Tales in Motion: I’ll Have a Lifetime of Travel Adventure, Please… But Hold the Travel, If You Would

“It’s possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it.” Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read.
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I don’t know about books, but I never knew anyone better for talking about places he had never been that Randall “Rusty” Russell. A full-hearted lad, but given to every kind of mischief, invention, overstatement.

No one was in the know except me – and me only because I was his cousin, I visited once a year – and because my Aunt Mary burst out laughing when I mentioned how impressed I was at the many places her son had been.

“That boy hasn’t been out of Sledge County in his life. Only place Italian he’s been is to Jay’s pizza. Believe me, I’d know.”

When I confronted Rusty with the evidence while we split a pizza at Jay’s – what seemed to be his favorite waitress had just brought it – he didn’t show chagrin, but simply told me everything, as though he was pointing out a fishing hole that no one else knew about.

“Look around the room the next time someone is talking about their vacation and tell me how many people you think are listening. Listening, I mean, in the way you listen when someone is telling you about something truly great, like a great pizza. Like a great…” – he looked around but the room was empty – “well, like a great anything. I’ll tell you how many: None. Zero. Zip,” he declared as he chewed and swallowed an entire slice.

“Oh, they’re polite, these are friends after all, but the experiences which seems so vivid and real to the speaker are only words to the listener. They can’t smell the salt spray and the suntan lotion; they can’t feel the fine sand under their toes, or alternately, the crust of the new powder under their ski boots. Soon enough into the conversation the most you will get from them is the occasional, ‘oh, ah, I see, I didn’t know it was an actual peninsula,” while they cast their eye wildly about looking for an escape route to the kitchen.

“If you asked me, to a man of imagination the situation seemed ripe for exploiting. I wasn’t willing to pass up the glory of having traveled, but all in all I was willing to see how far I could get without actually going through the reality of it.”

“Eliminating the middleman?” I asked.

“Eliminating, just as you say, the middleman.” He chewed on a piece loaded with pepperoni. “I find,” he said, “that the savings in time and money more than offset the lack of any cultural enrichment I’m missing out on by not actually going there. You can’t imagine.”

Well, of course the thing was with Rusty was that he COULD imagine. In fact, IMAGINE was all that he could do.

“It always helps if people don’t quite understand exactly where it is that you claim to have visited. I always call it Alpinea or Pavlovia or The Interior and I always make sure my mouth is full when I say it. Then I launch into my story as though my thoughts have come rushing out and I can barely keep up. First thing I do is complain about the travel agent, and by the time I’m through explaining how she should have booked me on the 7:08 into Zurich, but instead there I was, on the 8:07 in Zanzibar, and you have no idea what I had to do from there to get to Alpinea or Pavlovia or The Interior from there, then you might say that I am off and running.”

And by that time it would be considered a tad impolite to ask me “wait just a minute there, son, now WHERE did you say you were going? I missed that part.” If the thought does occur, they’re not going to get a word in edgewise.

By the time you give your imitation of the donkey that took you into The Interior and describe at length the taste of the native ceremonial drink that you downed on the beach/in the ski hut/under the desert moon, that glazed look in their eye takes over. You could say nearly anything.”

I must have made a skeptical face.

“Yep, anything, Here, I’ve been practicing on Mallory, watch. Mallory, if you have a second?” he said politely.

Mallory came over, there was a bit of a wary look in her eye. “What is it, Rusty?”

He gazed up at her. “Remember how I was telling you about my trip to Pavlovia? The dancing in the square of the capital? The toasts to the mayor and his son? How the native girls were stomping out the grapes at the time of the Great Festival?”

Mallory eyed a table in the corner that needed wiping down. ‘Yes, I think I do.” She gave it a little more thought. “I THINK I do.” She began folding napkins.

“Well, I forgot to tell you the part about how we danced barefoot down barbed wire on the village fences, and tied strings to the legs of the famous starlings until they lifted us clear off the ground, and carried pigs on our backs to see who would win the hand of the mountain king’s daughter.”

“Mmmm,” said Mallory, absently folding a cloth, “no, I think you told me that part,” she said in honest reflection, frowning. “Anyway, that’s nice. Is that all?”

“Thank you, Mallory,” Rusty said politely. She didn't seem to me to be entirely aware of his existence.

Sometimes you seem compelled to say something that you wish ever after you could take back.

“What I don’t get,” I said, for I was a very serious young person, and in truth I was fed up with what he was making of his life, “what I don’t get, is why you don’t just go ahead and travel to some of these places? Not the made up ones, but someplace real, like Austria, or London, or Athens? You’re missing out on life. All I’ve ever seen you do is come to the same pizza joint every night and order the same pepperoni pizza from the same waitress. Why not actually get out of this grimy little town while you have a chance?”

He looked at me, honestly puzzled. “And here I thought you knew me. Why not leave here? I would have thought it was obvious,’ he said leaning back, looking towards the kitchen, helpless, hopeful. “This is where Mallory is.” – lsm