The Reason



Carlsbad State Beach
San Diego, California


A group of strangers have suddenly appeared near me at sunset on a cliff overlooking the ocean. We have all pulled off the highway and gotten out of our cars to watch the event. A park ranger has just pulled up in his jeep. Down below, a pair of funky young lovers are on the beach itself, toes in the surf, arms in arm. And, unbelievably, someone, somewhere, is playing a bagpipe. The ocean sky doesn't disappoint us, the colors deepening pink, blue, orange. I move to an overlook area, the panorama pulling me in.

Perfect, I think.

Leaning against the railing, watching the sinking sun, I try an experiment: To see a sunset as it really is. Not the sun "sinking" but the spinning earth slowly doing a backflip away from it. Finally, I take my eyes off the sunset and glance around. Everyone's gone except the couple on the beach, the park ranger, and me.

And when I look back toward the horizon, I see a sight I may never see again:

A green flash.

My soul does a backflip. That's the only word that fits. It's the feeling Annie Dillard in her little non-traveling travel book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek called "less like seeing than knocked breathless by a powerful glance."

The problem, of course, is that a transcendent moment is literally only a moment: 2.3 seconds to be exact, the "psychological present," the length of time that any of us can stay in the moment, however remarkable. It's even a bumper sticker truism: STAY IN THE MOMENT! DAMN, IT'S GONE. Yet another drawback of having to bring yourself along with you on a trip—it just won't sit still.

My 2.3 seconds are already up. But as I stare at the last of the rays of light still seeping from a sunny place just over the edge of the horizon, my sublime feeling hangs on. A green flash. I know people who live by the ocean who've never seen one. Most sights, especially in nature, are a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. The vast majority we never see and what we do see can vanish so instantly we can't help question whether we saw it at all. And that's exactly what I am now thinking: Did I? Or didn't I? I head toward the park ranger, who has just started his jeep.

"Was that what I think it was?" I ask.

"What?"

"A green flash?!"

"Yeah. It was." He smiles, nods, a tad too Zen for my mood, then pulls away.

But I'm unfazed. If natural miracles happen on a person's work shift, perhaps they don't seem all that miraculous. Besides, he's a local—he can't see "straight" anymore. The man might be awestruck over a cow paddy in my Texas hometown. It's all about seeing. But this was no cow paddy. The green flash is the stuff of legends. And seeing it was the kind of moment that keeps me in the traveling mindset that Alain de Botton calls "receptivity" in his book The Art of Travel. Such a serendipity connects me to the planet in some indefinable way that daily living does not. It is to feel deeply alive. Moments, the right ones, can do that.

So even as my little soul is still soaring, I know it won't last. Anything that takes your breath away, must by definition, give it back, since breathing, however boring, is essential.

Knowing this, though, never seems to mute the sublime glow. And sublime is exactly the right word. The word "sublime" from the Greek came into modern English language as a way to describe inspiring places to travel. The feeling of this moment almost makes up for all those "other" moments—the international plane ride spent next to the nose-picking kid or the pungent Frenchman, the Mexican weekend complete with motorcycle wreck, industrial-size cockroaches, and a night of kneeling before the porcelain throne—even the California freeway traffic dodged to be standing here at all.

Such a moment is sort of like "falling in love," says traveling monologist Spalding Gray. It makes up for a lot. There's no planning it, but most of us are always looking for it.

Why do we travel? Millions of experts are ready with the answers to our usual "where's?" and "how-tos?" How often, though, do we ask "why?"

The answer must be inside us, built-in, way down deep. How else to explain that a travel brochure, alone, can lift our spirits? "Most people have that fantasy of catching the train that whistles in the night," traveling man Willie Nelson once said. Or as professional traveler William Least Heat Moon put it: "The open road is always beckoning."

Literary giants and legendary songwriters, bards and geniuses throughout the centuries, have tried to capture travel's paradoxes:

Travel can somehow can make you feel mortal (Pascal) at the same time it makes you feel in touch with the immortal. (Grey)

It can make you see again after the drudgery of daily survival slowly blinds us (Proust).

It can be frightening (Adams) but also strangely empowering after the fear is conquered (French), and it can teach the difference between being lonely and being alone (Botton).

It reminds us of the power of curiosity (Why do people build extravagant buildings to a God who, by definition, is everywhere?) over the tyranny of facts ("This gothic cathedral was designed by Michelangelo, contains 1083 steps to the spire, took 77 years, and was where King Leon of Latvia sang in the choir. Must see!").

It forces us to ask the important questions, even if the most important one ends up being: "There's no place like home." (Baum) It certainly makes home all the richer with the sweet longing for good mattresses and cushy chairs and homemade tuna sandwiches that signals the end of most wanderings.

It also allows us to stop asking questions and just be. (Eliot)

And even in the face of the earth's obvious supreme indifference to us, it can teach that a sense of the absurd, the ability to laugh, is as essential as a sense of the sublime.

Understanding the deepest reasons for travel doesn't always happen, of course. There are travelers who never understand the "why." Some who have in the words of Botton, "crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their way through jungles but whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed." In fact, some who travel via books may learn the "why" of traveling more than the most intrepid of such explorers (Room Travel). But odds are such souls will put down their book one day, hazard the gap between anticipation and reality, and finally, themselves, up and go.

If life is about the pursuit of happiness, whatever definition that might be, then some of the energy flowing through that pursuit's hard-wiring certainly seems to be directed toward the road "away." (Stevenson). But there's an undercurrent flowing through all the reasons to travel. "Aside from love," it is said, "few activities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling." True enough. However, seems to me, Spaulding Gray had it right. Traveling is, in itself, a pursuit of love.

At its very bare-bones basic, to travel is to fall in love with your life.

I stare now at the last sunset streaks fading away. It's almost dark and yet I don't go. I never know quite why I linger after a brush with the sublime, but I do. It seems I am waiting for my moment somehow to end.

Travel also teaches that the transcendent isn't mean to last, that the entirety of eternity is a balancing act, the yin and the yang of it all. And so that means that every sublime moment has its balance as well. Even if the balance is only the mundane, waiting to pull you back down to earth, where no one will believe your serendipitous stories, even though you can't help but tell them anyway.

And so I linger.

In the last shadows cast across the water, I see movement on the beach below. One of the lovers, after his girlfriend heads back toward the cliffs, is now unzipping, preparing to take a leak in the big middle of my sublime moment.

And back down to earth I go.

"Hey!" I yell.

Ooops, he waves, pops his whole other kind of flash back on the safe side of his zipper, and runs out of view.

Nothing left to do but laugh, I think. The yin and the yang. The sublime and the absurd. During the same sunset.

And no one will believe it.

Now I can go.

(Click.)