So much travel fare seems to treat travel as the concrete experience of places, people, events.  Go here, do that, eat this.  Top 10! How to!  Where, when, why: timetables, addresses, translations, names.  You will taste vinegar and you will see red phone booths and you will experience the gray established oldness of Europe.  Satisfied, you will fold up the guidebook, crumple up your lists, and go home.

But it’s not that.  Travel may hit you over the head initially with the concrete, but it sinks in slowly and indefinitely in the abstract.  It’s a gulp of potent alcohol that burns initially but then eases into diverging trails of taste.  It gets you drunk slowly – at first you think you can define that trace of peatiness, the woody, sultry elements, the malt, you think you can sort out the elements one by one in neat succession, but eventually you wind up in a slow-swirling fog of perceptions that keep colliding with one another and overlapping.  Travel ferments in you.

The gulps and burps of fermentation have already started in my brain and I can still hear the popping.  There’s the Arch hotel library with it’s high windows giving out onto the placid front of Madonna’s house, the gritty taste of haggis nestled between nips and tatties, the soft pies and ales and cheeses, the swapped stories of New York life, the white British bathtubs, the whir and buzz of airplane engines, the myopic views of city lights from above, the shacks bumping shoulders on the outskirts of Mexico City on arrival, the flooded streets, water sloshing up against the windshields of cars, the familiar hills of Oaxaca at night dusted with lights, all wooshing around in my head making a delirious, complex liquor.

Trav-el-ling, each syllable weighted.  Each time I roll it around on my tongue it takes on different flavors and meanings.  It contains all the varied manifestations and shapes of restlessness, from the desire to be in a moving vehicle listening to a certain song with a book on one’s lap to the need to uproot one’s life and move 14,000 miles away.  It contains a concept of home that’s constantly defined and shaped by away, and a sense of away that becomes part of home.

A broken-down bus chugging across South America is the baseline, the elemental bottom of my travel whisky.  The particular grain from a particular year (in my case, 2004) on which the whisky is based. The fermentation process – Chinese alleyways, Japanese apartments and universities, Mexican cafes and sweating sugar cane fields – has been different and varied but always loops back to the base note for inspiration.  There’s some star anise in there, some dumpling steam, rattling trains and Sichuan peppers, white sand beaches and the gorged leaves of Bornean rainforests, but all of it returns to that simple underlying note of the rumble of buses across the pampas.

Occasionally, through the stupor of the whisky comes the why.  Humans have evolved to not be shocked and stimulated by their environment every new day.  Travel is anathema to this little evolutionary strategy.  So perhaps, in that light, traveling is a bizarre mutation.  It remains to be seen whether it’s a healthy one for humankind or not.  Maybe it’s a mutation thrown into the mix to move humans from complacent stability to heightened sensitivity to difference and detail; to evolve humans into creatures of a persistent, insatiable creativity and curiosity.  Perhaps its meant to satiate the positive desire humans increasingly have to escape the confines of their own dinky repetitive little self-consciousnesses; to jolt them into a hunger for awareness that makes them more empathetic, more connected to other people and the world at large.

I’ll tell myself that since I can barely see straight from exhaustion.  I’ll tell myself that because sometimes I can feel the part of myself (what would we call it, the pragmatic part?  the rational one? the “normal” one? – who might have a steadily unfolding career and a home and who might follow the neat narrative arc of those established life stages) step back and say, wait a minute, what? Why are you here and there, woman?

When a friend asks me, “Why do you always need to go?” I don’t know what to say.  I can list all the factors – the checklist of symptoms…but it’s not enough.  The real why nags at me from someplace I can only circumvent with curiosity like a boat swirling on the rings of an eddy.  The real why is the subtle flavor deep in the whisky you can’t quite put your finger on, which lingers a little longer than the others.