Last

Leaving a hotel room, I always feel at least a slight twinge of loss. My room for a night, but my room no longer as soon as I shut the door behind me. Not that I'd spent much time in my Madrid room, but it doesn't take much for me to get attached. I paid the bill at the front desk and left the Hostal Don Juan forever.

In the early morning streets yesterday people made their way to work, more than a few with hair still wet from morning ablutions. In the doorways and foyers of small hotels women in institutional white dresses mopped floors and washed windows. At the street curb men in flourescent green jumpsuits emptied trash bins into big trucks. The shops were still closed, but the cafes were open and people stood inside at the counters drinking small cups of coffee. I walked up Calle Fuencarrel towards the Tribunal Metro station, thinking about how often I had set off in the morning from a newly familiar place, moving towards the novel and unfamiliar. This was my favorite part of a day of travel, the early light, the cool air, a fresh curiosity and before me the means to indulge it. I walked slowly, and only reluctantly descended into the busy Metro station and traded foot travel for a train.

At the airport I bought a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I was afraid that the only book I had left, The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela, would be too dark and would discolor my going-home mood. But The Road, about a father and son traveling by foot hopelessly across a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by fire and mayhem, was no less grim than the Cela novel, which is the confession of a murderer, written from prison. I ended up having time, a whole day in the air and airports, to read both short books, and while the end of The Road made my eyes water and my face crumple, neither of these excellent books damaged the I'm-almost-home good feeling of the day. When I started the Cela book, his name made me think of Finesterre, where at the spot where the path came down to the sea I'd come upon a larger than life bust of him with the nose knocked off.

As on the flight out, the Iberian Airlines plane was Spanish territory and the announcements were made first and more thoroughly in Spanish. The flight attendants too spoke to me in Spanish, though I noted that to others--who looked more obviously American?--they spoke English, and I wondered if after two months I had begun to take on the appearance of a Spaniard. Or maybe I just looked alert at such simple questions as, what would you like to drink? and, pasta or chicken? I certainly did have the skill to respond correctly to brief requests, but the long and muffled p.a. announcements eluded my full comprehension. My Spanish did improve substantially during the trip, but I'm afraid I still must've often looked like a deer in headlights when someone directed a long stream of the language in my direction. To be fair, I could sometimes discern enough to determine the speaker's meaning and make the necessary response; other times I could pick out a few key troubling words and repeat them as a means of asking for clarification; but sometimes I could do nothing more than smile sheeplessly and say "no entiendo," which translates, roughly, as "I'm sorry, but I have no fucking idea what you just said."

On the long flight to Chicago I had a window seat with no window, just a solid bulkhead. I felt cocooned, but not unpleasantly so. I paused often from my reading to simply sit and enjoy the pleasure of air travel's in-betweenness--those hours when you have left one place but before you have arrived in another, when you have no responsibility to act but only to be. And to maybe practice retrospection. Which I did. I opened my notebook and thought to see if I had any profound conclusions.... but ending up simply making two long lists, one titled "I met many people," the other "I went to many places."

In Chicago I stood in a long line for Customs, waited for my duffelbag to come through (amazed at the number and size of my fellow passengers' luggage; even out and about in the world we need a lot of stuff); went through Immigration; checked my bag again (no official had even glanced at it); took a train to another part of the airport; walked down a long terminal and right on to my connecting flight. Contemporary travel is a marvel of logistical accomplishment. And even so we are impatient, but think of how slow travel must have been even a short time ago.

Of course then my flight was delayed. We sat out on the tarmac for over an hour while a violent thunderstorm passed through, rocking the plane with strong winds. I had a window seat again, and two people in their mid-twenties, strangers to each other, sat beside me. The person just to my left was a Korean-American man, and he held a small video device on which he was watching an episode of South Park. On the aisle sat a tall, dark-haired woman talking on a cell phone to her mother in Rosemount. My two aisle-mates had not spoken until we parked on a side runway and the pilot announced our delay. But then they started and did not stop until we landed in Minneapolis. The man was returning from visiting relatives in Chicago, the woman from a six-month stay in Barcelona. They were both recent graduates, she from Winona State with a degree in Human Resources, he from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Physics; they bonded over the need they shared to find a job.

The woman said she had liked Barcelona but that there were a lot of strange people. She said she was glad to be going back to Minnesota, and then showed the man a picture of her chocolate lab whose name was Brownie. She had a boyfriend in Rosemount too, and they had agreed when she left not to see other people. She had returned early and hadn't told him, and she wanted to surprise him and bring him flowers. She asked the man, with some concern, "do you think it's ok to give him flowers? I mean, what would you think if a girl gave you flowers? I don't mean roses, but you know, something more macho?" The man chuckled uncomfortably, clearly wanting to say flowers wouldn't interest him in the least, but politely answering, "yeah, I think that'd be okay." I wanted to interrupt and be more encouraging, but they weren't talking to me; I was just the middle-aged guy at the window, eavesdropping.

Over the course of the flight the young woman told about her other travels. She had been all over the world--to Australia, to Vietnam and Thailand, to South Africa, all around Europe.... For some reason I was surprised. From the little I could discern (and, admittedly, judge) about her, I wouldn't have thought that she would be someone to devote so much time and effort to wandering about the world. But clearly she had made a great and ongoing effort. I wondered why, and as I could not ask, I wondered why I myself did much the same if not necessarily in the same manner. Why go off to Spain for two months? Like her I was coming home after a longish stint abroad, and the ending begged the question, why had I left home? It's a simple but not an easy question. I could say, I wanted to see northern Spain, and that's true but hardly sufficient. I could say, I wanted to work on my Spanish, and I did, but considering my limited success that can only be a tangential reason. I could say, I simply wanted to be somewhere other than Minnesota, and that feels closer to an actual motivation, if not a particularly interesting one. Maybe the best I can do is repeat some of what I said at the dinner table in Finesterre near the sea, when discussing pilgrimage with Mandy and Salima and Eddy. I wanted to cultivate knowledge and experience, and the way to do that, I thought and think, was to put myself out in the far flung world alone. I wanted to be moved, in general and in a Spanish manner. I wanted to be changed. And I was changed, of course. How is the next question, but that might take some time yet.

In Minneapolis at the baggage carousel I saw the well-traveled young woman take up a massive backpack and then look around for her seat mate. I could see him on the other side, but her view was blocked. She hesitated, then shouldered her pack and headed for the door, looking back over her shoulder twice more. Just after the second and last look, she came into the man's line of sight and he saw her, and watched her pass out the automatic doors. They had exchanged emial addresses but my guess is they won't use them. Travel nets one discoveries and connections, but it's also a litany of places and people left behind, lost.

I retrieved my bag and went out the doors too. Soon Alix pulled up and she got out of the car crying and we hugged and I cried a little too, and I was home.