Oregon Humanities

Seeking and Finding

Kathleen Holt

I’ve never been much of a traveler. Growing up in Hawaii, I was prone to motion sickness, and even short drives around the island made me nauseous. And as an adult, I’ve never felt the wanderlust that strikes so many other people I know. I’ve always preferred, instead, to find a small patch of the world to settle on and call my own.

Perhaps—motion sickness and homebodiness aside—this is because I’ve always been uncomfortable with how travel makes economic inequities painfully clear: several of my family members rely on Hawaii’s tourism industry for their livelihoods, though they can’t afford the plane fare that would take them off the islands to explore the world themselves. Hawaiian sovereign rights activist Haunani-Kay Trask took a hard line on tourism when she spoke at the University of Oregon’s environmental law conference many years ago, eloquently and passionately describing the problems that befall local economies dependent on visitors. When an earnest young man in the audience asked how he could better know and understand other cultures without traveling, Trask brusquely replied, “Read a book.”

But I understand the allure of a journey and see the life-changing effect globetrotting has had on some of my closest friends. Pico Iyer describes travel as a means of guiding us toward “a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly,” adding that “travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places and saving them from abstraction and ideology.” Given these lofty outcomes: a firsthand experience versus a chapter in even a well-written book? No contest.

However, being away from one’s homeland isn’t always a desirable state, but rather is sometimes a forced condition. As Edward Said writes in his essay “Reflections on Exile”: “Our age—with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers—is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.” Although Said steadfastly warns against romanticizing the exilic experience, he quotes Hugo of St. Victor’s famous words about the perfection of seeing “the entire world as a foreign place” and concedes that there may be benefits to being unattached to a place. After all, if anywhere is away, then anywhere also has the potential, if only for a limited time, to be home. Even someone like me, who bristles at the thought of being untethered and adrift in the world, can understand the power in “acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be.”

In the pages that follow, you’ll read about the experiences of Slavic and Somali Bantu refugees, an illegal Mexican immigrant, an American travel writer, an influential Oregon architect inspired by Far Eastern landscapes, an Army wife anticipating her husband’s departure, and a married man contemplating the threat of being apart as the very thing that binds people together. Whether these stories explore away as a physical or psychological state, as a possible future or a done deal, they all hint at the human desire to be rooted and belong—not only to a place but also to other people. (Of this, Iyer writes, in a strange but compelling statement that reads almost as an afterthought, “The most distant shores, we are reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.”) In this sense, away is about attachment and detachment, about allegiance and commitment, about seeking and, if we’re lucky, finding.