If travel demands freedom and spontaneity, parenthood would appear to require the opposite. Could this be why there seem to be surprisingly few fathers among the great travel writers of the 20th century? The editor of Intrepid Times, assisted by two prominent travel writers (who also happen to be dads), attempts to reconcile this contradiction.
Travel had been my obsession since the age of 17, when I spent my savings on a 2,000-kilometer ticket on Australia’s Greyhound bus network and bounced, alone, through lightning-scared mining towns. This set the pattern of my life; access to travel has been the one non-negotiable. Until the day my wife and I decided to buy a small house in the Polish countryside, and start something of a family.
First-time parenthood is an exhilarating and terrifying prospect for all who face it, and for those like me, there is an added fear. If travel is the source of your identity, not to mention the basis for your career, the source of your habits, and, hitherto, your only reliable path to happiness, how do you reinvent yourself as a stable, domestic parent?
Many of the great travel writers I have looked up to either never became fathers (Bruce Chatwin, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colin Thubron) or seemed willing to leave their children for months at a time while they explored the world and created their masterpieces (Paul Theroux as he undertook the journey that would become The Great Railway Bazaar, Peter Mathieson as he wandered in Himalayas in search of The Snow Leopard).
Are the two callings fundamentally incompatible? Does the transition from traveler to father mean the abandonment of the former identity?
Moving on the moves – early steps on a train in Poland.
Almost a year and a half into fatherhood, with my toddler raining destruction down on a bright red toy car to my left as I write this, I am still wrestling with this conundrum. And so I reached out to two authors in the travel writing community whom I know to be fellow dads and asked them a simple question: How has fatherhood changed your relationship with travel?
“Fatherhood changed my life completely.” Ash Bhardwaj, the author of Why We Travel – 12 Reasons to Travel and What They Can Teach You About Life, who also discussed fatherhood on the Travel Writing Podcast, shared. “It’s the most important thing in my life and I don’t want to be an absent father, so I now travel for shorter periods and less frequently. There’s no research trips to discover stories; work-travel has to pay. But it’s taken me in new directions; having kids forced me to reflect on my travel motivations, which ultimately led me to writing “Why We Travel.” Wherever possible, I take the family with me. I took my wife and our first child (Lyra) to Ecuador, New Zealand and Australia on assignment, and it was great. But taking Lyra (now 3) and Avery (4 months) for a two-week, six-stop trip to Vietnam was definitely Type 2 fun. More lessons in what makes good travel!”
What Ash has described squares well with much of my early travel experience, whether trying to find pram-friendly pavements in Tirana or soothing a wailing infant under the plaintive gaze of commuters in Tokyo. You may not really be feeling giddy with joy or excitement at the time; in fact, it may be a grueling struggle, but you will ultimately look back on the experience happily as something from which you learned, grew, and contributed as a human.
Sometimes, the joy comes later, and sometimes it comes in the moment. Many years ago in Tbilisi, Georgia, my phone vibrated in my pocket as I stepped into the small cabin of a Soviet-era Ferris wheel that overlooks the town from a towering hill. I fell into the work email, which seemed important at the time, and stepped out of the cabin some five minutes later, having missed the entire ride. My daughter would never have allowed such foolishness. Our children anchor us in the moment as wonderfully present travel companions. As Tom Sykes, the author of The Years of Traveling Anxiously, shared:
“When I started travelling with my toddler daughter Amara, a William Wordsworth quote came back to me: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Amara hadn’t experienced enough of our imperfect world yet to develop the anxiety, cynicism and pessimism that can affect adult travellers – including me – to a greater or lesser extent. On sometimes logistically challenging trips to Dorset, London and Atlanta, Georgia, she’s been patient, calm, jolly and curious about everything – and an inspiration to me to be a better traveller.”
Ash and Tom point to something that I fiercely hope can be true; That parenthood can be not the end of travel, but merely the gateway to a new variation of it. Something equally rich and rewarding, sometimes after the fact, and sometimes during the moment itself. At the same time, there still seems to me to be a fundamental contradiction between the demands of travel, particularly as a travel writer, and the demands of the parent. Travel demands freedom, openness to spontaneity. The great travel adventures occur when you allow yourself to be seized by the moment, to be shown something you did not even imagine could exist. As a travel writer, you come home with this story and open the gates for others to have this experience.
As a parent, particularly of young children (or one young child, as is the extent of my very limited experience so far), travel demands a new level of planning and control. The needs of infants are well known and non-negotiable, and the risk inherent in spontaneity is one thing for a willing and seasoned adult, but the equation is different for a vulnerable child who did not elect to come on for the trip. How do you feel that sense of possibility, that lift of uninhibited wonder, when you’re counting nappies and calculating the hours between naps? Could there be some pathway to reconciling this apparent contradiction?
First encounter with the ocean, somewhere in Spain.
Already, as my daughter evolves from babyhood into the first glimmers of small personhood, I see her making her own selections. From trivial preferences about food and books to the way she seizes on and forms words, the literal grammar of her existence. Parents learn, I am told, that they are not so much shaping their children, but merely allowing them to find their own path, to grow into who they are supposed to be. This disruption of the illusion of control feels relevant to travel. The new traveler clings anxiously to rigid itineraries. The seasoned wanderer allows the journey to take him by the hand and guide him to fascination and discovery. Likewise with parenthood? If travel teaches us to surrender control, could the lessons of travel apply to parenthood and, logically, vice versa?
The traveler has to learn what they can control and what they can’t. They are constantly reminded of their own ignorance. They experience long spells of tedium punctuated by moments of terror and fascination. They are constantly questioning assumptions and prior beliefs. Their days feel like months, packed with an astonishing surplus of memories, while the months recede like towns behind a bullet train as time moves at a mystifying, terrifying pace. Maybe travel and parenthood are not so different after all?
