We are born into a story, socialized and educated to believe in a certain narrative arc regarding the human life; this story is always framed as the path towards joy, prosperity, peace and love. Every society’s story is laden with latent values (and judgements of other values) that range from materialism to spiritual growth, sedentism to nomadism, monogamy to polyamory, acceptance of authority to critical thinking, patriarchy to matriarchy, democracy to hierarchy, rugged individualism to communitarianism, environmentalism to an exploitative ethic, selfishness to sharing, openness to reticence…isms ad nauseum. Without a frame of reference that enables us to deconstruct our milieu, we are fish that cannot see the water in which we swim. Travel has given me a frame of reference.
What is my story? I spent the first 18 years of my life in Lake Forest, Illinois, USA. Statistics and demographic information can only reveal so much, but I think in this case it can explain a lot. Lake Forest is the 34th wealthiest city in the United States with an average household income of $268,922 in 2019, according to Bloomberg. The 2000 US census showed a population of 19,375 people with racial makeup that was 95.80% White, 1.35% African American, 0.06% Native American, 2.45% Asian, 0.13% Pacific Islander, 0.44% from other races, and 0.77% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.87% of the population. In summary, it is a wealthy and relatively homogenous place.
My mother grew up here and her family owned a successful manufacturing business in a nearby city that brought them wealth and recognition. They had six children that were raised in a large country house that is reputed to have been quite wild. When she was a kid, she occasionally rode her horse to school in a display of eccentric privilege. My grandfather took hunting trips around the world to kill all sorts of animals that are now considered threatened or endangered. My grandma is rumored to have had affairs, including one with a highschooler that led to the heartbroken young man publicly smashing her yellow Chevy Corvette with a shovel. Their house was raided by the police at one point to seize the marijuana grow operation that the kids were running on the property, but family connections had led the police chief to tip off my grandma before the calvary arrived. They went yatching with the likes of Ray Crock – the creator of McDonalds – and complained when “new money” like Mr T. moved into town. My mother seems to have come out of this strange upbringing with a slightly distorted view of life, but having learned quite a bit about what path she didn’t want to take.
My father grew up in the town next door – Lake Bluff – his parents were both god-fearing Protestants that had worked hard all of their lives. They were descendants of later waves of immigrants from Prussia and Greece and had arrived in Lake Bluff through hard work. They had two children that took very different paths. My aunt dropped out of school to focus her attention on drugs and art. My father seems to have come out of his childhood with a strong drive to transcend the shameful middleclass existence that his parents led amidst such opulence and to break away from the conservative, religious dogma that he was fed by his parents.
They met in high school and started a relationship that endured through college, although not without some time periods that are never discussed. They were married around age 25 and attempted to settle down in Lake Forest, despite having limited money. The early years are blurry but the memories that I have of my dad include: digging up plants from other people’s property to landscape our property; men coming in black suits to threaten us after it had been discovered that my dad had flipped our electric meter upside-down so that it would spin in reverse as we consumed electricity; the purchase and use of illegal fireworks (this includes actual dynamite he got from some connection in Kentucky); long hikes in the woods near our house with him; finding cocaine in his desk drawer; his purchase of a Porsche without consulting my mom; driving around in the Porsche whistling at women; firing a pistol into the wall to kill a rodent that lived therein and extravagant vacations put on his company credit card (one of which ended with him getting into a brawl at a bar and getting his forehead split open on the corner of a table). He was volatile and occasionally abusive around the house. I loved him and we had a strong bond, but I always had to gauge his mood to determine if it was safe to be around him.
I remember my mom being perfect, although cracks would occasionally appear in her façade. She seemed largely content with raising us keeps and keeping the household together. She devoted every second that she could to teaching us, clothing us, entertaining us and feeding us. I loved her deeply and she always served as a bulwark against my dad. Nonetheless I remember tears and fights between her and my father regarding money, drinking and relationships with other women.
The gamble of moving to Lake Forest, buying a house and trying to make it all work paid off materially. My father completed his MBA and became quite successful in financial consulting. We moved into a larger house and had nice cars that regularly changed. We continued taking luxurious trips around the country. My father was mired in this world, participated in it, but couldn’t quite fit into it no matter what he did and was therefore internally miserable. He emphasized critical thinking, equality and justice during occasional moment, but the primary values of the household revolved around work, wealth, and appearance. Hard work was not emphasized as much in some other families though as I was regularly told as a kid that I shouldn’t worry about anything as I was “an attractive, white male.” I remember my parents and siblings regularly sitting at the dinner table vivisecting their friends, coworkers and neighbors for social or sartorial faux paus. Or reveling in schadenfreude at the failed marriage or bankruptcy of another family in town. It was difficult for me to avoid internalizing this type of thinking and to keep it from consuming me internally. There wasn’t much love in the house during these years.
The story that my parents intended for me to internalize was that hard work, intelligence, bending the rules and keeping up appearances will bring you wealth and happiness. This wasn’t the way that I came to see it – I saw unhappiness, my father trapped in a system that he hated, my mom trapped in a marriage that lacked love and a society that seemed to revolve around kicking or pushing others down to bring yourself up. But I only knew this world and I definitely knew that I didn’t fit into it and was floundering. This caused intense anxiety and depression for me as I implicitly believed, and was explicitly told, that anyone else who lived differently was poor and miserable. I had no way to disprove this theory as I really didn’t know anyone that lived any other way.
I decided to attend college largely out of fear that otherwise I might end up as one of those poor and miserable people. During my first two years of college I never attempted to break any of this down. I continued dating a girl whose life and family revolved around wealth and appearances. I was studying engineering, doing well academically and did my best to maintain the appearance that I was ready to assume my rightful place in society as an attractive, white male. When it all fell apart, which I wrote about in the last post, I decided that I needed to put physical distance between myself and this milieu.
The first real travel that I did was moving from Chicago, Illinois to Salt Lake City, Utah. Any travel, even if it is around the city in which we live, gives us an opportunity to be exposed to different stories, to other ways of relating to existence, ourselves, others and the world around us. But it is ultimately up to us as individuals to be receptive and pay attention. In Utah, I had my first exposure to people that were leading different lives and thought differently, people that had chosen to focus their lives on certain activities – skiing, climbing, biking and playing music. This made me start thinking about my own life. It never had felt like my life beforehand for some reason – it had just felt like I needed to stay within the white lines that had been painted for me. How did I want to lead my life? What constitutes a good life? What did I even like doing? My years of nomadism began when I saw that I could just physically leave if I didn’t like a place, that I could live where I wanted and how I wanted.
After a year I left to Nepal and India, places that viscerally challenged my worldview and beliefs with sights, odors, sounds and a distinct rhythm of life. My inability to communicate with anyone made the entire experience even more disorienting. At night there were human beings strew across the concrete of the city sleeping. Sacred cows roamed the streets freely. Open defecation was commonplace. Leprosy was still an issue. People swarmed us and begged. The roads, train stations and markets were pure chaos – the press of humanity, of over a billion people practicing different religions and speaking different languages trying to carve out an existence. Amidst all of this, joy, peace and love flourished. I caught a glimpse on this trip of a different way of life, but I hadn’t even begun to understand it. I returned to school with a renewed dedication derived from dreams of travel.
I graduated college in May, 2008. I fought forest fires that summer to save money and then found myself teetering between entering the white-collar professional world, which was the path advocated by parents and peers alike, and pursuing my dream of traveling. The decision ended up being largely guided by the financial crisis that was unfolding at that moment – even if I had truly wanted to find an office job, almost no one was hiring at the time. I had one job interview before I became committed to my life of wandering. It changed my life.
The only way that I got myself to attend the interview with Chase Bank for a Personal Banker position was by playing the mental game that the vast majority of people in the United States are playing: I tried to convince myself that if I could just do something that I didn’t like for long enough to generate money, then I could be free to what I enjoyed. I began sweating as soon as I received the phone call because getting this job would require me to convince my interviewers that I wanted this job that I didn’t want. I immediately felt an urge to begin taking the anti-anxiety pills that I had relied on in previous years. I shaved my face and bought a suit at Men’s Warehouse.
I had read Walden that summer and was haunted by this quote – “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.”
I entered the conference room and was greeted by four pale faces sat behind a desk, some sort of panel of midlevel managers taken from the far-flung, forsaken branches of the bank in the Chicago suburbs. We covered the formalities; I kept a copy of my resume on my lap to make sure that my words corroborated the carefully tailored distortions written in lifeless Arial Narrow. I worried that I might lose control of my hands and watch them float away or that my face would tire from smiling incessantly, but neither came to pass. I was shaking though; my mind alternated between thinking that I should have drank either more or less coffee. My anxiety spiked as it became apparent that merely handing them my resume and answering a few mundane questions was insufficient to get me a piece of the sweet apple pie that is America. They wanted me to do some role playing, but I was already role playing. You can see how this might become confusing.
“Okay. Let’s pretend that I am a bank customer who simply wants to make a deposit. You will be my teller. Your goal is to convince me to refinance and move my mortgage to Chase Bank.” She actually pretended to be driving a car; her hands rotated an imaginary steering wheel, directing her car to the hypothetical air tube and speaker through which we would communicate. I wondered whether her feet were also operating imaginary pedals, but I couldn’t see them under the desk to check.
“Hello, I would like to make a deposit. Could I have a deposit slip?” She calmly leaned towards the non-existent speaker.
“Good afternoon! I will send that right out to you!” I can’t remember if I pretended to put it in the airtube or not, but my adrenaline was mounting amidst a sense of impending doom.
“While you are writing that out, DO YOU CURRENTLY HAVE A HOME MORTGAGE!” I asked in sheer terror, surprising myself as I nearly yelled the last part at the fictional speaker and the woman.
“Yes, but it is with another bank.” She curtly replied, seeming somehow unfazed by my loss of control.
“Have you ever thought about…..refinancing… your loan with Chase Bank? It could…..save money. RATES ARE LOW!” I consciously took breaths in between words in an attempt to hold it together, making it until the last bit before my tone and volume began rapidly fluctuating again. The adrenaline and disgust were rising rapidly and overcame me. I wondered if they could smell the sweat and fear. Maybe they even enjoyed it? I contained the overwhelming urge to run.
I felt like some sort of lab rat being grotesquely tortured, completely incapable of understanding the overarching purpose for having electrodes attached to my miniature nipples. I was shaking at this point, my fists balled, my pupils dilated, and my feet twitching in fight or flight response. They asked me some benign questions and things slowed down a little bit. The adrenaline slowly wore off and I sat in a post-ictal state as they talked more about the specifics of the Personal Banker position. I peered out at the glimmering SUVs backed up behind a red light. I observed a woman talking on her phone in one car, looking absolutely crazy as she gesticulated in the absence of context. I alternatingly glanced at the desk, at these people, at my shoes.
“Are you motivated by financial incentives?” A bald man officiously squaring a stack of papers over and over again asked me. The stack of papers had been square for several minutes at this point.
“No, I wouldn’t say so.” They paused for a moment, taken aback by the answer. Their reaction forced me to reevaluate my response and I bumbled as I backtracked a bit. “Well….I mean… it depends. I want to earn money.” I couldn’t lie. It all fell apart, but the honesty was a release. I knew the job was lost at this moment. I viewed my general indifference to pecuniary remuneration as a virtue, yet what I had just said was tantamount to confessing to a battery of priests that you don’t believe in god. These people worshiped money – there was no other reason they would work within that befouled temple.
I walked out of the sterile box into the afternoon sun with new knowledge about myself and the world. Chase Bank changed my life! I went home and bought a plane ticket to Mexico that left a few days later to go volunteer for a non-profit organization run by a family friend. The oragnization was in the Yucatan Peninsula and focused on assisting families that had been displaced by the creation of a protected archeological zone. The families had lived on their ancestral lands since time immemorial and only knew agricultural techniques that were appropriate to that area. The government had given them marginal land that required them to grow different crops and use different techniques of cultivation. The organization was trying to help them in this transition.
I flew into Cancun and felt an immediate disdain for the energy that heavy tourism had created. This feeling was compounded as the executive director of the organization took me to Burger King – in the middle of the culintary paradise that is Mexico – to eat. I spent a few days with him traveling around to communities, visiting projects that they had going and working in the fields. He left after a week and then I was the only person that spoke English in a small truckstop town in the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula. I spoke barely any Spanish, but enough to help out with activities in the fields and around the house. It also became clear that the organization had a strong religious affiliation and purpose, thus much of the time spent in attempted conversations with the family that I lived with revolved around them maligning all of the other members of the community that were not a part of their church and for them to proselytizing to me. They would regularly pressure me to pray with them or to say grace. They would put a bible on my pillow every morning. They would regularly tried to explain that I was unhappy because I hadn’t accepted god as my savoir, but I could generally escape these conversations by feigning a lack of understanding.
There were some ruins nearby that I desperately wanted to visit. The ruins had been part of the impetus for the creation of the archeological reserve. One day, the preacher from the church offered to take me there. The true purpose was for him to have me as a captive audience for his proselytizing for half of a day, but I was willing to make this sacrifice. I only remember two things from that day. 1. There was a litter of newborn puppies in the middle of our lane on the road. We were going quite fast, but there was ample room for the preacher to swerve and miss the puppies. I didn’t panic until it became clear that it was to late and I screamed at him. He coolly responded that he did it intentionally, that they were street dogs that no one was going to care for and that he was putting them out of their misery. 2. The ruins had been near the border with Guatemala.
I became curious about Guatemala. Everyone in Mexico told me it was dirty and dangerous. The religious hypocrisy drove me over the edge one day and I left town with no clear plan, but I knew that this wasn’t the place for me. The desire to go to Guatemala was stuck in my head and I met a few other travelers on the road that told me that I should go there. I bought a bus ticket south.
I arrived to Xela in Guatemala for Christmas and checked into a hostel called Casa Argentina. This hostel also served as the base for a non-profit trekking organization – Quetzaltrekkers – where I intended to volunteer.
It became quickly apparent that the stories I had been told about Guatemala were ignorant, gross oversimplifications. It is a predominantly indigenous country with 24 languages and cultures spread across a mountain ranges and jungles sandwiched between two oceans. A place where the magical realism of Latin American literature actually exists; seemingly anything can happen with inexplicably beautiful and horrifying events unfolding concurrently. Guatemalans accept and live within this reality; they are proud of it. For me the indigenous Mayan cultures that thrived in the highlands and the crazy gringos with whom I lived and worked showed me an entirely new range of possibilities for existence.
At this time, Quetzaltrekkers was an idealistic, anarchic, egalitarian commune of sorts. We guided treks for tourists in the mountains and volcanoes of the country recounting the history of the civil war and information about the ecology of the region. Any profits generated were used to support a school and orphanage for street kids and we lived off of the tips given by the clients. Status and authority did not exist within the organization – all decision making was done democratically, and everyone rotated through the different roles and responsibilities within the organization.
There were volunteers from Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, Australia and US – brilliant people exploring existence. It wasn’t acknowledged at the time, but in the depths of the financial crisis it seemed like the world was poised for changed, that we could create a different future out of the ruins of capitalism. Quetzaltrekkers felt like an oasis or a laboratory where we were free to explore alternatives. Everyone piled into a dilapidated, leaky house with half a dozen bedrooms that various people shared. Bodies were scattered everywhere, graffiti and murals covered the walls, and there was only one bathroom with an electric showerhead that indiscriminately delivered shocks. The food for the trips was made in-house – we baked our own bread, made our own made our own kombucha and brewed ginger beer. Our lives were further spiced up with a steady diet of substances as the kitchen fridge was a medicine cabinet that included LSD, MDMA, hash and countless edibles. We threw wild parties and lavish feasts to raise money for the organization that were famous. We talked, cooked, danced, drummed, sang and laughed our days away.
Between Xela and our time sleeping outside on trails it was a semi-feral existence. The sunrises and nights spent out under the stars on these trips filled me with awe. I felt a deep connection to the places where we wandered and stayed, something that we were always trying to deepen. One of the more vivid memories of this time is a trip that we made to Volcan Santiaguito – a live volcano that erupts erratically throughout the day. We did this not out of bravado or merely to take photos, it was to feel the volcano, to feel the earth, to feel the energy. We staying up all night captivated by the power of the earth as it shook, howled and spewed forth glowing molten rocks. Risking our lives, we made offerings of liquor to the earth and to the gods before running up to the rim of the volcano to look into it. I would have welcomed immolation in that moment as I had found what I had been looking for my whole life. It was there. I don’t mean physically in the crater of the volcano, rather inside of me, inside of us. This ineffable energy that vibrated in each one of us, an energy of joy, love and purpose. It isn’t something that you can buy or possess, it exists in many places but isn’t on any maps. It is ephemeral and has to be created in each moment. My time in Guatemala changed my life and those of everyone that was a part of this madness. I am still friends with many of these people, some of whom I haven’t seen in a decade. This experience still feeds all of us, its spirit alive in each and every one of us. I am still wandering the earth looking for it.
A year after I had returned from Guatemala, I was wearing a shirt from the Queztzaltrekkers that said Xela on it. I looked in the mirror and realized that Xela is my name backwards.
