Homage to the Travel Partner

I read recently that the root of the word travel originates from the same as the Latin travail meaning “to suffer.” When I learned this, I felt like a Hindu who’d finally accomplished the lifelong quest for enlightenment. I never know why it is that travel is so addictive, when it can also be so incredibly torturous. In retrospect, [but never at the time!] it is best to laugh at the unsightly, irritating, and otherwise unflattering sides of a person’s character that come out only when living out of a suitcase.

Let me introduce you to Deah, a show-stopping and overwhelmingly-adored friend of mine. One summer, at the end of which I had planned a 3-month backpacking trip to Australia, I convinced Deah to move to my small town and work with me. To be clear, she didn’t so much move into my town, as into my bedroom, where there was just enough room to parallelize our twin size beds like Fred and Wilma Flintstone. For three months we worked together, commuted together, drank rye together, and cycled through REMs together. Midway through this time, I began my mission to convince her to join me on my trip. As I so love to do, I eventually got my way and her seat on our flight was secured.

Math is not my forte, but in the interest of numbers, let me clarify that this would mean a cumulated 6 months of uninterrupted time together … that’s 4,320 hours. Me and Deah – eating, sleeping, Greyhounds, pickups, vans, jobs, bars, poverty, peanut butter sandwiches, lost wallets, tents, wild boars, snakes, Europeans, and instant coffee – we shared it all.

I have a theory: there are absolutely NO two people on the planet who can spend this much time together and still admit to enjoying one another’s company, still have anything at all to talk about, not notice every irritating habit of the other and be able to focus on anything besides that weird whistling noise her nose makes when she’s zoned out reading a book.

All of this time seemed to come to a head in our last two weeks, once all the other people we’d met and traveled with had carried on, and we found there was nothing remaining to distract us from one another. Neither of us being morning people, it was often noon before one word was spoken between us. Keep in mind, we were backpackers; we could sleep as late as we liked and had nowhere to be besides the beach, so it remains unclear why mornings were so difficult.

One morning, in Newcastle, we had booked a whale watching trip. This meant an hour long bus ride from our hostel, and that we had to be out of bed before noon. We went about our routine of making breakfast, getting ready, finding the right bus– all the while communicating with caveman-style grunts rather than the spoken word— and then selecting our seats across the aisle from one another so we didn’t have to be too close. We only unclenched our jaws long enough to sip our coffee, staring straight ahead and acting as if we didn’t even know the other existed. After some time had passed, I heard an odd gurgling noise coming from Deah’s side of the aisle. I looked, and she had somehow choked on her coffee and in order to recover, spewed a mouthful all over the floor and the back of the seat in front of her. Dying to laugh but consumed by fear, I just turned away again, resuming staring straight ahead, deadpan.

A while later on the Bus Ride That Wouldn’t End, staring out the side window I finally accomplished my long quest to spot a wild koala in all of its inebriated glory. Excited, I turned to Deah, declaring “I just saw a koala in a tree!” She looked at me, with the Look of Death to which we’d both grown so accustomed, never said a word, and turned back away. To this day, neither of us is quite sure why my koala spotting was so irritating to her.

There comes a point as a backpacker that you begin to resent your pack with every part of your being. The encumbrance created, the pain in your shoulders, the limitation to freedom, the getting stuck in doorways to city buses thereby causing dozens of Sydney commuters to utter death threats in your direction … travel is suffering indeed. Being somewhat of a minimalist [and maybe just a bit lazy,] this meant that I would intentionally leave behind whatever wasn’t absolute necessary for my survival. Hostels in my wake would collect shirts, books, CDs, and shoes… or they WOULD HAVE collected these things, if Deah weren’t also in my wake. I wouldn’t call her a hoarder—per say—she just didn’t like seeing anything go to waste and was slightly more economical than myself.

And so, by the end of our trip, my rudimentary pack was sunken in and hungry looking, like an oversized t-shirt hanging on the bones of an anorexic girl. Deah’s, however, was nothing short of miraculous. Like Mary Poppins, she could pull out canoes, umbrellas, elementary school teachers, and canvases of artwork. But that wasn’t all! There was also that giant black duffel bag that she lugged with her up and down the East coast of Australia, the sight of which would likely still invoke anger in me, five years later. (Please don’t ask why this made ME angry, since it was HER who chose to carry it!) This bag served not only as Deah’s library—housing everything from self-help books to her Bible to fiction and fantasy—but also her winter clothing storage, which some might say is unnecessary upkeep in the middle of an Australian summer. Everything that I would leave behind, Deah would claim, and it would be invited in to her very multi-faceted Duffel of Torture.

Even without the impediment of the luggage, Deah is the sort of person for whom they invented the phrase “she would lose her head if it weren’t attached.” Oftentimes, we would fly into a state of Deah Panic, whether over a lost hostel key or a misplaced wallet, and would not resume normalcy until said issue had been resolved. In Airlie Beach, where we lived in the same hostel for a month while commuting via bus and ferry to one of the Whitsunday Islands for work, we experienced The Case of the Lost Wallet. In a foreign country, Deah was right indeed to panic about a loss of identity, as it were. The entire public transit system came to know her by name, as she was forever wandering off to find a payphone to check if the wallet had turned up. The bus drivers and ferry captains practically send Deah Christmas cards to this day, she became so familiar to them. We lived this stage of our transitory lives in a hostel room shared with two friends from Finland and two from England. Our entire room was torn apart, nearly to the point that you could actually see the bedbugs buried inside the mattresses. After several days of this panic, the wallet reappeared, under Deah’s bunk laying patiently, waiting to be found amidst the rest of her stuff. (I should just say that my favorite thing about Deah is that, while still living at home with her parents, she slept every night on the couch because the bed in her room was so buried in clothing that she couldn’t find it if she’d tried.)

With all the time we had together, I eventually stopped reacting when Deah would lose something, figuring one of us should remain level-headed and try to preserve a healthy blood pressure. At least this is the justification I used to avoid acknowledging that I was simply being a heartless bastard amidst her turmoil. One day on the last leg of our journey something else went missing and Deah went fanatic. Having long since learned not to worry, I laid on my bunk reading a book, completely and totally ignoring her screeches and erratic breathing. So effective was my ignorance, I hardly noticed when she would periodically roll me over to check underneath of me, flip my mattress and hurl me to the floor, or throw her Duffel of Torture on top of me, causing internal bleeding … I just kept reading. She emptied her entire pack onto the floor, flinging things around until our room looked like a warzone, underwear and tank tops hanging from light fixtures and flung over the curtain rod, canoes and schoolteachers exiled to the top bunk. I simply read on. Eventually concluding the missing items were not in her pack, she tore into mine [I decided it best not to protest.] Soon all of my earthly possessions were also strewn about the room, my pack looking more vacant than ever before. I sensed she had given up when I looked up from my book to see her sitting dejectedly, cross-legged on the floor among all our clothes, only visible from the armpits up. Setting down my book, I said disinterestedly “Did you check the outside pocket of your purse?”

She checked the pocked, as advised, and there were all the missing items.

Yes, it is always interesting to see the side of a person that comes out during travel. I am certainly no better, and fear that stories retold on me might be much less hysterical than about Deah. In fact, ‘bitchy’ might be the first word that comes to mind.

So my Deahr, I thank you for the adventure and your ability to laugh along with me! This is my pledge to you, should we ever travel together again:

I will not point out that the Australia hoodie in the Chinatown market is ¼ the price you paid at the Tourist shop; I will panic when you panic over lost items; I will permit laughter when I back our van into a tree; I will never look for another koala and should I accidentally see one, I will not tell you; I will wake you up when you snore on the beach instead of smirking and moving my towel further away, pretending not to know you; I will grab one handle of your Duffel of Torture to share the weight (similar to the time we carried that box of beer between us down the highway, right up until the point that our stumbles went the opposite direction and we tore the box in half); I will never again try directing you home from the bar, due to my incredible lack of respect for the difference between North and South; I will not mock you or reject you when you sunburn yourself so badly that a third of your body is covered in white blisters, and finally, I will never again laugh at you while you are choking.

Love you, Deahr!