Jorge planned his flight. The two years prior to his departure was keeping, Month after month, A salary part. Then he bought a ticket from Alaska And he told his family. Your goal: run away from an existence that he considered boring and, somehow, too cyclical for a soul without borders. Your method: Plowing America by bicycle from north to south, From the cogote to the last finger of the foot, Back on the Tierra del Fuego.
I met Jorge through his words: “In the park I met a girl who invited me to spend a few days at home, wide, blanca, in the woods. When I got there, path Fairbanks, It looked like Texas's Matanza House 4, It smelled like enflerrona and I followed my way. The truth, I didn't have the chichi pa´farolillos ”.
Then I agreed with him and admitted his flight: of his work, of his past, of himself. When months later I was pedaling for those same latitudes could not stop laughing, Although he had the "Chichi Pa´farolillos". Or maybe for that reason.
***
Travel has always been the perfect excuse for not looking at ourselves, to turn your face to the mirror. And I say this with the awareness of having traveled a handful of countries from every corner of the planet, from Alaska to Ushuaia, from South Africa to Iverness, from Australia to the Himalayas. I say it, I mean, Knowing that I once got on a plane with a backpack and, as Thoreau In one of his excursions to Cape Cod, I also said in the diligence that they would take me "as far as that day".
I once went up to a plane and, as thhoreau, I said they would take me "as far as that day"
I name Thoreau because he is my –Unico– hero and because from him I have roasted to the bones. His magnet led me to feel the beat of his words where they were written: because he was the one who, without knowing it - not him, clear, neither I - returned me to myself. In a letter sent to Harrison G.O. Blake, epistolary, He said that "living an authentic life is like traveling to a distant country and we are progressively surrounded by new scenarios and men".
My first distant trip, still imberbe, It was a Canada. The second, a Australia. I needed air.
Now I carry the weight and lightness of almost 30 springs and, Instead of changing city, I have moved to life. “Do you think that only has it happened to you and it surprises you, an unusual fact, that with such a long trip, Through such diverse countries, You did not dissipate the sadness and anxiety of the spirit? You must change soul, No of weather ", I advised him Seneca Lucilio in one of his moral epistles.
Now I carry the weight and lightness of almost 30 springs and, Instead of changing city, I have moved to life
Simplicity is in the cadence of days, At the door to the side, In ourselves. And that is also - or maybe it is the most authentic - the way to travel to a distant country. I remember going up to pico Matterhorn, In the Sierra Nevada massif, Gary Snyder He said to Kerouac that when it will reach the top of the mountain, "Keep up". That constant search is what vomits us, suddenly, On the other side of the world. When we have not even transferred the border of ourselves.
***
We travel through the stories, of the stories, of the stories. And of that continuous movement, Once the letters of the reasons are turned around, we decided: And that impulse that clamps us, Sometimes it takes us far. “When the restlessness virus begins to take possession of a rebel man, The victim must first find a good and sufficient reason to leave ”, It was justified John Steinbeck, one of those immortals that, Following the footprint of pain, He found the glory.
Me, traveler looking for purism in causes, probably imbued with the character one of the writers that I loved most and who followed his trail - and that of the anger grapes - from Oklahoma a California, I wrote on the occasion for my deems:
"Winter winds take me far: They are determined to bring to light the contradictions, But I just want to be. At one click I have been buying a thousand tickets in the last month and a thousand times I have contained myself, for a kind of purism in the causes: Why do I want to go? It is likely that when he resolves it, he is already flying somewhere, although at the moment I investigate the reasons looking at me in a gold mirror ”.
It is difficult to deny the pleasure of movement. But in that purism in causes one must dynamit the walls of thought
One of the trips that most passionate about the time that took me to read Don Quixote. I was never so close to a known world that when the walking wisdom came to me from the subsoil of those words: from Türkiye to Barcelona, from the past to me, of the common to the extraordinary. And maybe because, somehow, I have walked many roads and docked in a hundred banks, to measures that pass time, And I'm raising even the human, Hurgo in the traveler's reasons.
It is difficult to deny the pleasure of movement. But in that purism in causes one must dynamit the walls of thought. As in youth, novel Coetzee, “Maybe the depths in which he wanted to dive have been within him all the time, locked in your chest ". And now they do anything other than get out of the drawer.
***
Recently I read an article where the author - I do not remember who - exalted literature that did not happen as such. It happens that I have a predilection for discretion, Something that seems at odds in a time where fogueo bullets have kidnapped authenticity. But actually, Out of the academic rigor - and worldly noise - it's not so cold.
I have a predilection for discretion, something that seems at odds with these times where the bullets of fogueo have kidnapped authenticity
I have rarely extracted more sap than in the memoirs of Woody Guthrie. When I read them and still beat in me the recent trip to the roots of the depression of the years 30 of the United States, I wondered why something so pure had not come before my hands. My aspirations spared there:
“But Ruth, I think now I realize. I return to the road. Now, At this moment. I don't know how far I will have to go until I find a place to sing what I want to sing, And in my head they bust as many ideas for new songs as colors has a tree in a flower hill. I will sing anywhere where people stop to listen to me. And they will look so that I am not starving. They will look for the way you and I can end together ”.
To a contemporary traveler like Martín Caparrós his father told him to look for what he had never lost
Guthrie, eternal rebel, In addition to their army of songs that relieved the thousands of dust and misery refugees, wrote a novel whose title, A dirt house, He already has the power of his spirit. "We knew it", Maybe May to Tike, her husband, "We knew they were stealing us. We teach you to steal. We let them do. We let them think that they could deceive us because we are simple and normal people. And they took the custom ".
While I type these word - subjected in the novel with conscience - I fall back into that simplicity that, Like a strong underground current, He toured the life of Woody Guthrie and the traveler's reasons.
To a contemporary traveler like Martín Caparrós "He tells us inside- His father told him to look for what he had never lost. But he, that fatigued the northern provinces until the last breath of Argentina, I would have liked to have a mission. "But I don't aspire to so much. I would be content to know what I'm looking for ”, write.
Because always looking for something
(that in the end is nothing)
and do it poem,
or maybe strided
To get to you, or maybe to me.
Or who knows
-I know it-
Maybe both.
I like to travel knowing the world girls in which I live and myself
If on trips they live with a dose of emotion with a daily mist disconnection, tell me, It would be better to move from soul. The simplicity that Thoreau housed in one of his most famous obsessions (¡Simplify, simplify, simplify!) He reached another Walden, Well the house of Ramiro Pinilla It was called that. Therefore, sentences like the ones that trace in the blind ants, They lead me to the bottom of one - of me - himself:
“The movement that usually constitutes for the generality the only sign that it is alive, Forgetting even of ourselves, The escape, Evasion, The inevitable noise that the action produces and that we look, We need, We demand, shuddering before the idea of ??a static loneliness, Not because we know that in it we are alone, but because we face the only knead of cells that causes us true dread: ourselves".
I like to travel knowing this, Knowing the world girls in which I live and myself, Being the certainty that if a trip ever healed my grief, The starting point after knowing that you didn't have to move to weather was when I dared to start a journey at the dark night of the soul.
