Intentional Travel Unravelled
What’s your travel frame? I pondered this while sitting in the van, sheltering from an Antarctic southerly.
We had pulled up at a five dollar campsite along a coast road that traces the southern edge of Tasmania, squeezing into one of the last spaces between campervans and caravans and a couple of people in tents, now a critically endangered species.
I looked out at the rocky shoreline strewn with spaghetti weed and oyster shells, creeping saltbush and masked lapwings standing on one leg with their waxy yellow beaks to the wind.
Like the lapwings I had nothing to do and nowhere to be, but unlike the lapwings — poised in their tree poses — the nothingness was throwing me off.
They always manage to find me, the travel wobbles, the sense of being cut adrift from my moorings — watering the garden, harvesting the crops, feeding the chooks, milking the goats, cooking the food — ropes of daily responsibility holding me firm.
The giddy holiday promise — I’m freeeee! — lasts about 300km before petering out, and that inconvenient Alan Watts-ism floats in: Wherever you go, there you are.
The campervan next to us is plastered with bumper stickers, and one reads: Live a life you don’t need to escape from. Ok wanderer, what’s your point?
Travel can be a form of escapism, and also consumption as we gobble our way from landmark to landmark, taking photos, taking videos, take take taking anything that’s not nailed down (we stopped at a park by a river and in the toilets there was a sign saying: Sorry there’s no soap. You keep stealing it!).
As another gust of wind rocked the van and the lapwings stretched their stilts, I reflected on past travel experiences that hadn’t left me feeling listless and chilly, empty and ick; that carried a sense of purpose, even reciprocity.
In my twenties I came to Tasmania to get my hands dirty on farms and learn about local food systems.
In my early thirties I went to Japan to experience organic farming within a very different culture and landscape, working with a One-Straw-inspired leader in the CSA movement, a family of traditional oyster growers, aaaaaaand in a zen dojo with a bald, German, Buddhist monk named Dorothy… briefly decoupling from agriculture to rake cedar leaves and drive a tiny ute to various onsen.
When Jord and I set off on an extended roadie last year, it was to put on a bunch of screenings for his film The New Peasants in community halls and the occasional proper cinema, packing red velvet seats with green thumbs.
These trips all shared a common feature: They had a frame.
Frame ~ a structure that contains, supports or holds something.
(A frame is also one of many still images that make up a moving picture. Seems kinda apt when thinking about the fever-stream of fast travel versus single frame savouring of slower movement.)
In my dictionary, a travel frame is an intention, small or large, that you carry on your travels, that also carries you.
It could be a question (Will I spot the Swift parrot? How long can I go without a shower?) or a routine that remains consistent no matter your coordinates.
It might be a goal to connect with fellow travellers and collect slice-of-life stories, or follow in the footsteps of some historic figure you’re obsessed with.
Learning wild foods, foraging wild foods, eating roadkill or writing a sunrise haiku, valiant frames!
Keeping a travel journal... in the dark. Canvassing Europe for its tastiest quark. Drawing left-handed crayon portraits of people named Mark.
Travel frames of service can be picking up litter at campsites, or gatecrashing community garden working bees, or repairing hiking trails.
My absolute favourite frame is volunteering through WWOOF, HelpX or Workaway, because you will meet the best people and acquire useful skills, all for the price of your enthusiasm.
So many travel frames to pump up your itinerant pottering with purpose!
Before getting too mired in my first-world roadtrip fug, I decided to enlist the help of my little yellow sketchbook to frame this Tassie excursion. I would make field notes about the beings around me: What are their names? What do they do? Are they edible? Nature journalling my way around the island.
So I snatched up my sketchbook and brush pen and strode a grand total of three paces before a plant caught my attention, and I squatted down next to them to hash out an inky likeness, only to discover that they are a tasty coastal relative of fat hen.
Now I have something to hold onto, to take without taking; a way of relating to the places we pass through with curiosity and common courtesy. Plus, I’m learning things. Double plus, I’m not on my phone. Triple plus, people ask me what I’m doing and I peer up at them from my scientific squat, holding a sprig of foliage or pair of binoculars, nose dripping, eyes shining, and say: THIS PLANET IS FUCKING AMAZING sorry for swearing but did you know that that small bird over there has a second home IN SIBERIA?
I would love to know if you have framed travel thusly and if so, how’d it go?