Adventure

Caleb Crain’s novel Necessary Errors is a story of a young Harvard graduate who goes to Prague soon after the Velvet Revolution in the early nineties to teach English. It’s based on Crain’s real-life experience as an English teacher, but in novelized form. In the book, the narrator and main character is a young gay man testing out his sexuality, but also testing the world, befriending kindred spirits, and reveling in intense new sensations that come from being abroad when you are young and have the luxury of being somewhat aimless. The book could be considered gay coming-out story, or it could simply be considered a Bildungsroman, or perhaps it’s just a fictionalized memoir, but to me it is a zipline back to a time in my life that has inexorably slipped away.

The book has swept me back to my days in the early nineties as a young English teacher in Barcelona. It has me grieving for those intense days of discovery. Crain’s book has me smelling, feeling, seeing Prague, a city I’ve never been to, no doubt drawn from the author’s own intense sensory experience of his youth. The city is a palpable character, and the book is imbued with the acute sense of discovery of both a place and oneself: as the main character wanders the streets, I recall my endless walks around Barcelona, rambling all corners of the city on foot as my way of appropriating it, of making it known and therefore making it mine. I remember being all eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, alert to and soaking in every perception – every paving stone; every balcony with every geranium; every shop – including the jamón serrano shops with their pig legs dripping fat into delicate little paper umbrellas jammed into the bottom tip, smelly but to-die-for delicious once I tried it; every person, noting every feature, noting the styles – the men, this being a hangover from the eighties, in their purple shirts and pink ties, the women in their miniskirts with big-shouldered jackets, all so fashionable; the ubiquitous plane trees; the coffee shops with the news or soccer games blaring out and the old men drinking coffees and smoking – back when that was legal inside; the piss-smelling streets of the Gothic Quarter on a Sunday morning after Saturday night revels, mostly by fellow expats; the little squares with cafes, always filled; the big squares with pigeons and North African immigrants selling top manta – fake goods; the groups of well-scrubbed youth, even the ones dressed Punk – not yet “vintage” back then, or worthy of exhibits – whose mamas seemed to have just ironed their artfully ripped shirts.

Necessary Errors revolves around the narrator’s new-found set of friends, an international group that improbably becomes close and spends all their time together, discovering themselves and the world together, supporting each other, even though at home they may have never become friends. I, too, remember the intense world of my first years in Barcelona, before “going local”, before having the language to do so, pushed together with other expats who became my friends, with whom we shared adventures. Improbably, I still consider most of my friends from that year friends today, even though we’ve been scattered to the wind, some of us for decades. The very intenseness of that experience – every moment lived with every cell and pore of our being – can never be erased despite the time and distance. We supported each other through sickness and homesickness as we navigated through a strange city and culture… And the fun we had! The Fish Bar… I never knew its real name but we spent just about every weekday evening there quaffing beer after beer, after getting off work at 10 p.m. The Guitar Bar, a dingy little hole-in-the-wall where we’d go, and someone who knew how to play would pick a guitar – or would be handed a guitar by the silent, bearded owner – and start strumming and we’d sing along all night. The Saturday-morning, hungover schlep to Badalona, all chanting the mantra, “The true professional can be ready in five minutes.” My friends living in the Gothic Quarter in ancient apartments with mosaic floors, a coterie of international bohemians always staging some party, on the city rooftops overlooking the ancient tiled roofs, or out in the country. Some of those friends left after just a year or two, others stayed and our ways parted, and yet the intensity of that experience binds us together still.

In the book, the author leaves Prague after a year. But I stayed in Barcelona. I stayed almost 20 years. I stayed to live out my adult life – marriage, climbing the corporate ladder (so to speak!), child, mortgage, divorce, my mother’s death. My young adulthood was played out entirely in Barcelona, but it very gradually, imperceptibly evolved away from that first year. Slowly, the crowd dissipated as my friends did what I had planned to do – stay for a year or two and then go home. Gradually, we who stayed paired off with Barcelonans, our lives became “real”; we left behind the white-hot crucible of that first year and instead real life took over, with all its complications and hurdles – job woes, money issues, relationships. That intense experience slowly, imperceptibly came to an end; it wound down over the course of those years and receded into the almost-forgotten distance.

And now, as I read this book, it has all come washing over me with an intensity that has brought me to my knees. It’s no wonder it took Caleb Crain 20 years to write this book; such a compelling experience takes time to be processed, to be seen with enough perspective to understand what it meant. The book brought into focus the fact that that amazing experience of pure receptiveness, the pure permeability of youth, of living every single moment intensely, as an adventure and a discovery, is over. Not only over: long gone. How is it now 20 years ago? It arouses such melancholy in me: will I ever again live so intensely? Will I ever again be such a sponge eager to absorb the life around me? As I’m bogged down in middle age – bills, teen-rearing, work-work-work – will I ever have the real time and mental space to be so alive again? Are my life’s adventures, real adventures, over? Are we are only capable of experiencing this permeability in youth? Are we moldable and transparent when young, allowing life to suffuse and metamorphose us, whereas now my shell has hardened, I have fossilized and no longer susceptible to this transformative experience?

And so I hold onto those memories of my first overwhelming year in Barcelona, the single most intense experience in my life, the experience that changed me and made me who I am, or in truth, who I chose to become. I mourn that moment dwindling into the distant past; I mourn the loss of the youth, that singular moment that crystallized in Barcelona where I was able to absorb everything and everyone around me and let them enter me and move me the way I doubt I will feel moved and transformed again.

Although I hope I’m wrong…

The Puddle Jumper

This morning I boarded a nine-seat plane to fast-track my way to St. Louis, where I was to catch a plane for a conference. I hadn’t been on a tiny plane like that since my college years when my sister dated a pilot. Since then, I had only flown internationally, or long-haul domestic flights on large planes, planes where you are so insulated from the act of flying that – except for popping ears – you hardly know you’re airborne. But on a nine-seater, there’s no mistaking it: you are most definitely in a wobbly little contraption flying improbably high over the land.  

And the experience is utterly different to me, utterly thrilling, better than any amusement-park ride. As we took off – in itself an unlikely source of glee – the little town of Herrin came into focus, along with Crab Orchard Lake and Carbondale in the distance. And then, pure rust, yellow and brown. The last time I flew in college it was summer – the trees were like broccoli tops – lush, dense and green. This time, in the fall, the green had almost vanished and instead all I saw was tight curls of rust and brown, like my African-American friend’s close-cropped hair. The bucolic countryside of vast tracts of farmland punctuated by houses and barns and grain silos looked peaceful, eternal, idyllic, only punctuated by ponds and licks of creeks. As we neared the Mississippi, fingers of what had once been meanders came into focus, revealing the secrets of the river’s ancient course.

And the pilot:  he couldn’t have been older than his twenties, such a young fellow to hold my life – and the lives of my fellow-travelers – in his hands! And yet he did it with such aplomb, such insouciance, almost boredom. I wanted to hug him, to congratulate him. I wanted my daughter to become a pilot for the sheer nobility of the effort. Flying people through the skies – how romantic! How honorable!

As the Mississippi merged with the Missouri, I spotted my sister’s town off the distance, identifiable by the bridge.  St. Louis came into focus. And then, the descent. No getting away from it, we were dropping. Down we went, as I watched – for the first time – the runway come into view, and come closer, and closer, and closer… like a videogame. The landing couldn’t have been smoother, and that creaky little airborne jalopy braked in a matter of seconds, like a toy airplane, not the screeching slow-down of a larger craft. We were, improbably, back on the ground, having just shared our secret adventure, a peephole look into our everyday world that is usually kept hidden from us.

I was delighted, smiling, alive! My everyday world, the one I hardly see – and when I do see it, it’s up close, crawling through it, half-hour to Pinckneyville along pokey, narrow country highways – was suddenly miniscule, peaceful, toy-like, adorable. It was tiny – everything is so close! From up there, the water tower of Pinckneyville was just a few trees away from the bustling metropolis – comparatively speaking – of Carbondale.

And the sense of adventure. The sense that lurking up there, all the time, is this possibility of escape, of adventure. The possibility of seeing the world from a different perspective, a thrilling new perspective, and it’s there, waiting to be plucked, waiting to give a chiropractic crack to our brains and to remind us that the world is smaller and yet larger than we ever imagine as we slog through our daily lives. That thrill is right here, that new adventures and new perspectives and new possibilities are within our grasp. I had gone nowhere, to St. Louis, a trip I take several times a month, and yet flying there lifted off the fog of routine and opened up the frisson of newness. As I rose above my day-to-day life, my sense of possibility was triggered. As I climbed into infinite space, my sense of infinite possibility expanded.

I know that to a physicist airplane flight makes sense, but I’m almost glad to be illiterate in physics. To me, it seems magical. I was flying! I can fly!