While every trip has the potential to include a traveler’s moment, it isn’t something that can be forced or expected.
Photo by Benjamin Orbach
As I waited for the monorail that would take me to my connecting gate at O’Hare Airport, the sun rose and painted red the lower edges of the Chicago sky.
It was the color of the elderly Sikh’s turban in Jaipur, the man who had sold me a bottle of water between handing out change to the pilgrims who passed his shop.
The red light reflected off of the station’s glass walls, steel-colored fixtures, and sparkling floor. For the first time in two and a half weeks, I was alone.
My backpacking vacation to India was a trip to a world filled with henna-dyed orange hair; freshly baked naan; maroon and gold bangles; 500-year old fishing nets; purple saris; green fields of tea plantations; and the “What is your name?” shouts of the 19 smiling kids who followed me through a Shekawati village.
My snapshots are colorful collages set to the clamor of chatter and traffic, but as I watched the sunrise in Chicago’s airport, it was the darkness of Mathura station and the scraping noise of the man who dragged himself along the platform that filled my thoughts.
Mathura Station
A week earlier, beneath the station’s dim lights, our train slowed to a stop and we jumped to the platform below.
Shaking palms beckoned from the shadowy margins and little hands patted my legs.
My friend Fred and I jostled with other travelers so to climb the ramp and cross the bridge to platform 1 and the ticket window on the other side. At the ramp’s entrance, we streamed around the white-spotted cow like water flowing around a riverbed’s protruding stone.
It was 7:30 PM, Fred’s flight departed Delhi at 11:30, and we were a couple of hours away.
On the platform-bridge, wedged among bustling locals, I twisted away from the outstretched hands of older men who wore thick glasses and sidestepped between shoeless children in dirt-stained clothes who bobbed against the tide of the crowd’s momentum.
Shaking palms beckoned from the shadowy margins and little hands patted my legs.
Ten feet from the ramp’s end, a young man lay on his back. He clutched a black gym bag in his left hand and the sole of his right sneaker faced our approaching pack. His silver watch sparkled in the dim light; he wasn’t of the station’s inhabitants.
It had been a seizure, and an official in a tan uniform knelt at his side.
The crowd slowed, registered an unspoken acknowledgment to the randomness of the unexpected or perhaps the power of fate, and pressed on.
A Sudden Darkness
Photo by Benjamin Orbach
Fred and I searched for the ticket window, needing the express to Delhi. My navy shirt was tie-dyed with salty dried sweat. As Fred pointed to the ticket window, there was a collective gasp, and then black silence.
The station was engulfed in the darkness of rural India.
Before the lights went out, I had noticed the legless beggar on a wooden board. His curly hair reached for the ceiling and his hands were wrapped in rags that were once white. He had been dragging his way across the platform.
Adjusting to the black-on-black forms around me, I made out the beggar’s shape just a few feet away. Undeterred by the power outage, he continued along the platform. The scraping sound of his board against the concrete floor sliced through the thick air and rebounded off of the station’s walls.
Was he blind? I wondered. Did he realize that we were surrounded by darkness, or did it just not matter?
He maneuvered around still dark lumps – travelers huddled on bed-sheets for the night, their heads propped on baggage. Were we all just different shaped lumps?
Perhaps we had stopped existing to him, just as he had for us.
The Traveler’s Moment
Two minutes passed, a generator began to purr, and the lights flickered. India’s time-out for existential musings was over and the station’s traffic resumed its hurried pace.
What do you pay for a moment like that, for sound to stop and for smell to be suspended?
As I tried to box-out locals so Fred could buy our tickets, I heard water hitting the ground. A few feet behind me, a large brown cow was going to the bathroom. Drops of urine splashed upwards, rising from the station floor.
Fred wiped some sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and asked with a smile, “How much can you take?”
We began to laugh and a teenager cut in front of us. It could have been a scene from a movie or an overheard conversation at a bar.
But it was mine: my traveler’s moment.
My India moment, my raw moment of life where all senses inhale and flail and reach an agitated state of awareness where time stops – if only for a moment of pause.
What do you pay for a moment like that, for sound to stop and for smell to be suspended? For the chance to pause, to see through your eyes but also to climb out of your body, to step outside of yourself, and to see the details carved before you?
To survey the scene from above: yourself, the people, and the platform. To pull the camera back, slowly, on to the station, the parking lot, the taxis, the bicycles, and all of the people. To keep widening the shot until you see the slums and the buildings and Mathura itself, covered in darkness.
And then, to zoom back in, rushing from the third person back to your own two eyes, to hear the ebbs of human motion begin again with a shriek, or in this case, the scrape of a board.
To feel the hot air on your neck and the vulnerability of being aware of all the shadows; what would you pay?
Returning To Life
While every trip has the potential to include a traveler’s moment, it isn’t something that can be forced or expected.
Deep down, when we are packing our bag or buying the ticket online, that moment of unconsciously saying ‘wow’ out loud is what we hope for.
When it matters too much that the copy machine takes three minutes to warm up, that some guy’s shoulder on the subway is rubbing against you, and that Peyton Manning is on Monday night football, again.
That moment, where you recognize that you are in a far away place, and have discovered something so real that you never could have imagined existing just a few seconds before, is why we take time out from what we have, where we are, and what we are doing.
While every trip has the potential to include a traveler’s moment, it isn’t something that can be forced or expected.
With most trips, I’ve found, it just doesn’t happen. They can’t be bought; sadly, there are no travel moment sure things. There is no exact formula for state of mind and state of venue that will strip everything away.
For me, in this case, it was ironic that the moment came in shades of black in a place that broke the color wheel.
In a place of a billion shouts, it was an indifferent scrape of a square piece of wood against a concrete floor that slapped my face, stopped time, and made me pause.
***
Back in O’Hare airport, the monorail arrived and the doors opened. Inside, a lone man with gelled blonde hair, wearing a crisp white shirt listened to his ipod and watched the sun come up.
He glanced at me–my beard, my dirty pants, and my hair that also reached for the sky–and returned to the window and his day.
Have you experienced your traveler’s moment? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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I think Traveler Moments like the one you describe are very individual personal breakthroughs. They seem to come unexpectedly at moments of some duress, with a strong, “seeing-things-from-above” kind of revelation.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about the “Flow” experience in a book of the same name; he describes those moments when you’re so absorbed in an experience time stands still, you feel “in a zone,” details become more pronounced, etc. People in all walks of life describe this flow experience, from athletes to chess players. I highly recommend this book if you’re investigating the Traveler Moment.
There are experiences of strong emotion (”Crap – where’s my passport?”),
sudden reality checks (”Hey, I’m at THE Acropolis!”)
and second wind (”I was gonna die a minute ago; now I feel like I can jog with a truck on my back….”).There are also breakthroughs of self-awareness, creativity, empathy, sexual connection, spirituality…. I wonder at which point these are related to each other, if at all. If Traveler Moments are the same type of experience as flow, those have been completely different – similar to (yet not quite) a spiritual experience.
I’d love to hear people’s opinions about this.
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This is a great piece.
I happen to be reading “Flow” right now (slowly, and with a highlighter). I agree that there’s no way to plan or predict traveler’s moments or flow experiences, but if I were to attempt to create a formula for them I’d sum it up as ‘new experiences.’ (Not coincidentally, that’s what travel offers in spades.)
Like the first time I saw New York City, I emerged from a subway station at an intersection and there were skyscrapers in every direction, with a bridge between two buildings. That was my introduction to NYC, I’ll never forget that. But if I saw that every day I’d get used to it.
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Thanks for the kind words. Glad you enjoyed the essay. Maybe you’d like to see some pics too. Here are about three minutes worth, from the same trip. Just a little further south though, in Kerala.
Set to Jimmy Cliff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU3Yqe2Z9yE
Ben
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I like thinking about this a lot. And I wonder if that perfect moment isn’t the reason so many of us not only love to travel, but love to write about it. Travel writing that can take you into someone else’s perfect moment is (for me) the absolute ideal, the thing I want to read AND write.
It’s here that I get positively saccharin, maudlin, wallowing in sentimentality about travel. Those perfect times when everything stands still and you are so absolutely right there are why I love travel, too. And you’re right, you can’t seek them out, they just happen.
It would make a nice anthology, don’t you think, to have a collection of those moments compiled by some hard ass editor looking for the absolute best travel moments… hmmm…..
We were in Hawaii (Molokai) and wandered down to the beach to watch the sunset. Two island guys were fishing, drinking beer, playing music on their boom box while they messed with their reels while sitting on the open bed of their pickup.”You just gotta get out of the city sometimes and go fishing!” they said to us and we both laughed. Kaunakakai is the city?! The radio played Bruddah Iz’s “Over the Rainbow” and one of the guys turned to me. “You know Bruddah Iz?” he asked. (I play the ukulele) I smiled and nodded while the big orange sun dropped in to the Pacific.
Ahhhhh! Perfect.
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pam – i think that’s a great book idea! and from the sound of your “hmmm…” perhaps you’re noodling a way to make it happen…
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I often wonder….. “Do you have to travel to experience traveller’s moment?” Is it truly impossible to experience what you have described in this wonderful essay – in our daily lives (no matter where we live)? Just wondering……
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Thanks for the wonderful essay!
I had a moment like that in Taipei, where I tried to experience everything in a single day: tai chi in a park at dawn, hot dumpling breakfast, a race through the magnificent National Palace Museum, school kids rehearsing a pageant in a playground, a superfast elevator to the top of Taipei 101, a history lesson at the Chiang Kai-shek Museum, a zip on the dazzling subway, an excruciatingly wonderful reflexology massage, the night market, snake restaurants, the mystifying sights and sounds and smells of a fantastical Buddhist temple. But in the middle of that frantic day, I experienced a moment of calm and human tenderness. My new Taiwanese friend Su-fang (whom I’d been introduced to through a friend in DC) brought me to her home so I could see what a typical apartment looked like, and have a cup of tea. That day happened to be the morning when her sister and neighbors gathered in her apartment for a weekly origami session, which my friend had instigated to bring some companionship to a lonely widow in her apartment building. Her home was full of laughter and conversation, and they made room for me at the table which was piled with teapots, cups, cookies, cakes, origami papers and a menagerie of origami creations. They showered me with shiny origami fish and pineapple pastries, and I remember sitting there and suddenly realizing I was on the other side of the Earth and transplanted into someone else’s completely foreign life, and yet the kindness and joy in that room erased the barrier of foreignness.@Spillay: I don’t think it’s impossible to experience that kind of moment in your daily life, but it’s harder to crawl out of your everyday skin and look around. Having kids helps.
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Thanks for the story Marilyn!
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Spillay –
I don’t think you have to travel half way around the world to have an absolute moment of clarity a.k.a. a traveler’s moment. I do think, though, that extracting yourself from the norm of day to day and immersing yourself into something entirely foreign and unexpected does a lot to shake things up. You can’t help but strip away all the superficial stuff and your left open and vulnerable to whatever comes along — something that is completely opposite to the feeling of being “at home.”
Pam, Marilyn, I enjoyed your stories.
Ben
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Thanks Ben, I can really appreciate your moment as I’ve lived in India, and because I love these “momentsâ€. I find my life in India is full of them, people often ask whats great about living there and I try to explain it because of these “moments” – often without sucess.
In the spirit of sharing here is one pulled from my diary – Kalimantan, Indo 07
It turns out there was another who spoke English in town, he, known only as The Arab, got wind of my arrival so joined Ferdinand and I for a pre dawn coffee. Apparently travellers very rarely come through this part of Indonesia, with the last being an American three months ago, who gave an English lesson, which they wanted me to finish off. Out came bits of paper with English words.
The Arab – Miz what dis meeen?
Me – Ah, it’s not good, it means that a person has sex with someone’s mother.
The Arab -Yes, yes, that’s right, how you say it again, mother – fuc%@er? Is that right Miz?
Me – Yes, but don’t use it.
The Arab – Miz, Miz what about this? (Shows me his phone on which the American had changed the welcome message.)â€You’re a son of a b*&ch!†I don’t know what it means, but I like it. I say it to people and do this. (Pulls the finger). Tell me meaning Miz?
By now I was cracking up and choking on my thick black coffee in a filthy glass and gagging on the horrible cigarettes they proudly shared with me. The dawn revealed the dogs, the rubbish and the people waking up on the street in this dusty town, that had in likened to me as the ” bum hole of the earth”. My moment, the moment. And it dawned on me too, that this is this it is about. The glossy tourist brochures that had teased me; monkeys shows, visits to jungle tribes or mountain climbing- lost all their appeal. You can pay to see the monkeys or people doing “traditional” things and wearing “traditional” clothes, but you can’t pay for this. I had been floundering on this trip with what I wanted, and even it the midst of experiencing and feeling it, I still wasn’t able to articulate it any further, than realising that this was it, this was what it is about.In answer to your question, what would I give for my traveller’s moment? I give up hot showers and soft beds. I give up being at home for Christmas, birthdays and funerals. I give up pay cheques in dollars and having a healthy savings account. Giving up – implies at least to me a sort of sacrifice, – going without – but it’s not. What I have are moments that money can’t buy, people can’t arrange and I still can’t articulate, and I won’t give these up and now don’t have to give for these moments. But I would still like a hot shower maybe once a month.
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Nice article!
My ‘moments’ are when I look around – and chuckle. Not because I saw something funny, not because I thought of a joke: but simply because, I realise how unique the moment is, how incredibly I am to be alive, to be experiencing this moment, right there, right then, and how there is no place in the world I’d rather me.
These are my ‘moments’.
Happy travels to all!
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