WITH THE KIDS EITHER ON BOARD OR MOVING SLOWLY TOWARD THE dock, it was time to launch into full-scale “set sail” mode. There was a lot to do. Planning a full year on the road and finding volunteer organizations to welcome a family of four with underage children, then linking all our stops with plane tickets, while somehow keeping it all under our ridiculously low budget, was challenging enough. Add to this: Paint the house, organize the basement, reshingle the roof, remodel the bathroom, find a real estate agent and a buyer while working full-time, and do it all in a few months … I was exhausted just looking at the list.
It didn’t help that the euphoria, the bliss that Traca and I brought back with us from the Bahamas, was quickly fading along with our tans, and soon our relationship felt as if it was right back to its preyoga-retreat state: a little distant, a little cold, a little less happy than two people planning a world trip should probably be. It’s not that we were fighting or even angry. We just didn’t seem to be on the same page. In fact, as the days ticked by and I began to stress over the many details of our complex yearlong journey, Traca seemed utterly uninterested in planning even the smallest part of it.
To be fair, Traca’s never been much of a planner, particularly when it comes to travel. She’s more of an adventurer, an “avid” explorer, you might say, as in “diva” spelled backward. Give her an all-inclusive stay in a fancy resort with guided tours of sterile tourist traps and you will absolutely ruin her vacation. Traca wants the real thing, the local people, the local food. She wants to take overcrowded buses without air-conditioning. Even better: She wants to walk until her feet are sore and get completely lost at some point in the day. Through it all, no matter what happens, she believes, in a deeply spiritual way, that the universe will guide her to the people, places, and experiences she needs the most at just the right time.
It can be an exciting way to spend a weeklong vacation, and it has certainly added a degree of spontaneity to my life—but for a full year of travel? Internationally? With kids in tow? Drifting like four corks in the jet stream? Call me a boring stick-in-the-mud, but I wanted a little more structure than that.
At the very least, I wanted twelve stops to pin the trip on. Twelve known destinations with dates attached and people waiting. Tickets would be cheaper that way, I reasoned, and the kids would know what was coming up next if any particular stop proved to be an intolerable mistake. I wasn’t looking to wring all serendipity out of the adventure. I just wanted my big logistical ducks in a row.
But Traca wasn’t interested in big logistical ducks. She didn’t try to stop my research or scheduling, but she didn’t pitch in, either. It may sound crazy to all the careful planners of the world, but I honestly believe a part of her just wanted to go—to pick a place, go there, and stay until another opportunity showed up or the travel gods pointed us in a new direction. At first, I saw this lack of involvement as unsupportive, even reckless. Then one night, on the eve of our wedding anniversary, I flipped through an old photo album and realized: Traca wasn’t the problem. As I looked at the pictures of our younger, happier faces … our first summer together, our wedding day, our newborn babies … I could see we had simply grown apart. We had stopped listening. We had stopped talking. Worst of all, I had completely forgotten how much I used to love her spontaneous, planless approach to life.
I met Traca on the beach in Kennebunk, Maine, the summer after I graduated from college. It was 1987. We were both twenty-one. I’d just come off a long, brittle relationship with my high school sweetheart and I had vowed not to get involved with anyone, no way, no how, before heading out to Los Angeles to write movies in the fall.
So I was walking down the beach with a friend who happened to know Traca and we stopped at her blanket. Traca was very tan, wearing a bikini, still wet from the ocean, and she flashed her big smile at me when we were introduced. It probably didn’t look like much to the other beachgoers; we spoke for just a minute or two, hardly more than a quick hello. I’m sure I appeared calm on the outside, but inside I felt like one of those Tex Avery cartoon wolves, with my eyes shooting out of their sockets and my tongue crashing to the sand on a river of drool.
The next day, back on the beach, I spotted Traca lying on her blanket maybe fifty yards away. A girl sitting next to me was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching Traca … watching her sit up … watching her stretch and stand and turn in my direction … watching her start to walk. It was ridiculous, but I imagined that she was actually walking to me. I even put it into a sentence: I wish you would walk over here and sit down right next to me. I said these words in my head like an incantation, then watched as she grew larger and larger, moving across the shimmering sand like a mirage. The girl beside me was still talking, but she seemed to recede into oblivion the nearer Traca got. Until at last, to my utter amazement, this stranger, this vision, this red-hot beach goddess was standing, then sitting, right in front of me.
That’s when we started talking.
For the next few days, that’s all we did. We met on the beach, sat side by side, and talked about everything we cared about: movies and music, books and politics, fears, hopes, religion, philosophy, travel, and on and on. We listened and talked, talked and listened, like the waves that rolled in and out effortlessly all day.
Traca was unlike anyone I’d ever spent time with. In spite of our very similar conservative New England upbringings, she was attracted to anything alternative. She’d just gotten back from a semester in London, where she’d shaved her head on a whim along with the other punks. She talked passionately about music I had never heard of; she bought records based strictly on album art, which seemed like the height of recklessness to me. She was a vegetarian, a flaming liberal. She gushed about poetry and the environment, social justice and world peace. Though she could barely draw, she was thinking about studying art—which she ultimately did. In years to come, our walls would be covered with huge free-form Jackson Pollock / Found Object paintings that emerged onto canvas the way lava emerges from a volcano. Technique never slowed her down. Planning or sketching was a waste of time. She’d start with some paint, add a hundred layers if necessary, then press cigarette butts and rubber gloves and used sanding disks and whatever else she had lying around into the congealing goo.
But it all started on the beach. In those first few days, we talked as if time was running out, pouring our stories onto the sand, mixing our childhoods, family histories, and adventures, so focused on the connection, so spellbound and rooted, we each got sunburned on just one side of our bodies.
After a full-on summer romance, we moved to Los Angeles together, where I wrote a string of imaginative screenplays that no one offered to produce while Traca created a growing gallery of abstract paintings that no one offered to buy. It didn’t matter. We were dreamers back then, young artists gripped by a shared sense of destiny, with nothing but huge success ahead of us, just around the next corner. “This is the week,” we used to say. And we meant it, every week, for years. We worked when we needed to, took long blocks of time off whenever possible, and spent every minute together. It sounds silly now, but we used to lie in bed or on the beach or in the grass somewhere private and we’d press ourselves together, entwining like two snakes, arms and legs wrapped tight, faces touching, feet touching. In this way, we’d breathe into each other and we’d say: We are physically closer at this moment than any two people on the entire planet.
We got married three years after we met, and Logan arrived two years after that. Another two and Jackson joined us. By then, we’d traded L.A. for a small house in Maine and the chance to raise a family. Without question, Traca and I both loved being parents, but I’m not sure either of us was really prepared for the change children brought into our lives. Traca never saw her free-spirited self as a homemaker, yet suddenly there she was cooking, cleaning, shopping for organic baby food … which left me with the role of breadwinner, a task I struggled to fulfill and one that fit me about as well as one of Jackson’s diapers. Though we had our beautiful kids to wrap our love around and though life was mostly good, we often felt … what? Tired? Broke? Stressed? All of the above? Over time, we laughed a little less and argued a little more. We certainly were not the two closest people on the planet any longer.
We did get one painful wake-up call. In 1999, with the death of Traca’s beloved father, Larry, and the murder of my best friend, Shayne—tragedies that took place within two weeks of each other—we were suddenly, vividly, shaken back to life. In the aftermath of so much loss, Traca and I clutched each other, we kissed as if the world were ending, we vowed to savor every moment we had left, and we made an impulsive decision to move to Portugal for a year. It was a totally arbitrary destination; we had zero connections and virtually zero plans, but we went and it was beautiful. We ended up in a tiny fishing village on the pristine Algarve coast. Logan and Jackson were so young, seven and five, they began to speak Portuguese in no time, as if absorbing the language out of the salty sea air. And while they attended the local public school, Traca and I rediscovered each other, squandering days eating figs and ripe clementines, almonds and olives. It was a magical time. Over the course of that carefree year, our wounds healed, our spirits lifted, and we promised never to forget as we returned to Maine, ready to play house again.
Then nine more years went by in a blink.
We did forget, of course; routines can be hypnotic. In time, I began to climb my own corporate ladder once again while Traca dived ever deeper into her spiritual practice, widening the gap between us. It happened gradually, the way glaciers move—until one day we found ourselves in our mid-forties, with two teenage children and a nineteen-year-old marriage, disagreeing about whether to carefully plan a world trip or to let it unfold like a Sunday drive.
We just have to get out the door, I thought.
The world and travel would heal us again. I knew it. It could take us back to the two kids we once were on the beach. The happy ones. The dreamers. The ones with the half-sunburned faces. All we had to do was clear our schedules, pack our bags, and climb on that first plane.