Far Away Lands

Posted by Barbara Samuel

When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I wrote a diary entry that read:

THESE ARE MY LIFETIME GOALS:

Write books

See the World

Be HAPPY and have a family.

The last bit was because this was the seventies, and most of the examples of contemporary women writers were of the Virginia Woolfe/Sylvia Plath, model (also know as the “life sucks, then you die” model of literary accomplishment). I really wanted to be a writer (I was, but I didn’t want to kill myself. A nice family, nice books, a husband who loved me—that sounded a lot better.)

To tell you the truth, I didn’t really think I’d be able to travel. I put it on the list because I burned to go to Europe, but I’d never even been on an airplane and we’d lived in the same city for most of my life, aside from a two-month stint when our family followed my grandparents out to Temecula, California. My grandfather had a wild hair and opened a restaurant called Ed’s Kitchen, right on the highway, where my mother and grandmother worked as waitresses. My father hated it, couldn’t find a job, and we all took the train back home to Colorado Springs, and there I stayed. Endlessly dreaming of the Far Away.

It was the two months in California that ruined me. I was seven. We rode the train and ate oranges bought from a cart a man pushed down the aisle. I read and read and read, and when I wasn’t reading, I looked out the window at mesas and mountains and deserts. A terrible odor filled the car one night and my mother said it was a skunk that was run over. I saw a man in a sombrero, and declared us to be in Mexico. My mother said no, but what did she know? Once we arrived in California, we went to school in a building that had open hallways and palm trees. Palm trees! We ate our lunch on picnic tables outside. We went to the ocean, the gray and crashing beauty of which thereafter haunted my dreams. I played hide and go seek with my uncle in grass nearly as high as my head. I sat at the counter of my grandpa’s restaurant and eyed the pie safe and refused the quarters a man offered me, even though I didn’t see why I couldn’t have tips if my mother and grandmother got to take them.

And then we went home and my father found us a pink house to live in, and it was fine and beautiful, but forever after, I dreamed of travel. I wanted to see the whole world.

Time passed. Now and then, I got to take a road trip--to Seattle and San Francisco, where I walked along the beach by myself in the early morning, and Arizona, where I saw a man in a sombrero. I studied journalism with an eye toward being a foreign correspondent.

Then, you know, I fell in love, as we do. I had a baby who was great enough I couldn’t leave him to go wandering. I did write books, and once a year, I went to the RWA National Conference [LINK http://www.rwanational.org], which actually went to some very thrilling places. New York City—how I remember flying in over that familiar skyline the first time! Los Angeles. St. Louis during the big flood.

But I was writing historical romances and really needed to see England. I’m a hands-on kind of writer, and I wanted to see the trees and the birds. The light. Smell the air and feel the winds. I finally found the courage to arrange a trip to England and Ireland when my boys were in their early teens. My mother went with us. I arranged everything, everything through the Internet, and miraculously, it worked out beautifully. I think now I was very brave to do all that. We spent a week based in an apartment in Ealing, another in Ireland.

I was hooked. I remembered my old goal of seeing the world, and bought a map of the world to put on the wall in my office, and stuck a pin into it for each place I visited. Far away and close at hand—it doesn’t matter. I went to Telluride for the first time last September, and happily stuck that pin in my native state. A few weeks ago, I was in Minnesota for the first time (so beautiful), and even slid across the line to Wisconsin, where I ate lunch, so I got to put a pin there, too. The farthest away is New Zealand, and I’m pleased to see a diagonal line of pins from the far northwest of Scotland down through the southeast corner of France, like a fault line.

Where I go, I walk. And write—which is why my blog is called A Writer Afoot [LINK: http://awriterafoot.typepad.com]. Currently, my partner and I are planning trips to China (for him) and India, because I’ve been burning to visit for years (India, India, India!). I can’t wait to walk and write, write and walk in those Far Away Lands.

What I like about my world map, bristling with its pins, is the pleasure in seeing a dream materializing. The travel feeds my books, of course. A trip to Scotland a couple of years ago has been incredibly productive, and the Telluride trip last spring yielded a trilogy of romances for Silhouette Intimate Moments that begins this month with JULIET’S LAW [LINK: http://www.barbarasamuel.com/books-ruthwind.html].

But mainly, travel just feeds me. My heart, my soul. It makes that little girl happy. It makes the old woman I will be more interesting. It makes me, as I am, a more vigorous participant in the world. There was a moment on a hiking trip in France [LINK: http://www.barbarasamuel.com/columns-8.html], when I came down the narrow black steps of a homey old hotel in a tiny town in Provence. It was so exactly what that fifteen year old had dreamed of when she whispered Europe to herself, over and over, that I wanted to stop and do a little dance.

Now when someone says to me, “Oh, I so want to see Scotland/Romania/Australia/Tuscany,” I say, go. Go. GO! You will never, never regret it.

Is there a place you burn to visit? Or have you already visited a place you burned to see—and found it wanting? Or just exactly as you hoped, and more?