I traveled often with my father in the last years of his life. He called me his sherpa, alluding to my baggage-lugging skills, but also making light of the fact that he really couldn’t travel by himself anymore. Not that he wouldn’t have liked to. Well into his early nineties, he had continued to drive, alone in his Subaru, from Ohio to New England and back again each summer. When the family finally said “enough,” he harrumphed and stalled but ultimately gave in. Having won that battle, I felt the least I could do was to accompany him to places he wanted to go. He was a few months short of 99 when he acknowledged, “I think my days of solo travel are behind me.”
Now it’s over. After Dad died in December, there was a final flurry of air and road trips as the extended family gathered, first in Ohio and then in Rhode Island. Since then I’ve been back in DC. It’s been good to catch my breath, catch up on work, and have some time to sit with my feelings. Lately, though, something like restlessness is edging its way toward the surface.
In part, it’s spring. In Rock Creek Park, where Bill and I walk most days, the migrant songbirds are starting to appear. DC is located within the Atlantic Flyway, and Rock Creek Park is a migrant trap, a kind of highway service plaza for birds traveling north or south. In the past few days I’ve spotted a wood thrush, a Louisiana waterthrush, and a yellow-rumped warbler, along with blue-gray gnatcatchers and finches. More species will arrive in May – though climate change and habitat loss mean the number of songbirds in the park is declining year by year.
Why we move
In some ways, bird migrations are like human migrations. Birds migrate to where abundant food and nesting locations can be found. For many neotropical species, that means a long-haul flight in spring to nesting grounds in the United States and Canada. Temperature is a factor, but it’s mainly about finding resources for survival and a safe space. So, too, for many people on the move.
But animal and human migrations differ in important ways. A wood thrush heads north from Central America in late winter, but not of its own free will. It follows its genetic programming and cues from the environment – changes in day length, temperature, food supply. It embarks on a 3,000-mile journey without making a conscious decision to do so and without the least idea why. People, on the other hand, make choices: when to move, where to move, how long to stay, whether and when to return. It’s part of what makes us human.
A window of time
So my urge to move is in some ways innate, but it also reflects the stage of life where I find myself. I’ll miss traveling with my dad. But the thought occurs to me: with my childrearing and parent-escorting duties completed, I can go where and when I want. I can travel with Bill or on my own, see family or friends, explore new places or revisit favorite ones. To the extent that I’m still working for pay, I can do it from my laptop, from anywhere.
And there’s this: I’m 70. I’m healthy and mobile, as Bill is also, despite being a decade farther along. We travel both together and separately. But for how long? For a while, I hope, knowing there are no guarantees. Mobility limitations will set in sooner or later for both of us, and the window of opportunity for travel will narrow, then close.
Travel then and now
When I say travel, I don’t mean the kind where you’re chauffeured in a tour bus, peering out the window at exotic places, alighting to buy souvenirs or take in a view. Or, heaven forbid, where you’re packed into a cruise ship with 3,000 strangers, a retirement staple but a horrifying notion to introverts like me.
At the same time, I’m not about to reprise the kind of travel I did 50 years ago: finding my way through West Africa, mostly by public transport, mostly alone. I did this while a study-abroad student in Senegal and later as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. Those explorations changed my worldview, showing me how other people’s realities differed from everything I had known. They built my self-reliance and my trust in myself. They are too much for me now.
It’s time for something less challenging, more contemplative. Hiking, birding, kayaking in calm waters: these are moments when I’m at peace. I want to visit family and friends across the country and beyond, and I want to return to places I’ve known. In March we held a second memorial service in Providence, where I grew up. We stayed near Wayland Square, and I was able to push aside the visual incursion of Starbucks, Whole Foods, and CVS to picture the neighborhood of 60 years ago, the poky shops where my mother would take me to buy school clothes every fall. I don’t know why this kind of memory work feels necessary. I don’t even know if it is. But perhaps it may help me stitch together the disconnected threads of my life into, if not a seamless fabric, some kind of patchwork.
My bags are (almost) packed
In mid-May I’ll visit my daughter Cynthia and her husband in Canada. We’ll catch the Spring Birding Festival in Prince Edward County, a large headland jutting south from Lake Ontario’s northern shore. Another migrant trap, the area is the first resting place for birds after their 50-mile flight across the lake’s open waters. Next up is a Midwest trip, to Michigan and Minnesota to see old friends. These friends knew my father well, and spending time with them may help me close the circle of his life. Then this summer, Bill and I will hit the road. We’ll end up at the island in Maine where my family gathers each summer and scatter part of Dad’s ashes in the tiny memorial garden overlooking the sea.
And come fall, we have … an election. Given the singular importance of Pennsylvania to the outcome, I hope to spend some time there, knocking on doors. It’s too soon to make plans, but I’ll post updates in this space.
Third-age travel isn’t like twenty-something travel, at least not for me. I’m no longer fearless. I want to see new places, but wandering alone through strange landscapes, immersing myself in the unfamiliar, testing my courage, is no longer what I need to do. I still have a great deal to experience, but not much left to prove.