I thought they were a tour group granted special privileges to board our plane first. They wore identical scarves and chattered in bunches as they bypassed the rope corridors the rest of us would traverse. I was sitting alone in an Amsterdam airport boarding lounge scared shitless. I’d successfully navigated the route between gates, found a bathroom, and eaten a protein bar. All seemed well, but I trusted nothing. What if I’d made a mistake in booking? Gotten the wrong date? Come to the wrong gate? What if that huge group filled the plane and my seat was taken? What? What?
Notwithstanding a lifetime of domestic trips, I’d never aspired to travel beyond the North American continent. I never thought I could. I considered Canada and Mexico exotic enough.
Lands around the globe were mythical to me. Geography and world history lessons mixed into a jumble of eras and weathers, heroes and villains, major crops and minor wars. However much I feasted on historical fiction and memoir from abroad, I held only a skimpy and unreliable time line of human history in my head beyond that of this country.
Still more important, Dave’s reluctance to travel outside Montana echoed in me. Haunted might be a better word. More poignantly now after his death. I would never have gone very far or for very long were Dave still living. My reluctance might have manifested for the wrong reasons, but it would have been real. Plus, the North Fork of the Flathead—Dave’s family’s property, the Land—consumed all our resources.
Christmas 2010, four years after Dave’s death, my wise friends Ron and Claire gave me a backpack and a money belt along with a catalog of guided trips that the Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door Travel Company offered. And they followed up those gifts with a January visit to Helena and questions about just what tour most caught my eye. Before the night was over, before they’d returned home, I’d signed myself up for an October “Village Italy in 14 Days” experience. And that was the tour I was about to begin as I waited in the Amsterdam airport.
Why was I scared? Maybe the greater hesitancies and insecurities of age. Maybe too long since I’d navigated the outer world alone. Maybe a bit of my father bubbling up, a primal fear of what lay outside my ken, especially outside my language. Maybe just ordinary insularity.
And the moment we landed in Venice my fears seemed justified. My Rick Steves travel packet included detailed instructions on how to catch a bus that would deliver me to the tour’s official launch in Padua. Except that none of the buses at the airport matched the literature’s description. Their lighted signs all showed different destinations. I finally kind-of understood that I needed a bus to take me further into Venice and that there I would find a second bus out to Padua. And once on that second bus, a young couple with minimal English helped me identify the taxi stand near Padua where I had to disembark. The taxi driver spoke English.
I woke up the next morning to sunlight shining from the dome of the Basilica of St. Anthony into my room. And to the sound of its bells. Il Santo–the destination of pilgrims to the Saint of Lost Things. And putting an honest but romantic a point on it, I found myself.
I had the whole day alone before the tour group gathered. And spent it in the heart of maybe the oldest city in Italy. I bought gelato and ogled pastry displays and rainbow-organized sweater shops. I wandered through Il Santo and Padua’s Botanical Gardens. I stood and listened to a young street musician playing her cello in the bustling square outside the Basilica–already so eager to pin the moment and place in amber that I bought her homemade CD.
The tour group of 24 gathered for dinner and our marching orders from Tricia, our Scotch-Italian guide. We were off for a ten day trek that included Padua, Ravenna, the true village of Montone, a winery in Tuscany, Assissi, Orvieto, Lucca, Siena, Volterra, the Carrara marble mines, the Cinque Terra, and Lake Orta San Gulio.
That trip led to a week’s visit from tour guide Tricia to my home in Montana. And a Venice, Florence, Rome trek with another Rick Steves’ tour. And, and a side trip to Britain to Tricia’s home. Right onto a week’s solo sojourn to London for a workshop at the British Library about turning oral histories into readers’ theater. Plus another day of incredible fellowship with Tricia’s British friend Jean. Followed by Jean and Bryan spending a month with me in Montana. You see the explosion, don’t you, the circles in the pond of my life rolling out far beyond what I ever anticipated. Before the decade was over, I’d spent two weeks on the Greek island of Patmos for a writing salon and another two on Spain’s Costa Blanca, and in West Sussex, England.
Now, I’m seriously scared that if and when the pandemic allows international travel, my knees may not. And I am undone at that prospect. Even though I remain a bundle of nerves before each such journey. And over prepare. (Did you know you could walk yourself around Venice on Google Maps!) Still, the gifts of other places and other people render my anxiety immaterial.
Within the first 24 hours of our time in Padua, I had been rent open by the power of HERE—the reality, the comeuppance I’d felt at Gettysburg when history ceased to be cerebral and became humanly certain. HERE in the University of Padua’s Anatomical Theatre—here where the blood of illegally collected 16th century corpses stained these floors while students watched dissection. HERE in Volterra’s steep, cobbled streets, stinking of centuries’ old piss, the Romans gathered in the theater they had built on an Etruscan city. HERE in the highest, impossibly dangerous ledges of the Cararra mines, the block of marble that would become David began its circuitous journey to Florence. HERE, my god, on the Acropolis of Athens, I stood in fourth century BC footsteps and in the celestial company of Greek gods. HERE, HERE in Churchill’s war rooms. HERE the Magna Carta, not a facsimile, the honest-to-god Magna Carta. For all the hundreds of my European HERE moments, the timelines were deeper, the survival of remnants even more remarkable, the value of place both more historically singular and more gloriously ordinary.
I was systematically beguiled by artistry. First by lives and towns lived in jubilant color and design, where ordinary table settings and windowsills and shop arrangements all left me feeling happy. And then the incomparable and treasured skills evidenced in architecture, painting, mosaics, carving, cloth, paper, pottery, ironwork, glass. We rightly value our homegrown, North American artists. But—against the sweep of brilliance and mastery over multiple millennia, over an intertwined and competitive, religious-inspired world, we remain humble students. There aren’t words. Every trip abroad laid bare more intricacies, more skills, unimaginable craftsmanship, new applications. The patience and process of the ages applied to so many facets of past world. Still, in savoring the ethereal spires of Milan’s Duomo or the Sistine Chapel’s audacious story murals, I wrestled with two realities. That the jaw-dropping, endlessly beautiful art I saw grew from societies where most people lived short, painful lives. And that the Church intended its astounding architecture and artistry to dupe followers into equating wealth with godliness. Neither truth diminished the beauty.
Every trip ultimately became an incubator, a nursery for conversations and friendships that I will remember long after I’ve forgotten the lineages of church architecture. I remain in correspondence and Facetime touch with two couples from the first tour and, with Tricia, our guide. At different moments, we realized our respective and respected shared interests—from politics to art. I reveled in an old man’s flirtations on a Venetian vaporetto. At the Port of Pireaus, I let the plight of Syrian refugees, gathered there in makeshift tents, sink in. At the Royal Albert Hall in London for a Tchaikovsky concert, my seatmate and I enjoyed a brief, personal exchange about the music we loved and our corners of the world. She could not fathom Montana spaces. And I was still stunned by how many people lived, neatly packed into the British Isles. We parted for the evening on her sage advice about how I might find a taxi.
Of the thirty colleagues who shared our writing salon on Patmos almost all are friends. On the Isle of Revelation—a name Patmos acquired from the disciple John’s isolation there as he wrote the Book of Revelations—the process of memoir writing brought most of us the absolution, the blessing of honesty and inspiration. We remain able to offer that understanding to each other five years later.
And Jean and Bryan, the British friends I learned to know through Tricia, who’ve now come to know Montana, and entertained me in Spain and England, bring me the best of all my travel experiences: heart-close friendship, the incomparable gift of “seeing” me and the ways in which our histories and geographies give us distinctive perspective and joy.
I am remembering the music of those trips as well: the darkened de-consecrated church in Lucca where budding opera singers entertained travelers with Puccini; that street cellist in Padua; a romping piano concert held in a jewel-box salon in Orvieto—which ended with the German man seated in front of me, tipping his chair back and whispering “think what that would have been like if the piano were tuned.” An African American children’s choir in St. Martin on the Green. The Lancing College Chapel organist pulling out every stop for “Amazing Grace.” Rodney Crowell singing “Song for Life” in Patmos dusk. An Italian farmhouse singsong led by Tricia the night I turned 65. The Royal Albert Hall crowd on its feet as the cannons of the “1812 Overture” brought our concert to a close. And bells—cathedrals, campanile, monasteries, goats, commune offices, family chapels.
Oh yes, about that group in the Amsterdam airport? Turns out they were a Venetian choir, returning from a concert tour through Canada. And they sang us, they sang us—the whole plane—over the Alps and into Italy. ©
*”The Traveling Kind” is the title of a Rodney Crowell/Emmy Lou Harris ballad and a CD that they made together. As Emmylou Harris said, “We’re all travelers through this life, even if we never go anywhere. We pass through our time on this world.”
