Salon.com > Megan McNamer

As we waft out into the world

Fri, 12 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

The man's face was delicate and fastidious, with a high forehead. He wore round glasses with tortoiseshell frames and his thinning hair was swept neatly behind his ears. Cradling his glass of beer with the tips of his long fingers, he talked constantly with his companion, a young woman with a muted, nondescript grace, a Caroline Kennedy appeal. Their words -- English? German? Swedish? -- were absorbed by the sounds of the humid night market and the sex shows all around.

I took my first bite of a long-awaited dinner, a bowl of noodles with squid. A slow-growing burn worked its way down my throat, an expanding mushroom cloud of peppery heat. The tourists scrutinizing the nearby stands loaded with T-shirts and sunglasses cast a few glances at my red, shiny face. Like me, they recently had walked -- brisk and purposeful -- past the open door to Pussy Galore.

The barmaid brought me a pile of napkins. I bent low over my journal, wiping my eyes. I was recording my day.

"I like to be going somewhere more than being anywhere."

That seemed a good beginning.

"I like tickets and timetables, even seat assignments. Being on the road means being in line. Queued up. Ready to board. I like to be among those who are departing."

Travel by the book

Wed, 12 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Some years ago, when my husband J. and I were traveling in Europe, both barely 30, fairly ignorant and fairly brave, I hated the guidebooks that held us in thrall. They made a few days touring a foreign city read like weeks in the desert fleeing bandits. Was it really necessary to carry handy wash 'n wipes, premedicated this 'n thats, multi-use geegaws, mild detergent and clothes pins? All in secret pockets? Was it absolutely necessary to wear shirts that breathed? Must one stay hydrated, always? Sleep on schedule, like hostages or babies?

It was not clear to me that these books enhanced travel. Didn't they, in fact, usurp it? I hated to see my experience -- that wayside shrine I'd discovered, those sun-washed steps -- appear in quotation marks. I hated to have reality rated. And no matter how much boldface print they used, guidebooks actually encouraged inattention, it seemed to me, with their neat categorizations of the world, their obsessions with mundane safety and comfort, their normalizing of the strange. Under "Dangers and Annoyances," I thought, they should list complacency.

M(r). Butterfly

Fri, 04 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

His real name has tones and diphthongs and unaspirated p's. It sounds piquant and fluttering, the way he pronounces it, his voice guarded and clandestine. Quickly then he'll revert to the businesslike "Ron," a character that, clearly, he has created. Ron is a combination of police, priest, parent and pimp.

"Get into the temple," he might say, his language pragmatic and unadorned.

I am smitten.

When I first shuffled down the chute and through customs in Thailand, I arranged my face to say: I am a writer and student of culture. Then I had my face add: I have slept on monastery floors, rubbed shoulders with shamans, observed factory workers amid the clang of their toil and studied the courtship songs of refugees.

There was the beaming Ron, wearing a crisply laundered white shirt with thin, green stripes, a small, brass name tag centered neatly on the pocket. His smile, which appeared to be absolutely genuine, was also instantly, guilelessly flirtatious.

"My name is R-o-n," he said.

"Ron!" I responded, a bit precipitously. His near-prissy physical brio (I quickly jotted in my journal) exudes machismo itself, deconstructed and distilled.