Journeying and a Sense of Place
I was 15 when smitten by the lure of travel. A friend in Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up, dared me to ride with him on the back of his British motorcycle from there to Montauk Point on New York’s Long Island one July evening when life had turned into a dull routine. I accepted, but remember little of the trip, for we rode all night in the summer heat and I, foolishly, slept leaning on Rick’s back, somehow holding on to him in my dreams. We wore no helmets.
Five years later, working full time and attending college at night, I entered another friend’s fantasy: we found jobs as mess boys on a German Freighter due into Cleveland’s docks in a week. One late June evening we shipped out of Cleveland for Bremerhaven, Germany. We took $100.00 each and spent 22 days sailing up the St. Lawrence seaway, stopping at several Canadian ports to load cargo, before sailing out the Gaspe Peninsula into the North Atlantic and the German port.
We spent most of that summer hitchhiking across 5 countries, finally settling in with relatives we had in Ireland before flying home. It was on this trip that I began journal writing to record my impressions.
Years later, married and with our 3.5-year-old son, Matt, I was invited to teach on the Rome campus of the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas where I had earned a graduate degree. Sandy and I packed our belongings into 3 JC Penney trunks and lived out of them for 2 years. The urge to adventure was just too great to subdue. The world’s road called us to it, this time for an extended stay.
In subsequent years, my wife and I took students on study tours of Italy during the summer to share with them the beauty of Italy as well as the benefits we had gained from living in a different country. Many of them had not been out of Texas.
Over the years we reflected on what these adventures have taught us about home, about seeing our own country through the prism of a different culture.
First, I found that in traveling abroad, I came to know the United States, its patterns of behavior, its traditions, its rituals that stem from its unique mythology, with a greater clarity and focus. It seemed an obvious discovery but when we lived outside of its embrace, we learned that the rest of the world is not us, that countries have their own traditions and customs to which one might best yield to experience a new format of daily living.
Cultural biases, values and beliefs become front-and-center in ways that reading about them would not have.
Second, living and traveling in a country that speaks a different language can transform the simplest acts, like ordering a meal or buying a train ticket, into a call to find the resources within to succeed in these tasks. We learned, for example, that a people’s language is their culture, shapes their history and returns them to their origins. The more one assimilates a people’s language, the more one deepens into the others’ unique customs.
Third, even as the word “culture” is used widely today, traveling and living internationally allows one to concretely witness and participate in cultural diversity and to celebrate it as part of a different mythology. From matters of fashion, dress, social norms and customs, what we thought were shared more broadly were in fact uniquely part of our identity.
Fourth, we learned that yielding to differences, even entering them wholeheartedly, encouraged us to understand the social and psychological patterns that guide and set boundaries for different social norms. Through an alternative cultural mirror, we saw ourselves with greater clarity, uniqueness and appreciation.
Dennis Patrick Slattery.
