What is it about traveling that opens us up to other people? At home I can go months without meeting anyone who feels significant. I spend time with people I love, and give little thought to the people I pass on the street. It is rare for someone to move from the latter category to the former. But when I travel, it’s another story entirely.
When I travel, everyone is significant.
Here are some of the most interesting people that I have met. I will never see most of these people again, but in some small way, all of them altered my life:
1. Birdman
It was a gray day in Paris. The sky threatened storm. The people on the streets all wore black, all moved quickly in snapping heels. I was at Notre Dame with my high school french class, most of whom were in the church, either attending mass or paying an exorbitant fee to be taken up into the bell tower where Quasimodo lives on, gnarled and tragic, in our collective imagination. I didn’t have enough money with me to go to the bell tower, and I wasn’t in the mood to voyeuristically sit in on the rituals of others’ religion, so I waited outside.
I heard a susurration of wings and turned toward the noise. In the bushes to my right, there was a swarm of sparrows. In their midst stood a man in a long black coat and black shades. He held out his hand and dozens of birds alighted on his fingers. The breath snagged in my throat. I was entranced.
Birdman noticed me watching him, and waved me over.
“English?” he asked.
I nodded.
From a small brown bag he produced an angel finger. He broke it in half and handed half of it to me. He held the other half up to the sky. Again, the birds flocked to his hand like moths to a light.
“They like the sugar,” he said. “You can’t use bread.”
I struggled to juggle my camera, my bag, and the angel cake. Birdman held out his hands.
“I will hold for you.”
I hesitated. Thought: he is going to rob you.
But even if he did, I would have sparrows on my hand.
I gave the stranger my belongings.
He put his gloved hand over mine and positioned the angel finger between my own fingers. He motioned for me to lift my arm, and I did.
“More far form you,” he said.
I held my arm out farther.
The birds came. Their tiny claws were so small that I could hardly feel them on my skin. It felt like kisses that don’t quite touch the cheek, the kind of kisses that frenchmen and women give one another in greeting and farewell. I held my breath until every last crumb of pastry was gone.
Birdman grinned, and handed back my camera and my bag. “I took picture for you,” he said. I checked for my wallet and passport reflexively. Everything was where I had left it.
2.The gangsters:
On an Amtrak to Los Angeles with my at-the-time-boyfriend, I met two x-gangsters from Compton. They started talking to us because my boyfriend knew all the words the hip hop song they were blaring from staticy speakers. They asked where we were from. When we said Iowa, one of them replied, “Oh, Iowa? I hear Iowa’s nice. I’ve always wanted to go there. I had a buddy, he moved to Iowa. I was going to go visit him, but I never did, because...Well.”
“Well, what?”
“Once they’re after you, they’re after you, you know? He thought he’d be safe in Iowa, but he wasn’t. They followed him. They shot him dead.”
“Jesus. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t get involved with the gangs. Don’t ever.”
One of the x-gangsters had a daughter he wasn’t allowed to see. He showed us pictures of her on his phone. He lamented his restraining order. There was such warmth in his voice when he spoke of her that I could almost overlook how logical it is to want your daughter to stay away from a gangster.
The other x-gangster had been a promising soccer player. Almost a prodigy. It was his life. Then he started to have problems with his legs. He stuck out his calf and showed us how the muscle balled beneath the skin in gruesome knots. The doctor told him that he had a choice: he could stop playing and receive an operation, or he could keep playing at incredible physical risk. He refused the operation. He was too injured to play on a real team, but he still plays for fun, despite the danger. Now he works at LAX.
“How’s LAX?” I asked.
“It’s crazy. There’s all these celebrities that come through. You know who’s a bitch?”
“Who?”
“Rihanna.”
When they found out that my boyfriend was an artist and I was a writer, he said, “If you ever want to stay in Compton, you know, for research, give us a call. We’ll put you up, right?”
He looked to the other x-gangster, the baby daddy, for affirmation, but the baby daddy just stared back, not saying yes and not saying no.
The LAX-gangster wrote his phone number in the back of my notebook anyway.
I never called it, of course. But sometimes I still pick up that notebook and leaf through to that page, running my finger over the digits. And once, when I was flying out of LAX for the last time, 2 days before my boyfriend and I broke up, I saw a familiar figure wheeling plastic bins to the security line. I met his eyes and gave a tentative wave. I didn’t think he’d remember me. But his face split into a wild grin, and he waved back. Now every time I’m laid over in LA, I look for him.
3. Chris
Most recently, I was in Sydney, Australia to see a ten minute play festival of which a short play of mine had been part. It was a slow, rainy night. The festival was over and I was spending time with one my actors and his room mate. Since the bars in Sydney close at midnight, we stopped at the liquor store, and then found an empty hut on Bondi beach. There, we shared stories and beer. When the rain began to drive into the earth with a fresh vengeance, we pressed close against one another for warmth. I had the wonderful and dangerous feeling that I had known them for years, not days.
Eventually I left to go pee. When I returned, there was an extra person in our hut. It was a young Indian man wearing a trench coat and carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag.
“This is Chris,” said the actor, “He came over because he likes my music.”
Chris shook my hand.
We listened to Chris tell us the—embellished—story of his life. He said he was Advanced Tech certified, but was living on the streets. My friend told him he should go work for the mines. “You’ll make bank,” he said, “With AT skills. More than either of us.” Chris demurred. He said he was going to apply to work at a restaurant in the morning.
“Do that,” we said.
“And then go to the mines.”
Chris claimed to have been stabbed multiple times. He wanted to show us the scars. I looked and looked, but I saw nothing. My friends played along so well (they were actors, after all), they I almost couldn’t be sure I wasn’t missing something. I grew tired. I let my eyes wander down to the water. I listened to the actor talk to Chris with no less grace than he had talked to me and felt a wave of affection for everyone under our corrugated roof.
A cop car drove up.
The cop looked at our alcohol and our homeless man. We were sitting directly under a sign that read, ALCOHOL PROHIBITED ON BONDI BEACH. But we weren’t bothering anyone. We weren’t violent or disruptive or even drunk. We were just huddled against the rain. The actor’s room mate waved. There was an excruciating beat. At last, the cop lifted his arm and waved back.
Then he cut his lights and drove away.
* * *
There have been many others, of course. A man I think of to this day as “The Airport Angel” because he helped my mother and I make an impossible connection. An austere, towering priest who waved to a little girl on a train. A little boy on a different train, who called me “la belle femme” and drew me a picture of an airplane on the back of a receipt. A boy in Bézier who put his coat around my shoulder when I started to shiver at the club, and bought my drinks, one, two, but refused to buy the third, because when he asked what I wanted, I slurred. An Indian woman in New York who helped me find a train, and had the brightest black eyes I had ever seen. An old man who owned a bookstore in Amsterdam, whose body tilted the same way as the buildings there. A young man in a park who asked if I had a minute to talk. I only said yes to deter a different man, a man stained with mud and lust who I had discovered hiding in the bushes watching me write. But we didn’t talk for a minute; we talked for an hour. When I said no, I couldn't go dancing with him later that night, it was not without regret.
And countless others.
When I travel, I can fall in love with someone just because they tip their shades down to meet my gaze while waiting for a streetlight to flash to green. When they drive away, I’ll remember their eyes forever, something I can’t say for many from my home town who I see every day. Maybe it’s that since I know that one moment of acknowledgement is all we have, I grant it the weight of the lifetime I wish was ours.
But it’s not just that. It’s also that the people I meet when I am traveling are so often more beautiful, compelling, eccentric, or frightening than the people I meet at home. In part this is certainly a symptom of living in the midwest, but I can’t help but believe that even if I lived New York City, I would feel the same way. At home, slipping my earbuds in is as automatic as slipping my shoes on before I leave the house. I only pay attention to the traffic. I don’t see the streets.
When I travel, my ears are empty, and my eyes are open.
If we’ve never met, I hope we do when I’m traveling, because if we do, I won’t ever forget.
