Y WE TRAVEL
Why do we travel? For too long, we took this question for granted. Travel can make our large world small, and we forgot what a gift this is until it all got taken away from us not too long ago. Today, we’re returning to the skies in record numbers, but with a more appreciative mindset. It’s a perfect moment to take stock. The contributors to the “Y WE TRAVEL” series are accomplished writers from all walks of life. Over the length of this series, they will explore the diversity of purpose in our journeys—not just where or how, but why. On behalf of Toronto Pearson Airport and the Canadian Airports Council, please enjoy.
I grew up in Quebec during the time of the two solitudes, when the French rarely spoke to the English and anglophones could live and work in the province for decades without having to learn a word of French. My family had settled in Pointe-Claire, a staid, largely English suburb of Montreal, plunked like a carbuncle on the back of a Québécois village dated back to the early eighteenth century.
Dividing the two worlds was Avenue Cartier, at a corner of which was a small neighbourhood grocery where I would buy milk or cigarettes for my mother. It was owned by an elderly couple, and I would often sit on their porch, looking across the street, knowing that on the other side was another language, another religion, another way of life. Even as a young boy, I yearned to cross that road, and in a sense, I’ve been doing so all of my life.
Anthropologists are sometimes accused of loving every culture except their own. Perhaps there is a sliver of truth to this critique, at least for my generation, which was raised in the tumult of the 1960s. I was drawn to anthropology and travel because I hungered for raw and authentic experiences. Like many of my peers, I suffered from French poet Charles Baudelaire’s malady—the “horror of home.” We sought to escape from a monochromatic world of monotony in the hope of finding a polychromatic realm of diversity in some distant land, where we might rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human and alive.
My travelling life began in earnest when, at the age of twenty, I found myself in a café in Harvard Square, face to face with my roommate. On the wall beside our table was a National Geographic map of the world. David, a rough-cut ranch kid from Spokane, looked at the map, and then at me, and then again at the map. His arm rose, and his finger touched the Canadian Arctic. I had to go somewhere, too. My finger landed on the Colombian Amazon. Had it pointed to Italy, I might have ended up a Renaissance scholar. Within two weeks, David was off to the Arctic, never fully to return.
It is the quality of a journey, not the remoteness of the destination, that gives meaning to travel, and it is time alone that allows a traveller to be transformed, which ultimately is the goal of every journey.
I left for South America a month later with a one-way ticket and no plans except a promise not to return to the United States until Richard Nixon was no longer president. Watergate, Vietnam, racial strife, riots, rage—there had to be another way, a better path. After spending my life in school, culminating in two very intense years at college, I longed for the freedom of the open road. I carried just a small backpack with clothes and two books: George Lawrence’s Taxonomy of Vascular Plants and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. During my fifteen months away, I made just a single phone call home, and that was only after learning, by telegram, that my father had suffered a severe heart attack.
At the time, I believed that bliss was an objective state that could be achieved simply by opening oneself unabashedly and completely to the world. Both figuratively and literally, I drank from every stream, even from tire tracks in the road. Naturally, I was constantly sick, with malaria and dysentery fevers that grew through the night before breaking with the dawn. But even that seemed like part of the process.
Where We Travel
“After a few decades in the aviation business, it feels like I’ve been everywhere. But these days, I find myself repeatedly drawn back to the Dominican Republic.
I used to fly there twice a week as a commercial pilot—no big deal. But now that I make my home in wintry Thunder Bay, I see what a game-changer it is for our passengers to have direct sun flights, with no transfer in Toronto. From fall to spring, I see happy, sunburnt faces passing through our airport (YQT). They all have a favourite beach destination, whether it’s Puerto Plata, Cancun, or Varadero.
For me, it’s Punta Cana. I’ve always enjoyed the DR’s sights, culture, food, and service. You only get so much vacation each year, and when you’re spending thousands of dollars, you want a consistent, safe experience.
The other thing I notice is a reminder of all the qualities a small airport should aspire to be. Punta Cana’s airport isn’t a huge mall of steel and glass—it’s intimate, warm, and welcoming, with breezy ceiling fans and local bamboo, coral and thatched-grass trappings. It puts me in vacation mode from the moment I arrive, and writing this, I can’t wait to go back.”
– Graham InghamCEO, Thunder Bay International Airports Authority
Every adventure led to another. At one point, on a single day’s notice, I set out to traverse the Darién Gap, the wild and roadless overland link between Colombia and Panama. After nearly a month on the trail with three Indigenous Kuna companions, we got lost in the forest for a fortnight without food or shelter. The English journalist who had hired us as guides went mad; he had walked thousands of kilometres from Tierra del Fuego and was down to 126 pounds, a frail stick of a man. At our lowest moment, a rare encounter with a black jaguar up close proved to be an omen. Following the jaguar’s tracks, we found a trail that led us out of the forest. Three days later, I stumbled off a small plane in Panama, drenched in vomit from my fellow passengers with nothing but ragged clothes on my back and $3 to my name. I had never felt so alive.
In Vedic scripture, there is a strong notion that as a man passes through the stages of life—from childhood to youth, from householder to sage—there comes a time when he is freed from earthly ties and liberated to wander. While I am not about to renounce the world or abandon my family, I do see this as a powerful metaphor. Travel as a pilgrimage, where each step takes you closer to the goal, which is not a place but a state of mind, not a destination but a path of illumination and liberation. That is the ultimate quest of the pilgrim.
Luminous encounters need not have anything to do with religious devotion. Quite the contrary, they are simply experiences that break open the mind and shatter convention, allowing one to abandon old assumptions and see and feel the world anew. In short, those transcendent moments when, for at least a beguiling instant, bliss does indeed appear to be an objective and achievable state of being. Empathy with all sentient beings; rebirth on the open road.
It is the quality of a journey, not the remoteness of the destination, that gives meaning to travel, and it is time alone that allows a traveller to be transformed, which ultimately is the goal of every journey. In a cocoon of familiar comfort, a tourist can fly to the most remote outpost of the planet in a day with certainty that he or she will be able to scurry back home in a week, just in time for something else. The traveller, by contrast, is loyal to everywhere and nowhere. Home is the ground beneath one’s feet, and movement is the natural way of things.
Wade Davis served as explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society and is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of twenty-four books, including the latest, Beneath the Surface of Things.
Explore the rest of the Y WE TRAVEL series.
Part 1: We travel to meet the neighbours
Part 2: We travel to experience awe
Part 3: We travel to relive our past lives
Part 4: We travel to make family memories
Part 5: We travel to taste the unknown
Part 6: We travel because nature is everywhere
Part 7: We travel to drink in the beauty
Part 8: We travel for the challenge
Part 9: We travel to heal