Also by Kevin Oderman
White Vespa
Going
How Things Fit Together
Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium
© 2015 by Kevin Oderman
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Etruscan Press
Wilkes University
84 West South Street
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
(570) 408-4546
Published 2015 by Etruscan Press
Cover design, interior design, and typesetting by L. Elizabeth Powers
The text of this book is set in Adobe Garamond
First Edition
15 16 17 18 19 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Oderman, Kevin, 1950- author.
[Essays. Selections]
Cannot stay : essays on travel / Kevin Oderman. -- First edition.
pages cm
SBN 978-0-9897532-8-9
1. Oderman, Kevin, 1950---Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Oderman, Kevin, 1950-White amber. Container of (work): II. Title.
G465.O3225 2015
910.4--dc23
2014037085
Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.
This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.
for Ambrose Oderman, father and traveler
We all walk the long road, cannot stay.
—Eddie Vedder, “The Long Road”
Cannot Stay
Puppet Heads
Selling
At Koré’s
Of Corse
Time to Kill: Cambodia
A House Fitting
Colors
Trips Not Taken
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the journals where these essays first appeared: “White Amber,” “Judith and Harold,” “Puppet Heads,” “Waiting for the Bombs,” and “At Koré’s” in the Northwest Review; “Time to Kill: Cambodia” and “A House Fitting” in the Southwest Review; “Selling” in the North Dakota Quarterly; “Colors” in Green Mountains Review; “Of Corse” in the Tusculum Review; and “Trips Not Taken” in Shadowbox.
I am indebted to the Fulbright Scholar Program and to West Virginia University for time and a warrant to travel; to Phil Brady, Jackie Fowler, Bill Schneider, and the entire inspired tribe at Etruscan, who made this book possible.
A profound bow to my old mentors who, in classrooms or in letters, awakened me: Judah Bierman, Georgia Crampton, Donald Pearce, Sherman Paul, and Guy Davenport.
I have been supported in all this, the traveling and the writing, by friends. You cannot know how much your friendship has mattered. Finally, how lucky I am to have found her, my touchstone at home and occasional companion on the road, Sara Pritchard, aka Delta B. Horne.
::
Check in. A subdued line of passengers, everybody waiting their turn. Someone pushes a small bag forward, eyeing with a smirk the woman with the luggage trolley. It’s always so. And yet, even that woman is traveling light, leaving behind far more than she could ever pack into a few suitcases. By necessity, the traveler gives up on things, preferring for a time the experience of going. And part of the attraction of travel, it turns out, is getting free of all that stuff, which, however desirable in prospect, encumbers you. Having left almost everything behind, you walk lighter in the new place, nothing to tend to but the few things in your luggage.
Thinking about travel, it’s easy to skip over the actual getting there. The hasty curbside goodbye under the sign for departures. The bout of heartache. Few people enjoy the airports and the long flights, over seas. Over there, you think, the real traveling will begin, but even pushing through the heavy doors at the airport, you’ve already begun to be someone else. You hardly notice, perhaps, the subtle change, the traveler emerging from behind your at-home self. Traveling by air, you suffer a series of familiar rituals. You’re searched, you wait, you pass through one straight gate after another. You’re bound to your seat. The flight attendants repeat the grave incantations. You’re asked to consider the dire what ifs. Then you’re flying, actually flying, and you succumb to the Mesmer thrum of the jets. Libations are poured. In a spell, perhaps, you try to imagine your passage as seen from the ground—something silver, needling its way through the sky. The trance deepens.
If air travel seems no more than a parody of ceremony, it works. It not only takes you to a different place, in the obvious sense, but traveling, you undergo a metamorphosis. The person you are at home no longer feels entirely convincing. Perhaps because you’re a bit disoriented, your at-home self suddenly seems at least half a habit, mostly made in response to circumstances you’ve now left behind—your everyday life. Stepping outside the terminal, you feel it might be possible to just walk away from all that. Some feel this, I fear, as an invitation to bad behavior, to run amok out of hearing. Some do. But you might feel the real chances are inward, that in travel you have the opportunity to recall a younger you, a self less hemmed in by social identities. And you find in traveling that the world comes to you less filtered. Your senses seem sharper—like that happy moment when you try on the new glasses with the new prescription, and you find you can see again the way you did when you were young. You walk out of the terminal, the world buzzing around you, and you strike out into it, just a traveler.
About twenty years ago I was given the chance to live for a season in Thessaloniki, in Greece, and I took it, going alone. I turned off the path of the life I’d been living. I traveled a great deal from Thessaloniki, on the Greek mainland, out to the islands, the Sporades, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, up to Bulgaria, and twice into Turkey.