The Long Way There

一次放弃打折机票、改乘慢车与渡轮的旅行，路上遇见的人，以及后来写成的那篇稿子。

The Ticket

For years I believed that a journey began the moment you bought the ticket. That sounds foolish in print, but I grew up somewhere where distance was the only thing worth measuring, and the cheapest seat was always the right one. My employer was a large institution: a committee of directors, a floor of management who spoke on the phone all day and never once looked out of the window. They covered the trip, so the fee felt like somebody else's problem. I filled in the form, read the instruction printed on the back, and pressed the button. Somewhere in a database a machine gave me a claim number, as if the whole business were a small and temporary illness.

Air travel had become so ordinary that the word had lost its whole weight. You fly, you sleep, you land, and nothing happens to you. What I wanted that winter was a slower experience. An editor I had worked with asked me to write about the art of going nowhere. "Please," she said, and she never said please to anyone, "take the long way, and tell me what you find."

I opened the map. The short route was a flight from the capital, a bus, a taxi — six hours door to door, an entire day saved. The long route was a night on a rail line to the coast, two days on a ship, and then, because the ferry had been cancelled for engine trouble, a small boat belonging to a man named Seamus. He was a veteran of that crossing. Looking at the water, he told me that the sea takes a wise man's judgment along with a fool's, and that I should not stand up on the deck for the first hour.

I cancelled the flight. In a foreign language the word is heavier than in mine, and I felt it in my stomach for days. Then I bought the train ticket, packed one bag, and told my mother I would be gone for five weeks. She said, "Then write to me every day." It was a constraint I had not expected and could not argue with. Five weeks, in the term she used, meant a long time.

The Night Train

The airline desk in my own city had offered me a seat beside a member of a small travelling committee of engineers, all of them bound for the same international conference. I told them my plans had changed. "Changed?" said the woman at the desk. "Cancelled?" I said yes. "Then I will remove your name from the list," she said, and did it, and looked pleased with herself, as if a system had been tidied.

I had hired a taxi for the station three days earlier and cancelled that too, which is the general way of travel for a man who cannot decide. The platform at the central station was a long low roof with a hundred people standing under it in the wrong shoes. Above it the sky was the pale pink of a thing that has not decided whether it is morning.

Night trains are strange. The arrival time is printed on your ticket in a language you can read, and for eleven hours the world outside the window is mostly your own reflection. I slept badly and woke at the border.

There were two queues at the border, and only one of them was moving. The immigration officer was a young man who had learned English from a writer nobody there had ever read, and he asked what I did. I said I was a writer. "Then you will not like this country," he said, and stamped the page, and waved me through. It was the kindest warning I have ever received. He stamped with such style, too, one quick movement, as if passport control were a performance he had perfected. His uniform was newly pressed and the badge on it was gold, and it seemed to represent something about the state that mattered very much to him. He asked where I was going, and I said overseas, and he surprisingly asked the same question twice, as if the word might operate differently the second time.

An aircraft went over very low, so low that everyone on the platform looked up. Nobody said anything. In my country an aircraft that low is a warning. Here it was ordinary, and the ordinariness shocked me more than the plane. The significance of a thing, I learned that night, is not a property of the thing. It is a relation between the thing and the person looking at it.

Signs and Slow Water

By the second day I had a guide, a young man called Ferdi who had driven a taxi for eleven years and knew the coast the way I know my own street. Tourism had arrived before me. There was a tourist office with a plastic model of the harbour, a row of visitor centres, and a tour of the old fort that ran three times a day in four languages. The town had exactly one attraction, and eleven agencies were competing to sell it to you. The local survey office, next door, offered a free map of the walking routes, which I still hang up in my flat.

I bought the first ticket. Our guide pointed out a photograph in the entrance hall from 1911 and asked whether I knew who was in it. I did not. He told me it was a ship, and that his grandmother had worked in the hotel behind it, and then he stopped talking. This is the general shape of a conversation here: a fact, and then a small door, and then quiet.

My camera failed on the third day, and Ferdi lent me his. It was heavier than mine and made a click like a coin dropping. In the pictures that came back I looked like a fellow passenger on somebody else's holiday. It amazed me how quickly a place can become a habit. I complained about the film, and he laughed and said, in English, "Every place has a broken camera. That is the characteristic of a place." Then he added, moreover, that my camera was not broken, only reluctant, which I have thought about a lot since.

The coast here does not relate to the sea the way a coast is supposed to. It left the town and turned inland, and the sea came up and took the town instead. A hill of grey stone stands where the harbour should be. Along the shore the water is raw green, cold enough to hurt, and small fishing vessels come in at dusk with their lights on early. I ate raw fish that night, and a grain of salt sat on my lip for an hour, and I did not mind it at all.

On the beach below the old fort I met an old immigrant woman whose family had come here three generations ago, from a country I had never heard of, and who spoke a mixture of two languages that I could not match to any I knew. She asked where I was from, and I said my country, and she said, "Abroad?" as if the word itself were a joke. I became, for the length of an evening, her ally in an argument I did not fully understand. She then talked for forty minutes without pause, and I understood perhaps a fifth of it, and it was the most funny and most moving conversation of my life. She gave me a package of dried fish wrapped in paper, and refused money for it, and then insured me, in the tone of a mother, that I would eat it tonight and not tomorrow. She also mailed me a card every month for a year, and each one began with the same aggressive joke about my handwriting. I ate the fish that night, standing in the cold, and the cry of the gulls around me was extremely loud.

The Way Through

We sailed the next morning at four, and I was sick, and the sun came up anyway. By ten o'clock we were past the last headland and there was nothing in front of us but ocean and depth, an adventure in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning mostly that I was cold and bored. There is a wide kind of calm that comes from having nothing to look at and nothing to decide. Your pace slows and then your thinking slows with it, and after a while you can perceive things you were too busy to notice on land: the exact figure of the horizon, the way a golf course on a distant island looks like a stain, the fact that the power of the sun on water changes every twenty minutes and nobody notices. The source of all that light, I decided, must remain a question for later.

We landed at a town with no reason to exist except a historic church and a forest. I had booked a room over a pub where a woman played a guitar and a singer sang badly and well, in that order. Over the second beer a man explained that the local football tournament had been cancelled, and then the whole pub complained about it for an hour. I understood perhaps a third of the words. It was the best hour of the trip. There is a tension in a room full of strangers who are all complaining in the same language, and the tension is not bad. It is the sound of a symbol everyone understands without needing a definition. The whole evening shifted, at about eleven, into singing, and nobody decided it and nobody could have stopped it.

The road inland went alongside a river, up through a valley where the rock formation on the left looked like a wave that had stopped. Two villages sit three miles apart, and between them a path split in two and I took the wrong one, and walked an hour before I could distinguish between being lost and simply being new. At a farm I asked for water and the farmer's daughter carried it up in a plastic pail, and I drank from it and it tasted of bone. She watched me with close attention and I was afraid, for no reason, to say thank you too quickly, as if she might read it. I have subsequently learned, from a letter, that she had an attachment to a brother in another country, which is probably where the first question came from.

Above us was a mountain with snow on it in spring, and below the path a reserve full of deer who did not move when I passed. The desert on the far side of the ridge looked mainly like a sand-coloured lake, and I walked three inches of it and then sat down in the heat. My own fear, which had been running quietly under everything since the airport, finally relaxed. Not gone. Just relaxed. I think a strange place eases that feeling in most people, and I do not know why.

The Long Way There

It took five days to reach the town at the end, not five hours, and I had a tent, a sleeping bag, a camp stove, and a mobile with no signal. I had a paper map and a paper list of names. And I had insurance, which does not, I now know, cover a man who takes the wrong path uphill in the rain for the experience of it. My old peers at the office would have called that a decision to avoid a decision, and ultimately they would not have been wrong. The facility I had actually paid for was a single room with a hard bed, and I slept in it for one night out of politeness.

The town was a settlement of about eight hundred people, a school, a clinic, two shops, and a committee room with a broken electric light. The mountains surround it on three sides. An old woman with an innocent face explained, carefully, that two families had borrowed land from each other for forty years without a paper between them, and that a lawyer from the capital had called this, in a technical tone, "a customary arrangement." She said the word ownership as if it were a foreign object she had picked up with two fingers. Nobody in the valley would stir themselves to claim the land officially. It would require a sanctioned form from the capital, a fee, and a wait of months that constantly grow longer, for a plot of personally useless grass.

There was no democracy in the valley in any form I recognised. One voter per household, in theory. The chamber in the capital decided things, and the counsel who advised them was the only person I met who stated things clearly, with precision, as if precision were a kind of kindness. The real constraint was water, not law, and the water belonged to a company from another country. The plan was a quarry. The company would guarantee jobs for twenty years, and the local council had agreed to a compensation settlement that amounted to almost nothing. In return, a mountain the size of a small island would be removed from the map. The wood, the oil, the grain, everything there went straight out to be exportted; the machines and the fuel would be importted. The company had one member on the council and had banned the discussion from the local paper. Someone had imposed a tax on anyone who wrote a letter about it.

The company's regional office sent a specialized team to the village to educate people about the benefit. Their presentation consisted mainly of a slide show about how many trucks a year the mountain could carry, and a question period in which nobody spoke. Their preference was clearly for people who could not read. I stayed nine days, and I did not want to. I went with a fellow passenger from the capital, a young actor who was playing a doctor in a play about the valley, and a plot simpler than the truth. He asked me every night what the "real" story was, and I told him, and I told him again, and by the third night I understood that I had split the story into pieces to keep control of it. A story without a person in it is not a story. It is a report. And a report can be right and still fail to describe anything. I wanted to engage with the man, and in the end I could not, and the word guilty sat on me for the rest of the night.

The Article I Could Not Print

I wrote eleven thousand words. I was careful. I checked every name, every figure, every date, the term of the original permit, the amount of compensation offered, the two prior occasions on which the same company had promised the same things. I undertake to say that I did this well, because the doing of it was the one part I was good at. I undertook to show the manager of the quarry a copy before I printed it, and he agreed, and he read it in my presence, and he said that my description of the negotiations was "too general to be fair." That was fair, and I made it more specific, and I specifyied the date of the second meeting, and I gave him the explanation he had given the council, in his own words, in full, without a surprise. Then I sent the final text to my editor.

She rang at eleven at night. Her voice was strange, half astonished, half apologetic. The company had a lawyer in the capital, and the story was no longer a story. She had never rejected a piece outright in eleven years, and she said the word critical with real pain. She wanted to send a long reply to the lawyer first, and to copy me in, despite my advice, which I have forgiven her for. She would replace the whole second half of the piece, she said, or she would inform the lawyer that the paper stood by every word of it. The critic who reviewed my earlier work called the piece "an intellectual fantasy with a motivation that could be admired but not believed." The reporter who helped me with the documents said it was a misreading of how the valley works, and that I had confused myself with a set of rules that are not written anywhere. Both were wrong, and I could prove it, and it did not matter, which was the most depressing thing I have ever learned. A guarantee of a fair hearing is the most significant thing a small paper can offer, and mine had quietly lost the ability to make it. What I took from that, in the end, was limited but not small: I had been mistaken about one date, and the date determined nothing, and yet the whole thing fell. Truth is necessary, but truth is not sufficient. A story needs a person in it to satisfy anybody, and mine had been reduced to a set of numbers. I had been taught the first half of a sentence for years and nobody had ever mentioned the second half.

The law that week required clinical and biological details to be reviewed before publication, so the piece was delayed for a month. The doctor who had led me through the treatment rooms said the law was sensible and I should respect it, and then he paused, and told me that a colleague had lost her post for arguing the other way, and that the legislation concerning abortion in the capital was the only reason women from this valley were not travelling two hundred kilometres, and that medical staff there worked in constant fear of the law. I wrote all of that down. I did not use any of it. I told the editor it was not relevant to a story about a quarry, and she said, "I know," and neither of us said anything else, and I went home. Whether that was the right decision or a lazy one, I still do not know. I would like to be able to say that I do know. I prefer to believe I was frightened, which is cleaner, but I was frightened, and I was also lazy, and the two are neighbors. They sit on the same shelf in me, and they often arrive together.

I resigned from the paper the next spring. Not in protest. I simply could not sit in the meetings and be the person who had proposed the piece. My standing in the trade was more or less finished. A few people wrote kindly. A fellow editor asked me to teach a course on reporting, which I agree to do, and which is a strange way to keep a skill alive. I gratefully accepted. In the first class I asked the students to describe a street they know, and it took them forever, which was, I think, the point.

What I Did Not Expect

I did not expect the pleasure of travel to be the opposite of what I had always assumed. I thought the pleasure was in going somewhere. It is not. The pleasure is in the space between where you are and where you are expected to be — the interval of the crossing itself, the hours when you are absent from your own life and no one can reach you. I did not expect the day to be about absorption and not about attainment.

I did not expect the transaction with the people I met to be so clean. You show up, you are hungry, they feed you, you talk, you pay. A fee for lodging, a fee for the photograph, a fee for the coffee that is included and should not be. Nobody in the valley was performing for me. They were just people, which is a kind of loveliness nobody had mentioned to me. They did not need me to resist anything or to dedicate anything. They wanted nothing particularly, which was, for somebody like me, a small mercy. I have since blessed them, quietly, in the way you bless a stranger who gives you water.

I did not expect, on the last morning, to be unable to say goodbye to a single one of them. There was a complaint to make, and it amazed me that I could not make it. Some anxiety, some sorrow, would have been lovely. What I felt instead was a very strange peace, and a symbol of it: a rope of light across the water, so newly made that it had not yet learned to be a rope. A transition, not an ending. A gap rather than a wall.

I have recovered from that. I still take the slow way. I have learned that a return ticket is not a promise but an option, and that the road alongside the coast is not a shorter version of the sea, it is a different medium entirely. And I have learned that the world is full of wise people who will help you for nothing, and that if you contribute a little of your own attention, they will help you a great deal more than you anticipate and more than the cost. Their contribution is never written on a receipt.

It is a small thing, and it sounds small, but I have finally found the adult way to say it. I had to adjust my focus on the whole question, therefore, and to exclude the words I wanted to use, and to say only what I could necessarily defend. The long way is the way. Everything else is a slight on the map, and the slight is what you pay to avoid the obvious fact that you were never going to see the thing if you took the short cut. I gave the whole of that summer to a hotel bill, and it bought me the rest of my life in one piece. I would certainly do it again. But I definitely would not call it a holiday now. It was not a holiday. It was a residence, and I resided in it, and the fact of that is the only thing I have.

Thank you for the good question. You are the first person to ask me this, and I enjoyed the answer more than the journey, which is strange for a man who spent five weeks on a train to say. I expect to explain it to you again. I hope you will ask. I will pretend I have not told you, and I will tell you, and the old story will be slightly different, and that is why we travel — so that the story is alive, and the road keeps moving, and the arrival never quite arrives, and the ticket in your hand is not a pass but an argument that the world is bigger than the routine that made it.

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