Tag: digital nomad

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Whenever people ask me where I’m from and I’m trying to give them more than a perfunctory answer, it always starts something like, “Um, well…you see…” or something like that.

My relationship with where I’m from? It’s complicated.

I have only rarely if ever felt like I was someplace I would call “home,” and even then it never seems like it’s going to be a permanent thing. Even when I do stay in one place for a long time, there’s always a piece of me somewhere deep inside that is prepared to leave. Like in the old blues song, “Got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train…”

Moving a lot as a kid has without question colored my attitudes and my life: whatever sense of belonging somewhere and with certain people I have ever had has always been fleeting. I’ve always felt somehow separate; there but not there.

I think this may be part of why I have always been enamored of journalism: the journalist naturally adopts the perspective of the observer. He or she isn’t a participant; the journalist is by definition outside the action. And when you don’t feel like you truly belong anywhere, there is a comfort in observing. It’s a position that allows you a connection – of sorts – with whatever is going on, but at the same time you get to keep your distance because after all you are here to observe.

One thing I have done nearly all my life is to write, whether as an actual journalist or not. So as travel writing has blossomed, I’ve been lucky enough to bumble into gigs writing for various travel-oriented websites and contributing to them in a variety of ways. But writing for someone else – and not incidentally, writing for a paycheck – of necessity tends to dampen your true, wild, free and full-throated voice.

Enter The Dirtbag Traveler.

This blog lies at the nexus of my sense of rootlessness, my perpetual desire to see whatever the next place around the corner might be, and my love of writing. I came up with the name when I realized that a dirtbag traveler is exactly what I am – not much imagination needed to connect the dots there. And though I call myself that with at least a bit of tongue in cheek, nonetheless I contend that there are varying levels or tracks when it comes to travel, and not just in terms of economics or style either.

By my definition, the dirtbag traveler is the opposite of the safe or mundane vacationer. The vacationer or mundane traveler is the one on the guided tour, yapping away only in his or her native language at other people from his home country. He or she is the one who is always in clean clothes, the one who eats in nice restaurants — preferably chains he is already familiar with — every single meal, the one who gets excited about going to the shopping mall.

So, yeah, dirtbag travel is indeed contingent on budget constraints. But it has more to do with attitude, I think, and being okay with and even eager to spend time sinking down deeper into a place, allowing a place to seep under your skin rather than skating across its surface. It’s the difference between being in an airboat skimming over a swamp versus stripping naked and jumping in the bubbling, brackish water just to see what happens.

The dirtbag traveler sees new places through the lens of the scratched and dirty Plexiglas of a city bus, jostled and bumped, mired in the sweat and breath and funk of locals. The mundane traveler only catches glimpses of the cityscape from behind the tinted windows of the air-conditioned shuttle van.

I think part of my sense of being a certain type of traveler versus the other stems also from having read and fallen in love with Kerouac’s “On the Road” when I was in my teens. It is not only a book about travel itself, it is also a story firmly rooted in the tradition of Steinbeck and the working class and the people who had been systematically denied the American Dream. And it is about how those people were slowly waking up to the fact of that betrayal, their eyes opening to the nakedness of the emperor and realizing that There Is No American Dream, not for people like us anyway.

So coming from that tradition of travel, when I read most travel blogs I find them to be annoyingly chirpy and false. Everything’s too clean, too well-mannered and too tame to encompass the reality of travel. Most travel blogs read like extended Instagram posts or model auditions: vapid, devoid of context and serving no honest purpose other than to portray the protagonist in the best possible light, always having THE MOST FUN EVAR, YOU GUYS!

That, and to make money.

So while I’m not planning on making this solely about shitty circumstances that sometimes happen when you travel – nor am I planning on making any money – neither am I going to airbrush what I’ve seen or attempt to paint it in any light other than the cold reality of my lived experience. 

People forget that the Beat Generation was so named to acknowledge the weariness, the shabbiness, the dirt and sweat and the un-fun parts of their lives and especially their travels. “Beat” meant beaten down and weary, but it also meant “beat” in the sense of some thing or place or experience itself being tired, boring and dreary: “This party is so beat.” 

Hence the drive to go, go, go. Get going to the next place, then the next and the next. That particular piece of the Kerouac puzzle may well be the part I can most relate to. 

The Need to Get Gone.

But perhaps there’s a kind of Zen there as well: Kerouac went on to add new layers of meaning to the word, in later years suggesting that Beat also could imply upbeat, or beatific in the sense of reaching a kind of nirvana, or the sense of being “on the beat” or in time with music.

I think all of these definitions fit in nicely with my sense of dirtbag travel. So I’m hoping you’ll enjoy reading about my thoughts and experiences as I share stories about where I’ve been — and maybe even a few travel tips shoehorned in to rambling, disjointed nonsense like what you just slogged through.

Cheers,

K