For two Wednesdays following today, readers will see the cryptic notice, “Barbara Kay will return,” where my column would otherwise be.
My regular readers will know that we are vacationing on the same timelessly beautiful beach in Maine that we’ve returned to every year since first discovering it 43 years ago. They may even remember, as I explained a few years ago in a column published (eerily) on 9/11/01, that my fear of serious travel has me known in my circle as the Untraveller.
By “serious” I don’t mean the occasional jaunt to Los Angeles or London; I mean the kind of far-flung destinations where you are advised to get shots for Dengue fever before leaving Canada, or memorize seemingly anodyne gestures to avoid, like showing the teeth while laughing, that may be considered sexually shameful to your exotic hosts, resulting in incarceration or worse.
Novelty has its charms, but I confess it; I love my beaten paths. The more beaten (and, of course, within driving distance) they are, the more lovable they are to me. I see a fixed vacation landscape as the sand grain in the pearl of collective family memory: Each same-but-unique annual visit takes a predictable shape, flowing over previous memories as a pristine nacreous layer adding lustre, depth, weight and value to the imperceptibly evolving jewel.
I’m not ideologically opposed to travel. I am more realistic, for example, than the proverbial caterpillar from the Punch cartoon who, espying a butterfly, mutters, “You’ll never get me up in one of those things.” I do realize that one is bound to go somewhere involving airplanes occasionally, and so my beaten paths also include certain in-continent destinations like Miami, which require me to leave terra firma for a few hours.
But how did I become the Untraveller, considering virtually everyone I know adores traveling and does as much of it as possible in ever more distant and exotic locales? This past weekend alone I spent time with one friend’s daughter bubbling with tales of her year in a Brazilian fishing village, another friend’s niece, a marine biologist excitedly anticipating her fall trip to the Antarctic where she will dive a kilometre under the ice cap (shudder), and I marvelled at the vivid photographic fruits—a teary elephant’s eye, lions scuffling, majestic, wind-rippled sand mountains—from some other friends’ recent Botswana animal and Namibian dune safari.
I finally found the vital clue to my Wanderexia in a news report of a scientific study that made the rounds a few weeks back about obese people. Apparently, most people will eat more and are more likely to put on weight if constantly in the company of fat friends whomping down heaped platefuls of junk food. But it’s the opposite for me. Fat people act as a cautionary brake on my appetite. It is thin people who make me despair and overeat. If I could always hang out with fat people, I would be whippet-thin. Alas for me, most of my friends are gym rats and lipophobes.
So that is the answer. All these years I have been hanging out with world travellers, hoping the travel virus would infect me, when it turns out that I should have been chilling with the 95% of the world’s population that never venture beyond their own borders. If only I had known! Too late now though. I can’t possibly catch up to my friends, who have been everywhere and seen everything.
But serious travel would be wasted on me anyway. The other day a new acquaintance—much younger than me with a mind-boggling history of globetrotting—told me he had visited 144 cities, but strangely enough had never yet been to New York. Upon hearing this, my heart leapt. For of course I have been to New York (a six-hour drive from Montreal)! Many many times! Ha! So there!
Oh dear. How superficial am I? My reaction tells me that travel, for me at least, is apparently 99% oneupmanship, 1% true pleasure. No worries. I shall simply switch gears and exploit the new zeitgeist. I’ll ask the editors to change my notice from “Barbara Kay will return” to “Barbara Kay leaves a smaller carbon footprint than you. Ha! So there!”
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