Flexibility and the Traveler

Glenwood NM. This is the first area I stopped at last August when I got back on the road. I was very mindful of being a better traveler than before.

This is harder than it sounds. An experienced traveler learns that some camping situations work better than others; and some places are better than others. As you follow an annual migratory cycle, you polish your technique so that it works better and better.

The trouble is that you become a successful specialist, with all the narrowness and lack of variety that that brings on. 

For example we usually allow wireless internet and phone service to affect our itinerary, at least implicitly. There is a real downside to giving in to internet addiction.

The Glenwood NM area is a Verizon hole. The experienced and specialized traveler might just blow through the area, and barely stop. He has really lost something. Does he even bother to discover that there is DSL in the area! That surprised me -- it means that wi-fi and the "extended cell tower" options are available at several stores. So you do in fact have internet access; you just need to take a short trip to get it.

It takes flexibility to adjust to this situation and make the best of it. Flexibility is a "happy talk" way of saying that you must toughen up and tolerate some inconvenience. You must write rough drafts, read downloaded eBooks, and photo-edit off-line in camp, and defer your internet connectivity. It might sound corny to say this is good for the soul. But it is. 

Another mistake that a specialized traveler might make is to underestimate the compensations that people and nature provide to situations that originally looked disadvantageous.

In Glenwood the altitude is too low and the temperature too hot for a traveler who has specialized to cool high country. But what about the green leaves that grow along the river, and the birds, and water actually moving in the streams! These are the benefits that it takes a little effort to appreciate.

Being forced off-line gives the traveler time to relearn the pleasure of reading books or looking at juicy quotes that you've squirreled away in the past. Consider William Barrett's Irrational Man, in the chapter, The Flight from Laputa, p. 135:

A society that is going through a process of dislocation and upheaval, or of revolution, is bound to cause suffering to individuals, but this suffering itself can bring one closer to one's own existence. Habit and routine are great veils over our existence. As long as they are securely in place, we need not consider what life means; its meaning seems sufficiently incarnate in the triumph of the daily habit. When the social fabric is rent, however, man is suddenly thrust outside, away from the habits and norms he once accepted automatically. There, on the outside, his questioning begins.

What is true of society at large, as he was writing about, is also true for the individual traveler trying to branch out.