Letters from the Divide

A Series of Other Worlds
Pam Houston on the Constant Evolution of Adventure

It is a cold Friday night in Davis, California, and my light is the last one on in Voorhies Hall, home to the English department of the University of California, where I teach. I have two more hours to finish this essay before I head for the airport to catch the red-eye to Chicago, and then on to Paris, where my newest adventure will begin. A circumnavigation of the globe by airplane in 36 days, with stops in Paris; Bangkok; Thimpu, Bhutan; and Perth, Uluru, and Sydney, Australia. The idea is to see as many different countries, cultures and climates as is reasonably possible in rapid-fire succession, as much disparate flora and fauna, and as many breathtakingly diverse landscapes as I can cram in before the next quarter starts and I am needed back at school.

The trip is partly research for a new book project and partly just for the pure joy of movement, to feed my voracious velocity addiction, to lose myself entirely in a serious of other worlds. I am never happier than when I am hurtling through the air inside a plane that has letters on the side that I can’t pronounce, bound for a city/coastline/mountain range I can’t visualize, eager to meet a bunch of people who see the world through an entirely different set of lenses than I have been raised with. This trip is what qualifies as Pam’s ultimate adventure at the age of 43.

In my teens adventure was defined and confined by how far I was allowed to take my parents’ car. It was the Jersey shore most often,: Bruce Springsteen cover b ands, smoking something smelled very much like oregano under the boardwalk, and going around and around on the carnival ride the Himalayan while Rod Stewart sang “Maggie May” over and over again.
In our Ohio college town, adventure was Mary Larned and me taking our crushes out to the nearby horse pasture and hopping on to the backs of some green broke Arabian ponies, wrapping our fingers in their manes, clutching their bare backs with our thighs, digging in our heels, and holding on for dear life while the unsuspecting fraternity boys bounced higher and higher of f the horses’ backbones, their cable-knit sweaters glowing farther and father behind us in the dark.
It was a bar fight we inadvertently started by virtue of our presence alone in a tiny town called Thomas, West Virginia (on a weekend road trip from college- desperate for somewhere to go, something to do), and the spring break we drove to Fort Lauderdale and talked our way onto a cargo plane bound for Andros Island, Bahamas.

We had $200 between us and, when the Bahamian customs official suggested we work off our unpaid plane fare by joining the road-tarring crew for the next seven days, before the sun rose we hopped the mail boat to Nassau, where a guy named Dennis Lightbourne (no kidding) picked us up hitchhiking. Dennis put us up and gave us a five-day local’s tour of the island before we headed back to college courtesy of a mail boat, a water taxi , and three coast guard guys in a catamaran who were smuggling a 27-foot long pontoon full of hashish. They pulled that boat right up to the dock at the coast guard station in Miami and left it sitting there while they drove us back to our car.

In my twenties adventure was all about testing myself physically: running class 5 rapids during the 100-year flood in Cataract Canyon or a fast early-June trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon; skiing the bumps and the steeps and the out-of-bounds at Alta or the Seven-mile Run under the full moon from the top of Berthoud Pass all the way down to the base of Mary Jane; drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and heating mushrooms in the desert; reading Carlos Castaneda and Edward Abbey; and pulling up mile and miles of survey stakes along the road into Island in the Sky in Canyon lands when the Feds were getting ready to pave it – our own little Monkey Wrench Gang.

In my thirties I finally got more interested in people than in places. (I’d had nearly $20,000 worth of therapy by then, so it was about time.) I went to Bhutan thinking it was all about the Himalaya Mountains, but what I fell in love with there were the smiles of the people, their quiet sense of well-being, and the way one minute you were walking down a quiet street and the next there are eight or ten children holding your hands. I thought I went to Patagonia to see the Andes, but it was a woman named Macarena (no kidding) who got my attention, living with her grandfather and her young son on an overgrazed estancia, trying to keep the tradition of sheep ranching alive. I thought I went to Laos to see the mighty Mekong River, but it was the holy city of Luang Prabang and the daily 6 a.m. ritual, where the hundreds of monks who fill the city’s 36 monasteries walk the streets with their begging bowls and the women of the town come to the street corners with pots of steaming rice to feed them, that I will keep forever in my heart.

Tonight there is a big, fat plane ticket in my pocket. This trip will take me back to some of the places that I have fallen most in love with (though I have learned that a place is never the same place twice) and to a few places that I have only imagined; and soon that place of imagining will be filled up with sights and sounds and smells, with the faces and the stories of people unlike any I have ever known. I also know that there will be adventures waiting for me when I come back to Davis, among them the challenge of making a place for the young writers in my program to put their own adventures into words. My hope is that as long as I’m upright, I’ll be looking for my next adventures. Around the world or around the corner.