A Vehement Traveler

One day, in a sprawling desert within sight of Jerusalem, I saw a man in the distance descend from a camel, strip his garment from his shoulder and hang it on a low-standing tree. He then rode off into a cloud of white desert light so brilliant it pinched my eyes. “He’ll be back for it next year, ” said my Israeli guide, colleague, and employee of the Baltimore Sun based in the Israeli capital. “They follow their course, year in, year out; time only knows when the Bedouin will stop traveling.”

Now, thirty years on, I occasionally ask, could he be out there still, a traveler on his camel? Many of his kind have forsaken the desert, traded their camels for motorcycles, settled down and become waiters and such. Still there are those for whom travel is an imperative, and the thought of permanence a surrender of life.

Fifteen years before my near encounter with the Bedouin, a young man walked into a Buenos Aires newspaper. He was in his mid-twenties, an American, drenched and thin as a stick. He had no money but hoped to sell a story of his adventures in exchange for dinner. His eye sockets were deeper than those of other imploring visitors in my experience, indicating a serious want of food. I took him to a cheap restaurant nearby, where he ate fast but little. His stomach had shrunk. He stayed with us for several weeks.

Vincent Vaselo, a high-school teacher, driven by an aversion to the social squalor of 1960s New York, walked away from it. By the time I met him he’d been walking for two years through North Africa, the United States, down through South America to the bottom of the world at Ushuaia, where he turned around.

He traveled on foot with a backpack containing a pair of jeans, a shirt and sweater, a bottle of honey, and a bottle of kerosene to start fires. The day he departed I commented on the threadbare condition of his pack. His response: “Old flag, good captain.” Then I felt Vincent would never stop traveling.

Traveling. The word itself makes me think of Vincent, of the Bedouin, and others like them—vehement travelers, such as Michael Mewshaw, author of the oddly titled Between Terror and Tourism. “I hit the road at seventeen and haven’t stopped since,” he writes. “I’ve grown more restless with age and still don’t own a home or have a permanent address. For me and for my work, travel is a need as urgent as oxygen.”

That determination explains why he would have his way, though his wife and kin opposed his departures. They said he was too old to trek the arid and troubled countries that sprawl across the shoulders of Africa, westward from Egypt to Morocco, crossing international boundaries in cars, planes, buses, and trains, and frequently walking under the hammering African sun. His disdain for cameras and global positioning devices, which were offered him, was not surprising. Many men of his age are uncomfortable with such apparatus; some, like Mewshaw, boast of their “technical illiteracy,” flaunting what Aldous Huxley might have described as ignorance snobbery.

One of Mewshaw’s purposes was to search out “legendary cities, each with its deep historic and literary associations. I looked forward to Lawrence Durrell’s and E. M. Forster’s and C. P. Cavafy’s Alexandria; André Gide’s Tunisia and Algeria; Albert Camus’s Algiers and Oran; and Paul Bowles’s Tangier.” It was an intellectual and cultural quest, since those writers gave the world a rich treasure of literature that illuminated (and perhaps confused) the early and middle years of the last century. The genius of this cohort is not all forgotten, but certainly it isn’t much on the minds of contemporary students. Though all are dead, Mewshaw intended to visit places where they once were.

But he had other purposes—some of them unclear, even furtive. He hoped to encounter something “edgier” on his trip...