The Liberated

“This is the best sausage you will ever eat, because this is the sausage you eat as you leave Modena.”

In the train we agreed, it was a fucking amazing sausage. But, we also agreed that it was the worst day of travel we had ever had. Like, ever.

My mother always told me about guardian angels, supreme creatures of necessity. It was always hokey to me, but maybe it helped us sleep.

Today, Bernardo was the name of our guardian angel.

As you travel, the wear is like this emptying spring. When once the electricity of it all held you solidly to the rails, suddenly you realize just how little you have left. Where the hell are you even going? You go from just being this unquenchable desperado searching for the perfect adventure, until suddenly you're just spent; the spring is dry. Then, even a sip of water is an ecstasy, a sleeping bag a euphoria, and a beer an indescribable collapse into release.

His red two-door economy car was our chariot, and it was grander than the K2 rep’s van or even the older couple’s cadillac. A ride before his, we swapped the filthiest words from either side of the language barrier with an Italian truck driver. I wish I had drawings for some of the hand gestures we used. I mean honestly, can we reflect on how such a conversation could even transpire? Only one word can even describe it: absurd. Fucking absurd. But yeah, take all of that, and I can tell you that learning of our math teaching angel’s life was like some sweet music. To spend so many hours looking into the defiant faces of a thousand automobile drivers, never sharing a single word, and then suddenly to be sharing human connection once more! It's the straight stuff.

Despite today holding some of our favorite hitches thus far, despite not even having to sleep in a train station or waking to find a police officer’s light shining in our eyes, even despite Bernardo (god bless him), and hell, even despite making it to the dream-like, canal-etched Venice, today’s end was only relief. Relief from forsaken Modena.

So if you ever see someone holding a sign with “ANYWHERE” on it, bolded and in caps (no matter the language) pick them up. Just do it. Do it.

(Originally written on a train leaving Modena, Italy March 27th, 2014)

The Unaccomplished

The flexing life abroad is found in the serenity of incongruous days. But I have to admit, the closer I come to understand myself blithe, the farther I find myself from a pen.

There is nothing timeless anymore. Each day the horizon is a slow change; the fields and faces flip by like frames.

And so, with dozens of pages left blank in this book I was once so sure I would finish before I finished this journey, I'll continue without the words to patch the cracks and crevices under my thoughtless steps.

It does not end sitting in an American living room like I imagined, but instead left open and wide under the awning of two volcano perched glaciers, in a valley etched on an island floating in the Atlantic. My travels, unfinished, never finished, are forever wild. And my once aching empty simply found lovely in a (finally) wide, wide world.

The Maple Tree

Cobblestones array like the grain of an old tree. The wrinkles catch my wobbling tires, and it doesn't seem to matter how many times I true them. Perhaps it is the wear of age, or maybe it is the inevitable fate of a slim-line tire on the ragged road of a cobbled valley town.

It is spring, again, and life teems from buds, to birdsong, to bugs stumbling out of god-knows-where. It is incredible how much more daydreaming one can find in a few extra hours of daylight. There is really no doubt of my heritage in this land of identity: I am a New Englander, and I exude the seasons like a sugar maple.

And lately home moors my thoughts, even visits me nightly in the dreamscape. In my childhood backyard the snow melts from grass to lemonade and ice-pops, and then to leaves in the same way that the clock turns an hour. The sun might rise over the alps and hang on the horizon and the sun might wrangle you home under a burgundy set sky, but in between is mid-morning, noon, and after.

And you know, sometimes it is not exactly the more that we desire, but just a change of hands, even if the cards are good. We are all fit for our own fates, even if we hate to admit it. I came to Germany for so many reasons, but that was then.

What are the flavors of this bland quiche and passionless coffee? Is it just the taste of habit? I seem to remember scouring the Charles for Boston's best coffee and scone, but that was entirely another life, another love left on another shore. If life is a river, then why is it only when we look back that we can see the shape of the twist and turns? Here, coffee is coffee, it is mercilessly brewed from a smart machine and it is the worst of German Engineering. I think the Bavarians have had too long to figure out their desires.

Well, in the petaled folds of a new spring, I once again find my own desire. In the soft glow of another pleasant Bavarian morning, the coffee is stale, and my tires are true (sort of).

The Explorer

My sun warmed hair is cooled on the back of Jonesy, my finally fixed-up touring bike, and starts to un-mat after a night of dancing under a cowboy hat. Today there are no destinations, there can't be. The day just won't allow it. It is the kind of day you could never seize, even if the sun stayed and you weren't even hungover, but you definitely are. So me and Jonesy explore.

Way back when, in order to have a town large enough for the 1936 Olympics, Hitler joined the two towns of Garmisch and Partenkirchen into the very original Garmisch-Partenkirchen. From the mountain's view it's hard to see; while each town seeps off into farms or mountains, on their once border they seem decidedly one. And though maybe that's a new development over the last eighty years, it's different on Jonesy. Garmisch is the town I've known for three months, the one I walked through to work every day. It's where I live. It's where I buy groceries. And Partenkirchen? Well, that was more of a walk.

There are moments (though admittedly fewer than you'd expect in a foreign country) when I feel that I am somewhere new. It is different than the feeling of a tourist, fully expecting and half in the mind. It is different than the foreigner, outside and in the other half the mind. Rather, it is utter presence in perfect freshness. And it is a wonderful reason to travel I think.

And so, Partenkirchen unfolds along narrow walker streets and I am unmistakably more of place. Can you believe it? Three months. And here, down the street, the same streets seen from my morning gondola ride, is that feeling, the one I travel such long distances for, found on a day forbidding yet here, and full, and bright.

The Sated

This is the light of day!

Two-and-a-half months ago this same sky was vermilion, but now the promising topaz hues creep over the Alps. It fades into the bright unyielding sky-blue sky, the kind only in pictures yet never in the ones you take with a camera. Apparently this is how time works, reeling in twilights and hurling each perfect day forward into another.

And really, just two months? My days here hold lifetimes. And despite a heavy weighing feeling of lacks and lusts, they overwhelm. And each lifetime goes by slow, and full.

In the Bavarian Alps I have eaten bergkäse, wheat-beers, and meats of all shapes, textures, and complexions. But today, I had my strudel. It is a neat circle, drawn from this mountain hut, from my first days here, all the way back to this moment of apples crusted, baked, and soaked in a pool of creme. I can't fathom sweeter spoonfuls. It is Hudson Valley cider donut, the street crepe in Paris, New England's clam chowder, and the New Orlean po-boy.

The sun begins to set in earnest. To imagine leaving through my own will seems fumbling, but then I think of hiking Iceland, surfing Portugal, tilling Croatia, and all the other lands I've only dreamed.

And the strudel is enough, for today at least.

Teadrinkers

Hurtling along the lake now, a slate grey envelopes the city. It echoes down the train's silent corridor. Along the track we are sent forward into the rain. There is the sound of a man shaving in the train's tiny bathroom, and I think, who shaves in a train's bathroom? What pre-dawn events could have so badly delayed his morning routine to such a tiny mobile place? The rumors stretch off into the beyond, and no matter what I feel bad for him. In a city, in a country for only seven hours, where even the most mundane could still be revolutionary.

In the center of the city I see it tick in the morning gloam; I am alone again. It feels like a dream, and dawn stretches on for hours and hours. I can follow the neon still, weaving among delivery trucks and garbage men. Longing for tea, the kind you sip slow and thoughtfully.

It is cold and rainy and at first it doesn't hit me that I am back. It is another city. I am on Beacon Street, with each building scrunched together like un-matching jigsaw pieces. Slowly, like anywhere else, the cars and people begin to stroll each way, and the rain soaks in un-hurried.

It is nine o'clock now, but still nothing is open. I wonder if the city was considering taking the day off on account of the rain. I wander; I turn out an alley, around a corner, and under an awning until finally I am lost. The perfect rain tumbles and rolls out of the dark white sky. I wrap my tea-bag around my spoon, like my grandmother taught me to, and squeeze out the last dark drops. It has been a long strange week. With the first warming sip, I think how relieving it will be to return to normal.

The waiter comes over and suddenly, he asks if everything is okay. I swallow so as not to choke; how did I let on? The planes. The service. The brothers and mothers and homespun eulogies uttered in sleepless tongues the rattle of the trains and grey cities. I look at my uneaten sandwich, and I look at him. And, yes I suppose everything is okay.

I look out the window at my rainy day. And you know, if I were being really honest, traveling is just a series of beverages in new places. I think though, the trick is to drink them slow and thoughtful, and to squeeze out the best drops of tea with the side of your spoon. Just like my grandmother taught me to.

The Transported

Coming into Pittsburgh stands out to me (I don't know if I've ever said that about Pittsburgh). When you enter Pittsburgh along one particular highway you drive through a mountainside. It's like any city tunnel, the lights lined above like the medians below curve along the windshield. But this is western Pennsylvania, a land where the rural is weird and the suburbs stretch their paved arms up and down rolling hills. So on any given gray day (or even a sunny day, albeit on a gray highway), you drive to Pittsburgh and enter this mountainside. You haven't seen a building next to another building in hundreds of miles, maybe even months.

And then you come out the other side. You're hundreds of feet above the three rivers, staring out against a skyline boxed by buildings. You're trying desperately to pick your one skinny lane as you careen over the wide bridge, grappling with the hard fact that someone built a metropolis on the other side of this mountain. It's like a scene from Lord of the Rings or Star Wars where somehow there is a whole other civilization where you'd least expect it.

I miss that American roll up. Pittsburgh may be the outlier, but seeing a horizon grow steadily concrete, glass, and lights is like a slow hug, welcoming you in from god-knows-where. I don't know if I really even knew Munich until I swam up a tower to find out just how submersed I was. When you take a train the scenes change slowly, and intermittent towns and tunnels dislodge the wheres from the whats. And when you get off? Every train station looks like a train station, a receiving room for strangers. I have never been to a train station that told me to take my shoes off and relax.

When I came upon Berlin the lights were stars on a map below. A month in southern Bavaria and I forgot what it was like to be small. You descend. What moments before felt so formed and functioning starts to grow unwieldy. A brief hello, and then the cityscape disappears behind a thousand obstacles. It swallows you up faster, and before you know it Berlin dashes off with just too much to do.

But for a moment there it was, spread wide across the canvas, as if just waiting for you to fall out of the sky one day.

The Flexible

There is a different sort of limbo here in Europe. Of staring a week in the face of an internet browser, perusing the fates of a four day excursion. The doles of a flexible life.

Did you know there is a website that lets you pay a bargain rate to visit one of eleven metropolises? It is surely one of the new wonders of the old world. It is like gambling, only more appealing in every way.

A few clicks and Barcelona, Budapest, Vienna, and all the other deepest lengths and worldly corners evaporate into Berlin. Surely we are blessed.

The Traveler

I go to the third stall, the one with the fish-patterned curtain. Besides the obvious benefit inherent in this particular shower, it also is the stall closest to the boombox. I don't know who donated this wonderful device or for that matter any of the hundred or so cds that spill from unsheathed stacks into the sinks. I can't really begin place when they came. The albums range from 90's alt-rock, indie rock from the late 2000's, to Bruce, Marley, and the entire Green Day discography. It is, inevitably, a prime example of the pockets of magic speckled throughout Abrams Complex; the oddball one-time war-era-hospital I technically reside.

Today, I push the boombox's top, and it's the silver cd labeled "M. Ward mix" in sharpie. I push play and moments later he strums, and begins to croon over the fizz of splashing water. Underneath, the busy weeks are melting away and the entire earth pulls at me again. Here, visions of vistas fill my mind.

I don't know if its the familiar heat, the smell of my Colorado soap, or the blue fishes placed perfectly between me and my familiar songs, but I'm home. M. tells me (and the other guy halfway through his morning routine) that "every town is the same." And even as I reflect on a month of German absurdities, I start to think that maybe he's on to something. I shower blissfully indomitable, thinking about where-to next.