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Don George moved to Paris after graduating from Princeton two decades ago -- and never looked back. He has lived in Athens and Tokyo, has wandered through some 50 countries and has written more than 500 articles for such publications as Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure and Travel Holiday. He was Travel Editor of the San Francisco Examiner from 1987-1995.
C O N T E N T S My Private Wanderlust
Ibiza: A Navel Voyage
Mallemaroking D E P A R T M E N T S Postmark: New York
Passages:
Table Talk
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- - - - - - - - E A R L I E R Welcome to Wanderlust Isabel Allende
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BY DON GEORGE | i want to begin this week by thanking all of you who have taken the time to write notes of appreciation and encouragement about our double-issue debut of Wanderlust, which launched on March 25. Your response to this editorial adventure has been extremely gratifying and in fact wonderfully overwhelming. I am trying to answer each note individually, but in the meantime I would like to use this forum to say: Thank you -- your support is invaluably inspiring! I hope you'll enjoy the offerings in this second issue: Karl Taro Greenfeld's illuminating odyssey on Ibiza in search of a woman with a delectable navel (you'll just have to read the story); Dwight Garner's eloquent ode to the pleasures and edifications of New York's underground life; Simon Winchester's sobering report on the spread of mallemaroking; and Paula McDonald's moving tale of an unforgettable encounter on an island in southern China. Reading these tales has, of course, filled me with that sole-itching, soul-twitching, all-too-familiar feeling: I want to be out there, wandering down a dusty path to a village market, where I will buy fresh fruit and a hunk of cheese and some crusty bread -- and sit on a quilt of wildflowers and revel at the wonder of it all.
I think it began with my family's annual summer pilgrimages to the isolated, wind-swirled beaches of Cape Hatteras off the coast of North Carolina. My parents insisted on taking my brother and me before the season officially opened, so we usually had the place all to ourselves: the hotel, where I had Southern hot cakes and fried chicken for the first time in my life; the beaches, where the sand would flail our eyes and legs on windy days and where the world would stretch sunny and forever on calm days; and the wooden skeletons of sailing ships I thought had once been inhabited by pirates -- and knew were still enlivened by hearty ghosts. Later we spent a few weeks each summer at a family cottage on the shores of Lake Ontario in a town called Fair Haven in upstate New York. It was there I learned the joys of early-morning fishing, the creak of the rowboat oars echoing across the lake and the mist rising magical off the placid surface, and of Sunday oom-pah-pah concerts on the town green. By the time I reached high school, we were venturing every summer to a rugged resort in the wilds of Canada's Cape Breton Island, where we would hike and sail and play golf and I would be awed and exhilarated by the wide-open wilderness of forests and hills that stretched, people-less, all around us. The seed of all those family wanderings found fertile soil the summer between my junior and senior years in college, when I lived with a French family in Paris and worked as a translator for a French firm -- and blossomed gloriously the following year, when I lived again in Paris for the summer and then rode the Orient Express to Greece, where I taught for a year at Athens College and traveled throughout Europe. Sometime during that year my tweedy dreams of becoming an English professor dissolved and another dream took their place: to wander the world, learning about new people and new creations, and to write about these wanderings. This was a gradual odyssey, of course, but one moment in particular stands out when I think about it now. It was one sunny morning in June, soon after I had started my second summer's work at Kodak-Pathé. As I did every morning, I took the rickety old filigreed elevator from my apartment -- right on the rue de Rivoli, looking onto the Tuileries -- and stepped into the street: into a sea of French. Everyone around me was speaking French, wearing French, looking French, acting French. Shrugging their shoulders and twirling their scarves and drinking their cafés au lait, calling out "Bonjour, monsieur-dame," and paying for Le Monde or Le Nouvel Observateur with francs and stepping importantly around me and staring straight into my eyes and subtly smiling in a way that only the French do. Until that time I had spent most of my life in classrooms, and I was planning after that European detour to spend most of the rest of my life in classrooms. Suddenly it struck me: This was the classroom. Not the musty, shadowed, oak-panelled, ivy-draped buildings in which I had spent the previous four years. This world of wide boulevards and centuries-old buildings and six-table sawdust restaurants and glasses of vin ordinaires and fire-eaters on street corners and poetry readings in cramped second-floor bookshops and mysterious women smiling at you so that your heart leaped and you walked for hours restless under the plane trees by the Seine. This was the classroom. That year changed my life. In the spring of my stay in Greece -- after months of ruins and rocky mountain villages and Aegean epiphanies, Christmas in Rome and New Year's in Vienna and a soul-soaring sojourn in Istanbul -- I wrote in my journal: "My travels this year have expanded and enriched my worldview more than I can comprehend. The more I travel, the more I see, the bigger the world becomes. And the more cultures and peoples I encounter, the more I am awed and fascinated by the incredibly intricate and beautiful tapestry of humanity that covers this small globe. An experience of infinite and eternal rewards, a magic-lantern life." And two months later, just before I was due to leave, I wrote to a friend: "The new places I have seen, the new people I have met, the simple act of walking a winding alley in an unknown city, the experience of seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling the vast panorama of humanity, of living the world as it spreads and grows before you -- all this has constituted an education beyond words. Now that I have lived this, how could I ever relinquish it?" So I began to pursue wild dreams: I traveled to Egypt and rode an Arabian stallion into the Sahara; flew to Africa and jounced around on safaris and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro; returned to the U.S. and got a master's degree in creative writing, writing a book of poetry for my thesis; lived in Tokyo for two years teaching at a university, hosting an English-language talk show on national TV and traveling throughout Asia. After that, without a job or a plan, I moved to California and miraculously became a travel writer and then travel editor for the San Francisco Examiner, where I wandered and wrote about my wanderings for 15 wonderful years. Life is an accumulation of moments, of course, and every single encounter, every single whim and waffle, every opportunity passed or pursued, every lesson learned or overlooked -- every moment in my life has led me to where I am today. But in that unbroken accumulation there are still moments that stay with you, little x's on the trail map of your life. And in that sense, I know that I owe all the serendipitous riches of the last two decades to an undergraduate impulse to spend a summer in Paris -- and to a moment in June 1975 on the rue de Rivoli when it all crystallized. Ever since then my life has been blessed by and in many ways devoted to the singular spirit at the heart of this new journey: wanderlust.
That's my story. What's yours? Has your life too been blessed by wanderlust? How did it happen to you? Tell all in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - -
Don George is the
Editor of Wanderlust. You can email him at dgeorge@salonmagazine.com.
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Salon Wanderlust is published every Monday evening at 6 pm PST in Salon. Send all reader mail to wanderlust@salonmagazine.com. To receive a colorful weekly update on what's happening in Wanderlust, sign up here. Published articles are housed in the Wanderlust archives. Some of the books written about in Wanderlust can be purchased online.
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Alas, sometimes the best we can do is bite into the baguette of memory, and that's what I've been doing recently, trying to get to the heart of my own private wanderlust.
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