For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
Stevenson, Robert Louis (2011-03-30). Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (Kindle Locations 432-435).
She was ready: garden clogs, old jeans, paint-spattered, long-sleeved shirt, sunglasses, broad-rimmed straw hat, iPod Shuffle, and headphones.
With careful dexterity, she opened a can of deck stain, stirred it, poured some into an old popcorn bucket, then grabbed a small paintbrush. Carefully shoving plants aside, she positioned herself in the back of the garden bed between over-grown kale plants and the deck, dipped her brush into the slurry of stain, and sighed.
170 deck rail spindles waited, sanded smooth and thirsty for her brush. Only when she had coated the first tired spindle, did she realize that she had somewhere to go. She pressed play on her iPod and a pleasant British voice spoke to her through the headphones. “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain …”
AJ and most of the world knew Robert Louis Stevenson chiefly for his fiction, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and maybe a children’s poem here and there, but until coming across the selection in Librivox (check it out), she didn’t know that he was also a travel writer. His travel writing made sense to what she knew of his early life. How better to cultivate a lust for travel than to spend one’s childhood bedridden and sickly like he did?
In the past, she had dabbled in the great Jack Kerouac’s writing, but it didn’t pull at her enough to get through one book. Travel writing wasn’t to her taste, so she thought, but she was willing to give it another try.
Mr. Stevenson started the journey by describing his traveling equipment. He went into curiously deep detail about his new-fangled bed-like apparatus (our modern day sleeping bag) and took pains to describe his purchase of a donkey (our modern day rental car). He named the donkey Modestine.
It was September 1878. AJ walked along with Mr. Stevenson as he prodded and poked poor Modestine through the Cevennes, a mountain range in South Central France. Infinitely more knowledgeable in French and history than AJ, Mr. Stevenson did all the talking. They stopped at a Trappist monastery, Our Lady of the Snows, for a few nights’ lodging and some fascinating conversations with argumentative visitors, but his observations of the broad, lonely road were what caused AJ to sigh and shake her head in admiration.
They went slowly and thoughtfully through villages, valleys and over mountains whose stories he told. Many of his reflections and histories were interesting and picturesque, but she marked only a few for reference.
That evening she took a break from painting and pulled weeds in the garden while Mr. Stevenson slept outside on a dry, rocky hill, watching the night sky and napping between nocturnal rustlings of nature. He described his contentment and serenity so well that it infected her with the desire to come out of her sterile walls of blindness that night and sleep under the bare sky, too. But she didn’t and it was a good thing, because it rained.
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to this who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. (Kindle Locations 726-737.)
She could see Mr. Stevenson, mustachioed and possibly bearded, with his long, dark hair and eyes, his thin limbs, like straw sticks at angles as he sat, a cigarette burning in his long fingers, glowing bright as he indulged. In photographs and portraits (the painting by Sargent is one of her favorites), he presents a curious, but strong visage. He died in 1894 at the age of 44.
The next dry day, as she sloshed paint onto the monotonous spindles, she moved with Mr. Stevenson through a region whose history was bloody with religious rebellion, “The Country of the Camisards.” As they traveled through the area, he recounted the bloody violence that took place in years past, all in the name of religion. Through amiable talk with the natives, he discovered that the Catholics and Protestants didn’t mind each other so much anymore, unless they married across religions, then other people minded.
In all, AJ spent 12 days and 120 miles with Mr. Stevenson, trekking over mountains, sleeping mostly under the stars with Modestine chomping grass nearby, drinking chocolate for breakfast, smoking like it wasn’t unhealthy, and falling into passing friendships that AJ only dreamed of cultivating in real life. From the women who sat outside their cottages crocheting lace and gossip, to the monks at the monastery, to the young women who served him his dinners in small cottage inns, he made friends wherever he went.
In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God. (Kindle Locations 1979-1081.)
There was a reason the title of his book included “… a Donkey,” because the dear beast of burden, Modestine, played such a big part in their journey, by not only carrying (and subsequently dropping) his luggage, but by keeping him company during dark starry nights and giving him ample opportunity to practice patience and persistence. In the end, Mr. Stevenson honors her with this beautiful conclusion:
She loved to eat out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own. Farewell, and if for ever— Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion. (Kindle Locations 1303-1308).
“I want to write like that,” she whispered between slopping paint on a spindle and wiping the excess splatters off the deck with her shirt. She’d prayed the sentiment many times while reading different authors, but this time there was a twinkle of opportunity on the horizon. In two months, she and her family would be taking a late-summer trip to California.
In the weeks ahead, she took time to pick out just the right notebook for the job. It couldn’t be too big, shouldn't have spiral binding (the metal spirals get crushed, then the pages don’t open right), should be unlined, but with dots (or grids) for guidance so she could write horizontal or vertical if she wanted, and it should have a ribbon page marker. She had gotten a journal of just this description for her birthday from a group of friends.
And what would she do with the travel writing she collected in this journal? Make it into a travel blog, of course. Though, on no account could she say it would be as interesting or well-written as Mr. Stevenson’s travel journal; he had a donkey.
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