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Nash Williams at Yosemite National Park. COURTESY PHOTO
What about briefly breaking out?
No kidding, it could alter your vision — give you 20/20 if yours has been a little fuzzy of late. But not in the way you see a distant tree or a traffic sign or the red neon scrawl across the window of a small shop in Memphis I once spotted: “Guns & Music.”
That was perfect for me, then. Nowadays I’d rather it just read, “Tons of Music.” And maybe it does. I haven’t been back to Memphis since ’85, when I was helping a friend break out of Virginia to reach northwest Arkansas. Not 1885, but 1985, in case you weren’t sure.
Traveling through there — and meeting a harmonica player in the Mississippi Delta south of Memphis named Willie Foster, who once boarded a bus trying to reach Chicago but ended up in St. Louis, where he spent a week before he realized it wasn’t the Windy City because he couldn’t read — has given me 20/20 vision now, more or less.
To me that means seeing how the planet works and how Americans might move just a little faster in making things better. And it means seeing why we haven’t, and what remains strikingly, brilliantly beautiful about us anyway.
Roger WILLIAMS
Here’s one of the wild paradoxes about Americans you can see if you travel: We helped lead the New World emerging from 3,000 years of European civilization straight into slavery, through colonies then into a country. But paradoxically we also fought the bloodiest, most desperate war in our national history to end it.
If you travel to the Virginia homes of our Founding Fathers, places such as Mt. Vernon (George Washington) or Monticello (Thomas Jefferson) — the men who broke the United States away from the ancient bigotries of class and religion, who gave us free speech and a separation of church and state “to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries,” as James Madison (Montpelier) described it — you’ll also see their active participation as owners in the 400-year history of slavery. They left it to other Americans (led by Lincoln, born and raised in a log cabin) to soak the soil in blood prying us away from racial injustice.
That’s one kind of breaking out. But any kind of travel, large or small, has value, if you want better vision.
Say you work in marketing or sales or finance, or you’re a small-business owner. Say you live in a comfortable home in a comfortable city. Maybe you’ve defined travel so far as going to even more comfortable places, often with beaches or on ships where smiling workers serve you food and drink whenever you desire.
In that case you’re not really traveling, even if the scenery changes.
Instead, you might consider going to Uncle Joe’s Fish Camp pressed against Lake Okeechobee near Clewiston, where mosquitos the size of Focke-Wulf dive bombers (German, World War II) never appear in squadrons of less than 100 on some nights, and you sleep on a rickety old bed in a square little room and — whether you fish or not — you walk 100 feet to a dock looking out on sawgrass and water, its surface pocked by the occasional up-thrust head of an alligator or turtle.
That’s break-out travel.
Or say you wander periodically into Florida’s extraordinary preserved wilderness — Big Cypress Preserve or Everglades National Park, the Fakahatchee Strand or the Ten Thousand Islands or Archbold Biological Station in the Lake Wales ridge country, where the landscape in some areas hasn’t significantly changed in a million years.
Fine. But to see more clearly you need to go to a spa and resort hotel, and see how the other half (or 90%) lives.
That’s break-out travel.
My oldest son, Florida Weekly writer and photographer Evan Williams (no relation to the whiskey except perhaps an occasional tipple), did this last year when he moved to Los Angeles after many years in the Sunshine State. And my youngest son, Nash, did this recently, returning last week from his first-ever long journey with friend Grant Rogers, to Yosemite National Park.
Just because they wanted to see it, and backpack in the park.
For Florida boys, that’s some serious travel: from a foot above sea level to the foot of El Capitan, a granite cliff rising 3,000 feet above the valley floor to more than 7,500 feet above sea level. That’s 2½ times the height of the Empire State Building and three times the height of the Eiffel Tower.
Which you should travel to see. ¦
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