Wings

“'We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”--Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

During the summer, that hot, confusing summer, that summer that wound like an uncertain snake through the dust of Jibou, Oradea, Sarajevo, Krk, Zagreb, Budapest, Sibiu and Iasi--only a mouthful of the world my heart wanted to swallow--during that summer, I sometimes imagined that my overloaded, back-moistening traveler’s pack was, in reality, a pair of wings. This absurd image would flit through my consciousness as I shifted the enormous thing and complained while walking down a highway with my girlfriend, two removes from nowhere, thumbing for a hitch with a paper sign.

The bag was stupidly heavy. That had been my fault. I’d thought it necessary, besides clothes, to pack several books, a sketchpad (unused to this day), a computer, light-up fake ice cubes, and other nonessentials. Socks. My name is Christopher and I’m a pack-rat; for me, annoyance at having left something behind is always a sharper pain than whatever tome is wedging itself into my back as we trudge up an impressive concrete hill just outside of Zalau, arguing all the while.

It’s true; the idea of traveling, beforehand, is a lot more like flying than the reality. When you get there, there are beautiful, cool days, magic and strange languages. But there is also heat sickness, cranky self-hatred, difficult relationships (or loneliness), and, more than anything else, there is the pack on your back that you’ve been silly enough to fill with books you won’t feel like reading even when you have time. Instead, you’ll be staring out a stranger’s window pretending to be Romanian so they won’t ask for more money, while your girlfriend does all the talking.

Yet afterwards, it’s strange how we really do enjoy the inconveniences. Like the grandfather who is forever telling his materialistic grandchildren about playing with tin and dirt during the Depression, we bask in them after the fact--those nasty, uncomfortable things. When they find out about my previous travels, Czechs often ask me what country I like better--the Czech Republic, Romania or Croatia. It’s honestly difficult to say. There is no question that I’d rather live in Prague, where I can (for the most part) get what I want, where I have friends, where the architectural marvels glimpsed during an ordinary tram ride really can take one’s breath away.

Yet the further East you go, the more texture there is. There’s something to crunch there; something to write home about, not just send a pretty postcard. It’s no expatriate paradise. The bones of that old ancient and exotic dragon, Communism, obviously protrude from the ground, among gypsies in covered wagons and land mines from a not-too-distant and all-too-brutal war. You have to go around these things. Even in terms of career. How many people have I told about the first English class in I taught in Osijek, when a Macedonian man about ten years older than me started screaming at me for daring to suggest that they speak English in English class? By contrast, can I even remember my first day of teaching here in Prague?

Perhaps, in the end, all the things I see weighing me down, even now, are raw material for wings. I speak naively, I realize--as though the difficulties of others, or even of myself later in life (Disease? Debt? Bereavement? Homelessness? Divorce? Apostasy? God protect us from them, but even if he does, we must all face Death, at least.). And yet, I know a man who carried a beam on his back, up a hill, then carried the grave up, up, to the place where Grief itself is overwhelmed by Glory.