What do three photographs have to do with each other. These three have no people in them, at least none that you can see. But in each of these photographs I can see multitudes of friends and fellow travelers. I want to rehabilitate that term. It a good phrase in which to capture the idea of someone well-met while you are on the road.
The term, fellow travelers, in its best use is when I apply it to the young and old, and the men and women I met while backpacking in Europe and when driving across America around the time I took these three pictures.
In Europe most of our travel was by train and we would meet and link up with a small group of people, two others, maybe four, and travel with them for a day or two or maybe a week. They were our traveling companions. They might not be going to our ultimate destination, but for the moment – or for the week – we were thrown together in a train car or in a City – and we talked and planned and laughed as the woods and houses and fields flashed by or as we strolled in a city park.
And if they were well-met, they were lively and jovial, and we wanted also to be a “Hail-fellow, Well-met”. You would share your lunch of tomatoes and cheese and bread, and they would add sausage and at the end perhaps a cigarette. You might go drinking together at night, and later stand on a street corner and rather loudly sing some song you just learned. You may sit up the night in a train compartment talking of places you’ve been and places you intend to go. And they would rise and fall with their own ideas, and the next day with a hearty handshake and a slap on the back or maybe a kiss you would part never to see each other again. But later, telling the story of that train ride you remember your adventures, and wonder when you will have a chance to smoke the cigar they had given you.
It was someone with whom to spend some time when you were on a trip abroad, alone. Cigarettes play a role in this picture, but I will say there is no more deadly habit. If you smoke, stop now and never take it up again. Ask me why I had 5 bypasses. I will tell you it was the cigarettes. It was part of my old life. It is not part of my new life. And it does not need to be part of yours.
These three pictures represent the time when I was driving across country as a young man to go to Vietnam. I was not in the jungle, I served off the coast in the Navy. Later I would go and wander across northern and eastern Europe for a Summer. The pictures are before that time when I was driving West across the Untied States. The middle picture shows that, an open road. I probably took that somewhere in Oklahoma when there were hills in the distance and places that I had never been and would only pass through this once. I stopped and went to a small diner and had corned beef on rye, and I wrote about it.
The old “farm” house back home was torn down and rebuilt closer to the River. That’s on the right. Times there are not forgotten. Christmases. Trees with tinsel. Fruit baskets. Summers spent crabbing and rowing on the River. And we would wade out through the now gone fields of ell-grass, and swim.
The picture on the left is Hawaii when my ship passed through. I had time to see Hanauma Bay before it was crowded with other people who wanted to see that bit of paradise. I wonder if the Parrotfish I followed knew this or if its descendants know it now. I swam out on a calm afternoon over the reef and looked down the far side where dwell the Octopus and the needle toothed Shark. And I swam back with the image of the darkness where the light did not penetrate.
So go out. Travel, and rejoice in your adventures with the people that you will meet.
