Some thoughts on travel. Elvis Costello said, probably paraphrasing someone else, “ Travel should expand your mind, but not so much that you cant get your head through the door.” A humble traveler is the rarest of creatures, so I talk about this with trepidation. When Im among those who are of greater means than myself, particularly those who were born that way, I often get the feeling they are equally amused, disdainful, and a bit horrified by both the places Ive been and the manner in which I existed there. On the other hand, when among those less fortunate than myself, I can feel the cold settle between us the moment I say something like “ well, when I was in Paris…….”. For many, the idea of ever seeing Paris is as foreign as the country itself, while for others, the idea of seeing it from the underbelly, which is the view I usually get, is even more foreign. I can honestly say that I have been to forty countries on four continents and never once slept in a hotel. Mostly hostels, a few pensions and ryokans , in private homes with a room to let, crashed on a lot of couches with friends and quite a few total strangers, slept on park benches, in bus stations, in train depots, lived in airports between flights, and slept on the ground a lot. I confess that I would rather sleep on the ground, whether in the forest or the desert or on the beach and so long as its not raining or freezing cold, than stay in a four-star hotel. I know where I belong. I come by this wanderlust naturally. My childhood was spent crisscrossing the country in a pickup truck and sometimes a semi. My father was a horsetrader, one of the last of a dying breed of Americans who made a living off the final gasp of the nineteenth century. It was nothing to be in Missouri Friday night, in Oklahoma by morning, Illinois by Sunday afternoon, and back home with a load of horses before the sun came up Monday. Coffee from a thermos, truck-stop breakfast, and sandwiches to go, sleeping in the horse trailer or the backseat of our duelly truck. In the winter offseason, he drove a truck for a company out of Columbus that had him on a regular route to Mexico via El Paso, trucking tomatoes up to the Eastern Seaboard. My mother, a seemingly quiet farmwife and secretary at the local high school for thirty-five years, commenced traveling the world as soon as she retired, kicking off with a week at the Louvre and moving on to visiting family in Switzerland, then bouncing around Europe, the Caribbean and Central America like a footloose teenager. My grandparents were serious world travelers and dedicated gastronomes who planned their trips around food destinations. My grandfather, a metallurgist for the huge Swiss-based Foote Mineral Company, traveled six continents gathering mineral samples for the development of new alloys, riding camels into the Rub-Al-Khali and following yak trains deep into Mongolia when it was still dangerous Red China. One of my early travel memories is driving cross-country with them when I was about five or six, wondering at the Great Plains after a lifetime spent in our claustrophobic hills, visiting National Parks and restaurants along the way, camping a lot and staying in Holidomes ( remember those?) now and then. Eating steak at the Roundhouse in Chicago in the old trainyards. Having breakfast at the Bright Angel Lodge on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Staying with their friends in San Diego who had lived in Kenya for years, their beachfront home filled with mounted antelope heads and carved wooden masks. An elephant foot footstool. Eating my first Mexican food and liking the tacos but not the guacamole. My earliest childhood goal in life, and always my lifelong dream, was and is to set foot on all seven continents. It still is, and I refuse to die til Ive been to Antarctica. One of the more interesting aspects of my life as a chef is that I didn’t choose this career for love of food, but for love of travel. Immediately after bailing out of the stable life I tried on for size after college, I realized that I could go anywhere at any time and get a job in the kitchen, which came with the added perks of free meals, free drinks, and waitresses, who tend to have the rather desirable trait of being emotionally damaged . When I starting doing resort work shortly thereafter, it came with housing also, everything you need in one package. For years, I bounced between beaches in the summer and ski resorts in the winter, getting paid well to live where tourists paid well to go. But the true revelation came with the off season, between contracts. What do you do with two months off and 5 grand in your pocket? If you’re young, free, and single, you spend a few months living in a tent and mountain biking in Moab, or explore our National Parks and Wilderness areas ( one of the only truly great ideas our government ever had, but don’t worry, they’re busy dismantling that program. They’ll be paved and filled with Starbucks soon), or a month camping on the beach down in Mexico. Even better, back in the good old days before the Euro, when the Dollar was worth a damn and Americans weren’t looked down on like cockroaches (except in France), you could hop a standby flight to Europe or Asia for next to nothing and live like a king, albeit a small king, until you had to go back to work. I remember an oceanfront hostel in the Greek islands that included meals and enough ouzo to tranquilize a donkey for the outrageous sum of four dollars a day. At least, I kind of remember; Santorini is a blur because of that damn ouzo. But what do you do when you have to grow up, as most cooks/chefs do sometime in their late thirties, and still only make as much money as you did when you were in your twenties ( again, like most cooks/chefs do)? There are two options: settle down, get normal, sell out, get boring; or, live simply and keep on living well. I think you all know which option we have chosen. A glimpse into our private life reveals a lot about our philosophy. We live in the first home we have ever owned, which we bought when I was forty-seven. It’s a thirty-year-old 850 sq ft plain little house, on a nice chunk of private land on top of a mountain at the end of a dead-end dirt road that has potholes big enough to lose a horse in. At the time we bought it, it was the second cheapest house for sale in Mon Co. Over the last year, we converted the garage into a great room and built a new barn/garage, almost entirely by ourselves and with a lot of recycled and free materials. Our house is filled with old hand-me-down furniture, rocks and shells and coral, skulls and bones and fossils, hundreds of records and thousands of books. Its affordable to heat because its compact, and we don’t have air-conditioning. When its hot, we open the windows like people did for the thousand years before the late twentieth century. We live outside Morgantown, expensive by Appalachian standards but dirt cheap compared to most places we’ve lived. Our annual property taxes are less than our monthly electric bill was in Seattle. I drive a Ford E-150 Econoline with no frills except a boomin sound system, and Alegria drives a fifteen-year-old Jeep. Theyre both paid for, our car insurance is forty bucks a month combined, and we’ll drive them until the wheels fall off. We don’t have cable, never had it, never will. Im working on the first computer Ive ever owned, leftover from the Richwood Grill office, and struggling mightily to learn how to use it. I have the ten-dollar-a-month cellphone plan with the free flip-phone, and Alegria’s is only slightly better. We have a big garden, and I kill a deer or two every year for meat to supplement the food we buy. We never eat processed food or fast food; real food is fairly cheap, all things considered. Our kids don’t have the latest toys and gadgets, they have wooden blocks, books, woods, a pond, and a pony. Although we have insurance for our children and some untouchable life savings, we have no retirement plan; I love to work, and I will work till I die. When we dine out, we stick to ethnic food and country diners. Fine dining, and by that I mean anyplace that has the gall to refer to itself as such, is almost always a rip-off (trust me, Ive been in the belly of the beast long enough to know), so unless we know someone involved with the establishment, we don’t waste our time or money. An example: last year, a local ‘fine dining’ place charged $150 per person for their Valentines Day dinner ( in little ol’ Morgantown, the same in New York or DC would have been double that); add two cocktails and tip and that’s over four hundred bucks. A few years ago I spent three glorious weeks in Peru backpacking from the Andes down to the Amazon for less than four hundred dollars. Now, who’s living large here? I suppose its a matter of perspective. Ive been to every state in America multiple times, watched the Northern Lights dance over Denali, seen the full moon rise over Mt Tukunuhkavits, spent Christmas Eve alone in a ghost town on top of the Rockies, eaten mushrooms around a campfire under the Redwoods, gotten falling-down drunk in Key West, seen ghosts in the French Quarter, been in jail in Texas, seen a show at the Whiskey on Sunset Strip, rode out an earthquake, felt a tornado pass in the darkness of a Nebraska storm, slept on the deck of a freighter in a rolling storm in the Gulf of Alaska, ridden a horse through the Sonora, eaten lobster at a picnic table beside the water it came from, heard wolves calling and elk bugling, and been eaten alive by mosquitos in more places than I can remember. Ive swam in the Mediterranean Sea and the Mississippi River, in the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Indian oceans, spent solstice in an abandoned castle in Bavaria, drank beer in Brugges, ate fish n’ chips in London, hallucinated in Amsterdam, prayed in St Peters Cathedral, watched the sunrise over the Acropolis and Machu Picchu and Mesa Verde , slept in the infamous Chunking Mansions of Kowloon, been bitten by fish off Koh Phi Phi, a snake in the Everglades, and a poisonous spider deep in the Amazon. Ive not just lived through it all, Ive lived hard, and Ive lived well. Thats better than a stock portfolio, a mcmansion on a quarter-acre, and a safe secure future any day.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 14:03:59 +0000
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