Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Lonely Traveler
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Each year, fifty million people surge through San Francisco International Airport. Sightseers. Immigrants. Businesspeople. Lovers. Grandparents. Clerics. Children. Every shade of skin color. Every configuration of family. Every known ethnicity and nationality. Every conceivable body size and shape. Every imaginable national garb. All around me, languages I don’t understand are being spoken.
SFO has attitude, rhythms, moods. Late, very late at night, I am tranquilized by its cavernous quiet. At peak flight times, the crowds are excited, energized and energizing. I can get away with gawking at people because everyone is self-absorbed with coming and going, corralling family members, finding departure gates, sorting out last-minute arrangements. I can be alone with my travel plans, with myself.
SFO is a shopping mall with airplanes. The food courts are like the night market in Marrakesh. The public spaces are a mini-MOMA of contemporary California artists. The distractions compete for my attention, but nothing stops the kaleidoscope of past journeys throwing a party in my head.
The thinning light at dusk over Corfu as I sipped retsina and snacked on feta cheese with kalamata olives. The time I journaled a spy’s cover story, imagining that I was a new recruit decoding WWII German ciphers at England’s top-secret Bletchley Park. The tangy smell of Turkish coffee served by a stoic Arab-Israeli street vendor while braying donkeys, laden with produce, ignored me on the cobbled streets of East Jerusalem. Standing alone in the crowd, mesmerized by the cranking gears of the medieval astronomical clock affixed to Prague’s Old Town Hall.
Travel is a blind date. The world’s beasts and beauties can only be courted—or cast off—in person.
The deafening percussion of the drums and bagpipes of the Royal Military Tattoo is only heard inside the feudal walls of Edinburgh Castle. Bungee jumping off the Victoria Falls bridge 400 feet above the Zambezi River requires being there to jump. Navigating the staircase locks at Béziers, France, is only possible behind the helm of a boat cruising the 17th-century Canal du Midi.
Travel is also thousands of miles of travel-worn shoes. Squandered hours in transit terminals. Idling in security lines. Reading insipid airline magazines. Time sequestered with strangers in a metal tube hurtling at 600 miles per hour. Ensnared by the social norms of separation and solitude.
Coming home, I will have souvenir stories to tell. Years after, as my memory dims, my stories will be exaggerated, details forgotten. embellishments stamped into my passport. Travel memories—like the memories of lost loves—are untrustworthy, scandalously so. My fading recollections will—like a poker tell—reveal more about how I want the world to know me than about the world I know. Like the fibs we unfold on a first date.
SFO is a megachurch worshiping in pursuit of passion. That somewhere, somehow, amidst a jumble of bankers and ballplayers, artists and assholes, maids, musicians, mothers and motherfuckers, doctors, dancers, deadbeats, liars, lip readers, lion tamers, lounge singers, we might find each other.
An United Airlines plane—its insignia already blurry from the ground—climbs into the pale blue sky over the San Francisco skyline, banks sharply and flies towards the wide world. I’m on board. Alone.
