories of faith.