In the wake of an unsettling string of animal-related allegations that have marred his time in office, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is back in the news today after another unprecedented development roiled Washington. In a twist of fate that analysts are calling both “seismic” and “surprisingly predictable,” the controversial Trump cabinet member who had made waves for his anti-vaccine crusade was revealed to be three raccoons in a used Men’s Warehouse trench coat.

Following a verbal spat on the Capitol Hill rotunda that culminated in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ripping the oversized cloth off of the piled procyonids, little doubt remains as to the identity of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services.

“It was almost cartoonish,” explained Senator Adam Schiff, impressively unfazed after witnessing the debacle unfold. “As Ms. AOC revealed RFK’s true identity, you could tell he — I mean, the three grimy beasts — knew immediately their gig was up. They looked around at the chamber like —well, like raccoons in the headlights, for lack of a better term… two of them visibly foaming from the mouth. And then they ran free, escaping all due process. Am I upset? You bet I am. Surprised? Not one bit.” Senator Schiff looked away with a weary sigh.

Some were less shocked by the news still. “As soon as I met… uh… the team of omniverous mammals formerly known as RFK Jr., I said to myself, ‘That’s no man. That’s three terrestrial scavengers desperately trying to remain upright. That’s not the voice of a person. That’s the gravelly croak of three cigarette-addled sewer dwellers fighting over a half-eaten Big Mac in the middle of the night.’ I only wish now that I’d voiced my suspicions sooner,” California Governor Gavin Newsom solemnly lamented.

An aide to the raccoons-in-a-coat was equally stoic over the recent revelation about his boss. “I’d like to say this latest development sheds some light on that recent bombshell about RFK harvesting the uh… appendages… of fellow raccoons. But I’m still stumped by that part.” The aide looked as straight-faced as a face could be. “Where my job stands now, I’m not totally sure. But I tell you one thing, I’ve been given the go-ahead to proceed as though it’s business as usual.”

When reached for comment, Representative Ocasio-Cortez said that her suspicions around RFK Jr. began when she caught him “scarfing down garbage out of a Capitol Hill dumpster beside a pile of his clothes during markup.” She continued, “This administration complains about illegal aliens, then literally puts raccoons in charge of public health. It’s time we say enough is enough.” There was a palpable look of annoyance on her face as she appealed to the reporter.

Senator Lindsey Graham also appeared shaken by the incident. “Look, it’s time we address the elephant in the room. I’m as outraged as anybody else to be deceived by three — three nocturnal garbage bandits. But what AOC did was frankly unacceptable. A breach of decorum unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” tepidly thundered the South Carolina senator before pausing briefly to say his daily prayers at the altar of a newly minted golden Trump statue within walking distance of his D.C. office. “That an elected official could defy norms in this way, that she could stoop so low as to disrobe these innocent raccoons as they fight for our democracy, well, it disgusts me, to say the least.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz spoke to a Fox News pundit on the night of the procedural anomaly. “I think in moments like this it’s important that we look past the media frenzy, that we actually consider the job that these three rather committed raccoons are doing,” exclaimed the indignant senator. “Those three coons — and forgive me if the term isn’t ‘politically correct’ — didn’t fund one single gender studies program at the CDC. Frankly, they’ve done more for our nation than Fauci ever did, and they don’t deserve to be victims of yet another liberal witch hunt! I think it’s time we give them the benefit of the doubt.” And with this, Cruz stood his ground on behalf of the purportedly rabid creatures that stalk the streets after dusk in search of sustenance.

President Trump, too, came to the defense of the raccoons. “I’ve known RFK for a long time, and there’s no trio of lower mammals that’s ever taught me more about basic human biology. They’re the BEST raccoons. Very smart, very loyal. Know what’s better for this country, believe me, more than any of these RADICAL LEFT lunatics! I will not be searching for a human replacement at this time. THANK YOU for your attention to this matter,” he declared in a Truth Social post that went out at 4:13 in the morning this Thursday.

The teetering tower of sentient raccoons is still at large within the greater D.C. area, and officials are warning citizens to call the police if spotted. Meanwhile, Trump’s top lawyers are reportedly searching for a loophole that will enable presidential pardons to encompass four-legged beings.

It’s unclear whether the industrious deceivers will face accountability for pulling off this decades-long charade or simply be allowed to resume their government position(s). But as politicians start to wonder what other creatures could have infiltrated their swamp, citizens begin to question which of their elected leaders are really just animals stacked atop one another and shoddily stuffed into suits. What’s undeniable is that the chaos consuming our country has crossed species lines, and that the boundary that once separated man from beast in our politics has officially eroded.

Share

More than ten shirtless men sat atop the semi-truck as it trundled over the craters that pockmarked the streets of Iquitos. Beneath them were sacks of grain, rice, flour, fertilizer, and animal feed that were piled as high as the buckling flatbed would permit. In the most populous city on Earth that can’t be reached by cars or roads, sights like this weren’t so uncommon.

Some of the bare-backed workers watched the evening’s clouds roll by overhead, their gaze as stoic as sentinels. Reflections of street lights and telephone wires swept across the whites of their eyes.

The connective cables were shadeless silhouettes underneath the reddening sky, rising and falling like waves of an ocean or slurred notes on an open-ended staff. They thinned and gathered with no discernible pattern as they snaked between homes, wrapped entire towns in their baby anaconda coils, and circumnavigated the sprawling, isolated city in an operation that was as methodical as it was animalistic.

Wherever there was a break in the powerlines, another series of filaments came into frame and flitted across the tired eyes of the truck’s intrepid passengers. And just as suddenly as the network of wires shuttered out of view, giving way to distant canopies and rust-mottled rooftops, the melody would resume — swelling and receding as the electric symphony’s subsequent movements flared into being. The utility lines skated along the cresting clouds in a way that was at once suave and haphazard, ordered and erratic. Stark black waned and violently waxed while amber, blush, and cerulean blue bled like watercolors through the open sky behind it.

Some of the riders had fashioned mattresses and cushions from the bags of grain, more concerned with getting a few minutes of shut-eye than watching their heat-choked metropolis clunk cloddishly by. Some sat upright, legs swaying back and forth like pendulums in the swampy summer air. Their shiny skin glowed an igneous orange as it refracted the final rays of the setting sun.

Some pointed toward pedestrians like myself, more transfixed by the passersby who were out of their depths in the mosquito-swamped climate than the avant-garde orchestra of moto-taxis weaving frantically in and out of traffic. To them, the outsiders were more striking than the scarcity of seatbelts on their teetering tower of assorted goods-and-grains-repurposed-as-pillows.

As the hulking lorry lumbered down the streets with the earth-rattling immensity of a tank, its passengers were completely unperturbed by silly little things like safety, and its driver was even less perturbed by the looming prospect of a moving violation from the city’s threadbare police force. We were infinitely more out-of-place than the tuk-tuk drivers preparing to careen across the narrow path of the leviathan vessel, the backfiring motorbike to the riders’ immediate right, and the stray dog bolting through the horn-blaring bedlam.

More than the ceaseless drone of insects and more than the entire families crammed onto the backs of rusted e-scooters, for those who’d spent their lives in Iquitos, it was the fumbling gringos like myself who so often stole their attention. More than any of the sights that inspire tourists to take out their phones and snap pictures, it was the tourists who became attractions: temporary transplants struggling to integrate with the restless whole of the sweltering, Amazonian city.

Iquitos fielded its fair share of sightseers, but it didn’t make every Peru visitor’s “must-see” list in the same way as Machu Picchu, so it was often relegated to the sidelines. Unlike in Cusco, where you’re frequently no further than an empanada’s toss from the nearest traveler, interlopers stood out like neon fanny packs in this city carved from rain forest.

Puerto Miguel was a village of roughly a hundred residents and required a two-hour motorboat ride from Iquitos to make landfall on its dolphin-silvered shores. There wasn’t even a golf cart within the jungle-bound villa. A single sidewalk evenly bisected the outpost, and it appeared to have been recently laid.

Half of the enclave’s residents earned income selling groceries or gasoline to the other half. One house provided cellphone service to the entire neighborhood. A building across the street doubled as the patchwork settlement’s court and jail. It was painted in a dull red and green like a Christmas store weathered beyond recognition. Its foundation was stained by the silty streaks of the slowing wet season. As with much of the town, it wore the scars of a building that routinely waged war with the flanking river. Some structures seemed to have been partially swallowed by the annual torrent. A few had been rendered uninhabitable.

Near the town’s center, a rooster, a toddler, a pair of dogs, and an Amazonian cousin of the anteater engaged in a standoff, each fruitlessly attempting to translate body language across species lines. They stared at one another with rapt attention, advancing and retreating as they skittishly tried to pinpoint where play ended and peril began. The ragtag quintet weaved underneath a home that sat on stilts and onto a sandy court as kids ages 5–15 traded a frayed volleyball back and forth.

None of the competitors paid any mind to the farcical band of misfits distractedly darting between them. Far stranger to them were the visitors who’d landed in their town by motorboat and now ambled tentatively along its single walkway. Some set aside their game completely, gawking and pointing at the tourists like children at a lion exhibit. A couple of them approached us and asked our names in Spanish. One offered us a bracelet he’d spent his afternoon working on.

I desperately clenched a makeshift handle screwed into the ceiling of our shuttle as it rattled down the switchbacks that lined the Sacred Valley. Sinking further and further into the crevasse between the seat and sliding door with each stomach-lurching turn, I scanned the other occupants of the vehicle to see how they were faring. There were tradesmen, women preparing to sell crafts, and kids asleep on laps. Mothers looked placidly forward, utterly unfazed by the driver’s breakneck pace around each precipitous bend. Farmers tended to chickens whose aberrant clucks never loosened our gas-happy captain’s grip on the wheel or stole his laser-focused attention from the pothole-latticed byway.

But the most astounding of all to me were the school children who were so accustomed to this commute that the towering vistas outside their windows didn’t even elicit a second glance. They were numb to these daily rollercoasters. And they were so confident in their cowboy chauffeurs that they didn’t stop to question whether they’d arrive at their point Bs on time and in one piece. For them, these rides were every bit as quotidian as my daily routines used to feel for me. The only difference was that the normal I knew growing up was waking up each day, eating toaster waffles as I watched cartoons, and boarding a yellow school bus less than a block from my home.

All through elementary school, I felt as though my little suburbia more or less represented the human condition, and that a magnifying glass pointed toward much of the planet would reveal the same. The circumstances I was born into were all I had to frame my concept of normal.

When I watch my life play out in my mind’s eye, it all feels so obvious. The games of cops and robbers and the entire K-12 school system, our recess times and our units of measurement, our taxes, fashion trends, boisterous football matches, pledges of allegiance, and runaway insurance costs. Our hot showers and abused air conditioners. Our stuffed fridges and overflowing grocery stores. How could it have ever been any other way?

My friend and I walked along a trail only 20 minutes from his Pennsylvania home as we fought off ticks, dangling tree limbs, and overgrown brush. Out of the blue and breaking the silence that punctuated our labored breaths, I asked him what it was like to be a twin.

As an only child, people have often pointed the equivalent question toward me. And in my 20+ years of being confronted with the typical, “So — what’s it like to be an only child?” query, I’ve never really figured out a good response.

My friend, a philosophy major, part-time drummer, and full-time twin, ruminated for a minute before giving me a reply. “I get asked that a lot and, honestly, it’s the only life I really know… what’s it like to not be a twin?” he countered, turning the question on me with a genial smile and a breathy laugh as he wiped a bead of sweat off his face. The frank and efficient response may have owed in part to the August heat, but the brilliantly succinct retort immediately struck me.

It’s impossible for me to put myself inside the shoes of someone who has a sibling. The experience of brotherhood or sisterhood is as foreign to me as, for my friend, the notion of life as anything other than a twin. And I could no more easily understand the twin experience than what it is to be an older brother, younger sister, Chinese teamaker, Tibetan Sherpa, or Amazonian tribesman. I can imagine loose outlines for each of the alien paths. But we can never remove the shells that encase our conscious experiences.

That trite metaphor about “a mile in another’s shoes” that I’ve heard repeated since childhood has only grown more meaningful as the years have flown by. It’s one of the most fundamental truths we have to turn toward when we consider how to be to the people who enter our lives: that we can never, truly, understand what it is to be another.

Growing up, I grasped on an intellectual level that poverty was a pervasive problem across the globe. But I hadn’t had any experiences to ground or calcify that understanding. I hadn’t yet boarded an airplane and flown free from the laws and rails that contextualized my life. I hadn’t ever forced myself to assimilate in another part of the world. I hadn’t seen for myself the reality that life happens wherever you build it, and routine follows suit.

Normal is wherever you plant roots. And the less we’ve seen of the world, the less we understand of all the weird forms that “normal” can take. The less we understand how someone might look at the most mundane and unexamined features of our day-to-day lives and see something remarkable, unbelievable, or outright bizarre.

The more places we go, the more opportunities we have to reflect back on our own fundamental oddity. The more we travel, the more vantage points we find to look toward home with a telescope and see how it fits into our wonderfully grand fixture of weirdos masquerading as normal.

It can be a mind-bending task to look objectively at how we spend our time here on earth. But sometimes, if we’re fortunate, the veils of our internal worlds slip. The scaffolding that keeps us safe inside our own subjective experiences collapses around us, and as we look out from the dust, we see the million other forms that our normal might have taken.

We see the arc of our lives — all of the rules we’ve followed, all of the practices we’ve observed, and all of the ways that we show love for the people in our lives — for exactly as arbitrary as they are. In another nation, or in neighboring regions of the ones in which we already live, there might be entirely different cultures, customs, priorities, and principles that prevail. What we accept as standard is just a spin of the cosmic roulette wheel. We can never fully know what it would be to have lived different lives, been born as different people, or developed different understandings of our world than the ones that our specific lives and paths came paired with.

We’re forever confined to one strange at a time.

The only way that writers on this platform are compensated for the time and effort they put into their work are through your generosity. If you enjoyed this memoir, it would mean a lot if you considered offering your support. These travel-related articles are among my favorite to write, and I’d love to publish more of them.

Subscribe now

Share

Share

Share

While it might be a sin in some literary circles to confess, I’ve never written an outline for a single article or story that I’ve published. As early as middle school, I’d sooner get a zero on my assignment than commit to a task I considered so mundane. I resisted that outlining advice well before I learned I love to write. Before my affinity for words had entered into even its most rudimentary stages, I preferred writing more rather than less if it meant I could avoid paring down my thoughts to something so stiff and lifeless.

No matter how many teachers and professors told me I’d be served best by arranging each piece into sections before beginning, the directive never clicked. I was told I should frame each paper as introductions, theses, and body paragraphs — each assigned a separate, designated purpose. I was told the bow to tie each essay together should be neat and tidy conclusions.

With structure, the task of writing 1,000 words wouldn’t feel quite so daunting, our instructors repeatedly preached. For some students, I trust that would have been the case. For those who find themselves paralyzed by all of the forms a blank page can take, structure can provide a foothold rather than a cage. But depending on the person, such rigid mandates might leave someone believing writing is something that it isn’t. That, like math, there are correct answers and incorrect ones. That there are rules so immutable they can never be defied.

For those who turn to outlines because it’s difficult to organize their thoughts, it’s often lost on them that it’s supposed to be. We shouldn’t expect the opening stages of any creative or intellectual pursuit to be frictionless. But once we outgrow the training wheels of our first bike, we’re suddenly less restricted in our movements.

Writing is a fundamental exercise in thinking and our minds are so chaotic that they’re difficult to corral. But the practice of sitting with our thoughts long enough for them to meaningfully congeal is much of what this creative endeavor is about.

I couldn’t put words to why my teachers’ prescribed formula for approaching this art felt so unnatural. But always, when I broached a new essay or writing assignment of any sort, I was happiest just launching into my ideas.

Even classes that didn’t call for verbosity in the least I greeted as opportunities to hone my craft. My health teacher told me she’d never read the word “disinter” before reading my essay on Super Size Me. She admitted that she was forced to refer to a dictionary by the time she’d reached my third paragraph. I was awarded 100% on the should-have-been-throwaway assignment.

My AP U.S. History teacher rarely gave me less than a B for my research papers, but would jeeringly remind me, “You know, you really don’t need to treat each of these as an English exercise….” Mr. Lancer was astute enough to notice that citing my sources invariably took a backseat to crafting unnecessarily polished sentences on Andrew Jackson. My love for language was the driving force behind my work, and history never interested me much back then.

Mr. Lancer’s brother and sister-in-law were English instructors at the same school, and I reasoned since he shared their last name, he probably had a few kernels of Lancer writing wisdom to impart as well. (Despite the other two Lancers’ religious insistence on outlines — and unflappable belief that linking verbs ought to be avoided at all costs — their classes were the ones that really began to foment my passion for the subject.) So I was determined to pull that same linguistic value from Mr. Lancer’s class — despite its stubborn status as a history course. Whether the assignment was on the Revolutionary War, slavery, or the Great Depression, my eyes lit up as I got lost in each new essay and research assignment.

This lengthy opening tangent feels especially appropriate because it perfectly conveys both why I began working on this piece — and why I hate outlining. Initially, my inspiration behind this screed was the concern that I’d left something integral out of the previous article I published, and wanting to explain why that happened. I wanted to bring people inside my mind and walk them through the way that ideas snowball, drift course, and divide.

Oftentimes, a narrative will start one way and turn another. Sometimes a brief parenthetical side note will want to evolve into an entire diatribe or dissertation. Other times, as a story nears completion, I’ll realize I’m simply trying to cram too many disparate ideas together, and that each would be better off evolving into its own article. Ideas need adequate room to breathe and develop. And like cells multiplying, one column suddenly becomes two.

Despite the sheer number of times that my writings have turned into something different than I initially envisioned, there’s no other way I’d desire my creative process to unfold.

In this most recent case, the article “We Don’t Know How to Process Travel Anymore” was previously almost double its current length. In short, it’s about the way that modern travel has altered our relationship with the world. Instead of simply examining the cultural vertigo of going to sleep in one continent and waking up in another, that unabridged draft dove more into the way that contemporary travel is something so grand that it calls for words we don’t yet have. We not only struggle to adjust mentally after such geographic shifts, but we lack the vocabulary to even truly make sense of them. I included a long-winded analogy about the amorphous nature of psychedelic experiences. But as the piece stretched beyond the 10-minute marker, it started to feel too loose and incohesive for each of the distinct ideas to be housed under the same roof.

I made the decision to simply split the draft into two separate ones. And I decided that this new one would open with a brief anecdote about the writing process and then transition into my broader observation. But again, soon after I began typing, it became clear that I had more to say about my disaffection for outlines than I assumed, and that, once again, my thoughts about the wordless nature of travel would best be shelved for later when I could unpack them more thoroughly and without the added fog of an overly long anecdote.

Were I to outline my pieces beforehand, it’s likely that I wouldn’t run into such hurdles as often. But it’s these specific hurdles that are one of my very favorite parts of running along this track. I love how writing prose, at its least structured, gives me an opportunity to sit with my ideas in a more organic setting and more meaningfully grapple with the ways they connect. In what order does it make most sense to present my thoughts?

Very often, there’s such a fluidity to the mental process that when we write down our reflections on a subject in the order that they arrive, they present more humanly to others than if we’d constructed an outline. Being at the mercy of my internal dialogue as I write — rather than referring to a few bullet points about what each of my sections are supposed to contain — results in something that feels more lucid, relatable, and conversational. Less mechanical and more reminiscent of the way that our minds actually work.

Considering where an insight is leading, and how to get there without any jarring “additionally,” or “In this other example…” signposting, grants me an opportunity for deeper and more deliberate thinking. Such speed bumps detract from a train of thought’s pacing. Worse, they can derail those readers who crave continuity and logical progression.

It’s for this reason that I’ve held an enduring distaste for subheadings. While in occasional pieces they’re called into action, most often when I see them employed in prose they’re being used as shortcuts. When people don’t know precisely how one idea or event bleeds into the next, subheadings negate the need for such understandings. Vaulting over those natural bridges between notions can leave a story feeling at once jumpy and dispassionate. The logical leaps are as convenient in the moment as they are detrimental in the long term. They sidestep the intellectual legwork that enables a narrative to come together naturally.

As an editor, very often when I review a draft about a breakup, I’ll find that it’s divided into sections such as, “How We Met,” “Where It Went Wrong,” and “Moving On.” Or a travel essay might be carved into infantilizing chunks with the subheadings, “Arrival,” “Exploration,” and “Reflections.” In each case, they not only disrupt readers’ momentum, but give them an unsolicited preview of what’s coming next instead of allowing them to follow along as events unfold on their own.

When constructing new articles, I don’t usually know how to correctly order my thoughts or what form the finished product will ultimately take. So often, I convince myself beforehand that I have less to say on a certain topic than I actually do. And sometimes, it’s in writing about a subject, and sitting with it more deeply than I ever have, that my thoughts take shape. That rumination helps me to see connections that aren’t always apparent to me as I begin my work.

The exercise is as invigorating as it is vital. And when we follow outlines rather than allow thought to flow organically, it can sap the joy in the creative process. That framework flattens what should be a process of discovery into something fixed and preordained. It assumes our thoughts are settled before they’re given the proper chance to develop and cohere.

Share

One of the most enticing aspects of travel for me is seeing parts of the world that, throughout most of human history, were impossible to even reach. The invention of flight made our world so accessible that anyone capable of boarding an airplane could suddenly experience a new culture. It democratized travel.

But as with astronauts returning to our atmosphere, disorientation tends to follow landing. There’s a social adjustment that’s needed after such seismic lunges between nations and customs, and that reality often gets drowned out by the menial conversation around jet lag, airport security, and other plane-related hoops and logistics.

Clearing continents in engine-powered long jumps has become so common that we rarely stop to consider the obvious cultural vertigo that can and should stem from going to sleep in New York City and waking up in Sydney or New Delhi. The expectation that such gigantic transitions should be taken in stride reduces their psychological weight.

With each new trip abroad, there’s been a period of reintegration that’s followed as I’ve returned home again and tried to resume my daily life. On one hand, it’s not hard to resurrect the routines that gave my world structure before I left the country. It’s as natural as riding a bike or clacking out words on a keyboard. The gravitational force we call “habit” kicks into gear, and I restart all my activities anew, tend to all of my preexisting obligations, and visit all of the same stores and cafes and friends. It’s reassuring to know I haven’t forgotten how to write, play music, or hold a conversation at the gym. How to navigate all the creaks, cracks, and peculiarities that define home for me.

But on the other hand, it’s disconcerting just how easy it is to return to my secure family in my secure town, where life follows a predictable rhythm, and every stranger or store clerk I encounter I can be reasonably sure speaks my language. It’s odd to trade the world of friction, adversity, and novelty that I knew while traveling for one where consistency and inertia reign supreme.

There’s comfort in the sameness. But comfort breeds complacency and I feel the suffocating force taking hold already.

I feel as though I’ve phased between disparate worlds with the flick of a credit card. It’s incredible to board a plane and disembark on the other side of the planet, but there’s something about these sudden, night and day transitions that feels deeply out of step with the natural order. It short-circuits our ability to process the leaps between poles.

Much as our bodies and minds might try to make normal of the bizarre, it’s not often enough that I hear people talk about the destabilization that comes paired with the modern marvel of flight. Through brute technological force, we now vault between time zones, geographies, languages, and all of the cultural variations that have emerged from them. Most passengers are so blithely disinterested in the world whizzing by beneath them that they’d sooner waste entire flights with their heads in tablets than bide a few minutes sitting with the way that flatlands turn to seas, mountains, and oceans. As with flipping through a story just to read its final pages, our touchdown feels unearned when we’re detached from the path toward our destination. The sense of gratification that should come with a completed novel is stripped or diluted if we take shortcuts.

Modern travel can collapse the stories of our lives in the same way, sapping the gradual buildup that instills our entry into alien lands with impact, that breathes poignancy into our eventual return home. We reach the terminus, but with enough assistance that it frequently deprives us of the adventure so many begin traveling in order to find. The need for risk is reduced to a bare minimum. We step off our planes with suitcases in hand and backpacks on our shoulders. But the closing credits that greet us upon landing can feel hollow. The climactic score to herald our homecoming strikes a discordant tone.

We arrive intact, but not reassembled. And that’s one of the strangest components to grapple with. To walk on one side of the equator yesterday and another side today feels like it shouldn’t be possible. It stands to reason that such a shift would fundamentally alter the fabric of our being — soften or callous us to the point of non-recognition. Fracture, erode, and reshape us in a way that a face-off against oceans, mountains, and deserts surely must. Let the raw forces of our spinning planet wear us down and rebuild us as something more awake, alive, and receptive.

The body makes the trip more easily than the mind. It takes time to reconcile where we’ve been with where we are again. There’s no gradient to the shift, no gentle acclimation, and no easing between worlds. Travel often comes in the form of a sudden and complete substitution of one reality for another.

As remarkable as it is to have our most gaping cultural chasms bridged by airplanes, there’s perhaps merit to peoples’ gut-deep distaste for the tourism phenomenon. It’s a Pandora’s box we’ve opened. The ability to set foot on the other side of the world so effortlessly is an aberration. When many travel abroad, it’s with the hope that the world will bend over backwards and cater to them. There’s little use denying that our newfound affection for travel has had far-reaching consequences, from the cost of emissions on the climate to the social and economic problems plaguing tourist hot spots.

Yet, even still, experiencing life in other countries and continents is an opportunity too enormous and too transformative for words. The privilege of seeing the corners of the globe that would otherwise be walled off from us isn’t something to take lightly. There’s an unshakeable wisdom that can be found in seeing all of the norms we’ve spent our lives accepting without question turned suddenly on their heads.

The uncomfortable acclimations are all a labor of love. It would be wrong for the bounds between continents to feel much breezier. I’m in awe of airplanes even if after I land I sometimes struggle to gather my bearings.

Back home, there’s no constant cycling of world travelers. There are no llamas or alpacas accompanying locals on their daily commutes. There are no overflowing “colectivos” to cart citizens up and down the sheer cliffs that encircle our town. And if we had such a transport system in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, let alone mountain passes forbidding enough to necessitate carpools, they probably wouldn’t be occupied by grizzled farmers trying their best to keep the scents and sounds of their overripe fruits and over-exuberant roosters at bay; women carrying entire craft stands condensed into bulbous bundles, slung across their backs like humps on camels; or an assortment of somnolent children soundly sleeping through every hairpin turn, rogue cow, and wheel-devouring crater that littered our path. The babies aboard managed to stifle their wails. The toddlers were seemingly lulled into comas by the mundanity of this routine occurrence. For me, the culture shock was extraordinary. The viscerally chaotic van rides brought to life a part of the world that no documentary could fully impart or reproduce.

Back home, there are no precipitous mountains poking their heads free from the suburban sprawl surrounding me, no three-wheeled tuk-tuks or moto-taxis zipping their way up and down them, and no cloud-piercing vistas to dwarf our nearby skyscrapers. But as Spring takes shape, echoes of South America reverberate through the residential calm. Bird songs seep into my bedroom window in early mornings and remind me of their Amazonian cousins. The sun filtering through trees in late afternoons whisks me back to my walks through the Andes. The leaf-stained ruins of my local forest are my own private Machu Picchu.

And every time a plane zooms overhead, I’m reminded of the perplexing future we’re all a part of. I’m reminded that, no matter how unnatural it may seem — no matter how long we believed that joining the birds was impossible — flight is a part of our story now. And to have our lives framed by that bewildering fact is as dizzying as it is enlivening.

The only way that writers on this platform are compensated for the time and effort they put into their work are through your generosity. If you enjoyed this memoir, it would mean a lot if you considered offering your support. These travel-related articles are among my favorite to write, and I’d love to publish more of them.

Subscribe now

Share

Kevin was a burly German man with a face that was as plain as it was approachable, rounded to dull edges and its lower half shaded by a noncommittal stubble. It was a quarter inch shy of a beard, a week beyond clean-shaven, and hung above a gray button-up shirt that clung to his shoulders in the tropical heat of Puerto Viejo. But with each button undone and a woolly beer belly bulging out from beneath the fabric, a soft wind did wonders in making his classically German, side-parted, and slick black haircut look less severe. The loosened flaps of his shirt were slightly yellowed by sweat along the outer edges and billowed in the breeze with an admirably careless grace.

Kevin was one of those people that, I contended, looked nothing like his name.

His Luxembourgian friend, Felix, who flanked me on my other side as we walked along the beach, boasted pale skin that blistered in the Costa Rican climate no matter how thoroughly he slathered it in sunscreen or how cloud-covered the day at hand. He wore thick glasses beneath a head of bright brown curls, and had a skinny build that perfectly fit the bill his name all but broadcast. He was a Felix through and through.

The kindly German, by contrast, struck me as much more of a “Bruno,” or maybe a “Marco.” And he should have been flattered by my stubborn insistence on this front, as, for whatever reason, the name “Kevin” conjures far less endearing images. For me, the Kevin label belonged more to a man who’d settled down and had his personality flattened by the pressures of adulthood. Someone who was characteristically bound by his career and whose greatest thrills came in the form of beers out with friends and small regimented escapes from a life already set in stone. His vacations were primarily of the three-day-long variety, and needed to be confirmed with his boss half a year in advance.

Kevins were surely incapable of wandering free on a continent overseas — bouncing between cities and answering only to their most spontaneous whims.

As Kevin told me about the months he’d spent on the road and shared the stories that latticed them, I was at once wowed by his boldness — his decidedly un-Kevin nature — and undercut by a pang of jealousy. In the midst of my second solo international trip, I was both proud of the scale of my own leap into the world and humbled by the seasoned travelers around me who were in the midst of far grander journeys — who casually rattled off stories of life on six of the seven continents.

Soon-to-be-29 and already dreading my coming decade, I asked Kevin how old he was. Part of that owed to earnest curiosity, but part of it stemmed simply from the compulsive need to compare myself to him, and take stock of how I was faring in my own mission to become a world traveler. “31,” he shot back. Had he said either 26 or 36, I wouldn’t have been surprised. His reply was one that was airily unburdened by the weight of growing older, unworn by the alien terrain that was “the 30s.”

I struggled to voice my following question. My words were roundabout and landed somewhere in the ballpark of, “So… what’s life like now that you’re in your thirties?”

As if he’d already given the matter a healthy bit of prior thought, he shot back without hesitation: “Honestly, ever since I started traveling I don’t even stop to think about getting older.”

As he said the words, it cemented a realization that had been gradually starting to dawn on me. And that slowly hardening epiphany was as obvious as it was elusive. I hadn’t even spent a month in the country, but my three weeks there had already managed to dilate into what felt like a year full of memories — an inconceivable amount of living condensed into a period of time so infinitesimal that it could skate by entirely unnoticed under different circumstances.

Back home, three weeks felt like nothing at all. A few blinks would render the todays into tomorrows. And there was a daunting certainty to that cycle. I felt happy and secure, but insulated from the world where the sheer weight of living comes in doses far too colossal to ever be distilled or contained. I was shielded from the moments where we understand our planet as the slow-moving Goliath that it is.

Even as someone who cherishes the work I do for a living, my adult life has an unsettling way of flying by. No matter how much I love writing, months still meld together. January becomes February becomes December.

Yet when traveling through unfamiliar nations, moving between hostels in foreign cities, and keeping track of the shifting casts of characters within each, it only took a week of life on the road to reduce my world back home into a smaller place. A safe haven that I’d hate to ever leave behind, but one that was eerily ravaged by the ceaseless flow of time. My stagnant routine kept me walled off from the world that allows you to stuff months into days and decades into single years — to populate the passing seconds with still frames that alter the course of our lives.

So I decided to myself a year before the moment came that, wherever I found myself when my internal clock struck 30, it would be traveling. That I would be in martian lands, filling life’s fleeting hours with memories I’d never willingly forfeit. That I would stuff so many mental keepsakes into so little time that I would be as unfazed as Kevin broaching my new decade.

Booking a flight to Peru, the only near-certain item on my agenda was a trip to Machu Picchu. What specifically would occupy the passing weeks, what people would forever define each of the places I went — I was blissfully uncertain. Two months of mystery laid sprawled out before me. Blanks I challenged myself to fill.

I expected I might set foot inside the Amazonian region. But I didn’t know that the rickety motorboat weaving through that hissing, chittering, notorious rainforest would be helmed by a man named Lucio who was blind in one eye, yet somehow retained enough vision in the other one to spot wildlife with telescopic precision. He was stout, standing at little more than 5 feet, yet braved the jungle with a kind of poise and nonchalance that faltered only once, in the presence of the Amazon’s most poisonous snake. He guided our ramshackle vessel through waters deep enough to house multiple species of piranhas and dolphins, and through trees tall enough to effortlessly conceal pumas, jaguars, and anacondas.

I couldn’t anticipate that I’d share lunch with a sexagenarian named Maurizio as we looked out over the snaking rivers that bordered Iquitos. That we’d make our way in and out of town seated on the back of moto-taxis whose drivers would willingly disobey whatever traffic laws landed their endless succession of customers at their chosen destinations. That the stoic motorists would fearlessly brave whatever clouds of exhaust fumes their thousand, equally freewheeling competitors had left suspended above the congested, Amazonian streets.

I didn’t know that I’d find myself in a pitch black room with a family of curanderos that chanted Ikaros as a silent storm of lightning spidered erratically through the darkened sky around us — nor that, throughout the ostensibly illicit ceremony, the chanting ayahuasca overseers would be accompanied by a fellow psychedelic subject who screamed so sexually and so ceaselessly that her vocal tenacity put the shamans to shame.

I didn’t know that I’d hike through the Andes mountains with a few men from the UK I’d never met, traversing rapidly between a dizzying array of microclimates. I didn’t expect the oxygen-starved air and alpaca-populated peaks to be abruptly replaced by a land where sweatshirt-piercing mosquitos and stifling humidity reigned supreme.

I didn’t know I’d lose my drone in the rolling dunes of Huacachina, nor that a local buggy driver would confer with a few friends on the phone, and transport me over those precipitous sand mountains into Ica, where a local kid would come sauntering proudly out of his home with my flying camera in hand. Nor did I know that the damage it sustained would be far easier to correct in the hands of a local Peruvian repairman than if I’d been back in my home country. The ordeal was both a lesson in the kindness of strangers and the inefficiencies to which I’d grown so painfully accustomed back in the star-spangled States.

I didn’t know I’d sit around a bonfire with a group of new friends from around the world, nor that a guitarist would help herself to a seat on a neighboring log and play what was the most beautiful rendition of “Let it Be” that I’d ever heard. Nor had I predicted that the following day I’d climb up to the ruins of Pisac with most of those same people, each of us finding time to revel in the ancient monument’s confounding isolation.

The stark lack of other explorers there to breathe in those same vistas enhanced our own experience at the same time that it made me reflect on the arbitrariness of what we deem “World Wonders.” At roughly 1,000 meters higher than Machu Picchu and with none of the tree-cover shrouding the trek toward its timeless peak, the Pisac archeological site provided some of the most awe-inspiring views from all of my time traveling.

I didn’t know that the day of my 30th birthday would involve me participating in a Temazcal ceremony, cramming myself into a hut comprised of sticks and blankets as searing stones from the blazing fire beside it were placed into a pit at the sweat lodge’s center. I didn’t know that the evening would end with me dragging all of my belongings out of a valley that was infinitely steeper and more demanding on the way up than it had been in daylight — and on the way down.

I didn’t know that I would struggle with altitude sickness for the first time that night as I clambered free from that 45-degree-angled crater and toward my temporary new dwelling. As my heart beat out of my chest, my extremities began to numb, and I labored to draw enough oxygen from the dry mountain air, I wondered for a few minutes whether I might suffer a medical emergency before my 30s were even underway.

I didn’t know that, as my symptoms intensified, a truck would pull over at the sight of one of my new companion’s outstretched thumbs, or that eight of us would proceed to file into the back of the savior-in-plain-clothing’s pickup. And it would have been impossible to anticipate that we’d be tasked with tightly gripping the driver’s poorly packaged new window pane as he made his way forward and backward up the switchbacks that crisscrossed the Sacred Valley. He dropped us off conveniently at the door of our hostel, my breathing still heavy and my heart still beating a few dozen too many times per minute.

As my new friends doled out pats and praises to a congregation of kitties co-inhabiting our commune, I slunk away to my assigned bedroom and slept off my sickness. I emerged from my room to the rejuvenating sight of towering ridges and sweeping highlands as far as my bleary eyes could see.

Turning 25 was the first time that it felt surreal growing older. I’d held in my head a million different visions of where I’d be by the time I reached that weighty halfway marker in my 20s. But by the time I concluded that 25th revolution around the sun, I hadn’t achieved half of the things I’d wanted to by then.

I didn’t harbor the hallmarks of a 25-year-old. I wasn’t established in my career. I hadn’t magically found stability. And the notion of beginning the adventures that were supposed to define my youth felt less attainable for me than they had when I was fresh out of high school, still naively convinced that each of the things I wanted from this life would come naturally. I thought I’d find the hours to devote to each and every hobby I held dear — that I’d become a professional musician, carry on my father’s band in his name, and still have time to spare to be a writer and world traveler.

But now at 30, I’ve finally reached a juncture where I could hardly care less about achieving the dreams I once clung to so tightly. I’m still not the person I thought I might be by this point in life. But I love who I am.

I’ve grown to accept that, with each peak we reach, a hundred more inevitably come into view. Achieving goals rarely gives us a lasting sense of accomplishment. More often, it leaves us craving for more. We refix our focus on the vistas we may never reach, and repeatedly humble ourselves in the face of our radical insatiability.

We’re happiest when we accept that the horizon is unreachable, and when we scramble toward those faraway places all the same — learning to savor our stumbles and delight in the absurdity of being tiny creatures coded to look infinitely onward.

Share

It was nearly three years ago that I found the opportunity to fly a drone for the first time. My friend Colin brought one to a graduation party, and as he tended to the airborne camera with his measured finger motions, I stood in shock at the talent it must demand in order to …

Read more

Signing up to walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, I held an image in my head of a timeless path through an ancient landscape, flanked on all sides by sacred stones and preserved by the apocryphal powers of native Peruvian mysticism. I envisioned something almost processional in its importance — a red carpet for th…

Read more

The bartender introduced himself to me as Junior while he prepared my candy-colored, non-alcoholic drink. “And you?” he asked. He stood at a medium height, wore tan skin beneath a cocktail shirt that was ill-suited to the Peruvian desert climate, and had a kindly face that bordered on effeminate.

“I’m Ben,” I replied before he sh…

Read more

There’s something special about the movies I watch on airplanes. Whether it’s the emotional states that come paired with adventures to new places, the stark lack of distractions at our disposal whilst claustrophobically crammed between strangers, or whether it’s merely the change in altitude that alters state of mind, my mid-flight film…

Read more

There’s a passage in the foreword of Death by Astonishment that frames the book and the lofty mission behind it beautifully. It’s at once admirably brazen and honest to a fault. How it reads for you will likely dictate the value you’re able to derive from author Andrew Gallimore’s research.

When scientists come up with bold ideas and ma…

Read more

It took years of relentless peer pressure before I surrendered to the cultural juggernaut that was Game of Thrones. My long held resistance owed almost entirely to the subject matter of the show. While I’d seen glimmers of greatness in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien’s world never enthralled me in the same way as so many of my friends and elde…

Read more

Anyway, it was great to finally get Josh on the show while his travels in South America are on temporary hold. You can read about them here if you aren’t already!

This made for one of our least entertainment-focused episodes to date, but as I prepare for my own trip to South America, it was fun to switch gears and exchange some of our travel thoughts and experiences.

Most fans of cinema live in quiet acceptance of the fact that, no matter how many sequels a movie gets, it will almost invariably be a cheap imitation of the original. No matter how much of a masterpiece the initial release, or no matter how fertile of a bedrock it lays, few and far between are those followups …

Read more

I often find it difficult to address politics when my stance on a given topic is little more than, “Well, this is bad.” And the past year has been a steady stream of dismal developments. Trump’s cabinet members are bad, and his policy is bad, and the public statements he makes serve as napalm on a r…

Read more

“What’s your favorite piece that you wrote in the last year?” Dean asked me as the lingering aromas of devoured holiday dishes wafted through the air of our mutual friend’s less-than-commodious dining room. He had a grin on his face that was equal parts expectant and supportive.

I mused over the question for a few seconds as ambient chatter bou…

Read more

For anyone who went into 2022’s Avatar: The Way of the Water for its plot, there’s a fair chance they walked out of theaters disappointed. But the 13 year pause between iterations was never meant just to buy James Cameron time to write the script for a sequel to his meteoric 2009 blockbuster. The primary reason for the lengthy interm…

Read more

This was a mutant satire (could it be fairly called fan fiction?) that I wrote three years ago upon the release of “Avatar: The Way of Water.” It isn’t quite up to my current standards, but I had a fun time revisiting it. May it tide you wonderful readers over until I come up with something more meaningful to say about thi…

Read more

Happy new years everyone!

Share