Backpacker Fiction: Finding What?

Monday, November 24, 2008

Finding What?

"In their view, they were traveling to find themselves, rather as if oneself were a missing cuff link or earring that had rolled under the bed. They admired those among them who meditated in the lotus position for a fixed period of time each day. Like I mean he's really into meditation. The meditators were closer to finding themselves. I couldn't imagine any of them ten years hence, having never known such shapeless people..."

Martha Gellhorn's scathing critique of a community of hippies living in a water tank outside of Eilath, Israel in the early 1970's always causes me to reconsider the whole backpacking movement.

Caught in some karmic cycle of boredom and hash smoke, Gellhorn's travelers are accused of holding no original philosophy of "why they travel" other than enacting a simple antithesis of why their parents didn't travel.

It's a simple dichotomy: A life of no responsibility is as far away as one can get from a life filled with it.

This idea that one can "find themselves" in a water tank in the Israeli desert is too much for Gellhorn. She sees it as the ultimate in self-inflicted boredom.

But reading Gellhorn's essay, I'm reminded of the anti-establishment roots of backpacking. Anyone who's been to the Khao San or Patpong will recognize it as being the closest thing to Pinocchio's Pleasure Island as one
could possibly find on the planet. While the donkey tails aren't visible, one easily gets the sense of being among kids recently freed of parental restrictions.

Wallets are opened for booze, tattoos, hair extensions, prostitutes, bus rides to the beach, piercings. Anything you were forbidden to do at home becomes the visible trend. Even being covered in dirt becomes its own status symbol of the traveling ascetic - like a Hindu holy man, someone so dedicated to their spiritual quest that personal hygiene falls to the bottom of the list of priorities.

But why "shapeless" as Gellhorn describes them? Shouldn't she be applauding their deviation from 'the norm'? Their intrepidity to wander without creature comforts?

She asks, "After you have fled your home, what do you find? What is it?"

My own personal view is that one finds balance. One sees that a great portion of the world's population doesn't live with the daily infrastructure we take for granted. The traveler willing chooses to confront themselves with the injustices of poverty, superfluous wealth, starvation and plenty.

They find that dinner parties, social facades, Hollywood movies and supermarkets are only one end of the happiness spectrum - that they are for the Privileged Few instead of for the Simple Many. I didn't ever "find" myself while traveling, but I certainly found a great deal of perspective with which to view my life in the West.

Outside of the rat-race, one sees more easily the flaws in the system. Perhaps that's what Gellhorn failed to realize about her water-tank hippies. They were immersing themselves in an alternate way of living, searching for alternate happinessess, alternate spiritualities. They found fulfillment in a water tank and the company of strangers; they shared everything they had, excluded no one. Whether or not one devotes their life to these "alternates" is left up to the individual. But even temporarily, they offer a balance of perspective when you've returned home.