by James King
Even before I landed in New York, broke and jobless, I knew I would go back for more travel; more specifically, overland travel. But I’d need money, and I’d need to complete what I left Europe to do—write a novel. I couldn’t have been luckier on both counts.
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| Jim's crazy wandering across Europe to Cairo |
First, one of
my university professors, Elizabeth Christman, offered to mentor me through the novel-writing process. She was a remarkable woman. Originally from St. Louis, she was
an agent at a major New York literary agency for many years. Then, at age
55, she started teaching at the University of Notre Dame. I took one of her
courses, Writing for Publication. She couldn’t have been more supportive and
encouraging of my writing. When I called from Ohio to tell her of my
determination to write a novel, she suggested that I get a job in South Bend so that we could meet in person instead of over the phone.
Fortunately, one of the jobs I had in Ohio to earn enough to afford the first trip was as a prep cook in a steak restaurant chain called The Boar’s Head. It so happened that there was also a Boar’s Head in South Bend. I visited my former boss at the North Olmsted (OH) Boar’s Head, and he was kind enough to call the manager in South Bend. He gave me a glowing and entirely undeserved recommendation.
I don’t recall
where I stayed those first few days in South Bend, but I quickly found a tiny
studio apartment not far from the restaurant, the University, and Ms.
Christman’s apartment. I couldn’t afford a car, so I bought a bike to get to
work and Ms. Christman’s place. At the restaurant, I moved out of the kitchen
and onto the floor as a waiter, where the money from tips was more than what I
would have earned as a prep cook. Many of the other employees were Notre Dame
undergrads or graduate students, and we all got along well. Maybe too well? After
work, we’d often meet in the lounge for a drink or two or more, and then go
somewhere else for more beers, hot dogs, and laughs. Too often, I found myself
biking unsteadily back to my apartment as dawn broke.
In the
meantime, Ms. Christman (it took me a long time to honor her request to call
her Liz), mentored me as promised and, after several do-overs, helped me get my
first full-length manuscript ready to send out to publishers. She even offered
to—and did—act as a sort of agent by sending it out to publishers while I
traveled. She never stopped telling me that she knew, just knew, that one day I’d
be asking her to sign a copy of one of my novels. It still breaks my heart that
she passed away before that could happen.
By the time I
completed my novel (spoiler: it was never published—the first of several) and
despite all the money I had blown on late-night beers and bad food, I had saved
enough to head back to Europe and, eventually, the Middle East and Asia. Tom
and I had been in touch to map out our journey. As Tom noted in the previous
post, he wanted to explore parts of Africa, while I wanted to revisit parts of
Europe and explore some countries we didn’t visit. We decided to meet up in
Cairo, Egypt.
At last, departure
day came. I took Air Icelandic to Luxembourg. From there, I revisited Amsterdam,
Munich, Venice, Paris, and Nice. Then over to Spain, with a stop in Lourdes,
France, which struck me as an interesting mix of tacky and transcendent.
Despite my intention to spend more time in Spain, I ditched those plans in San
Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay. Time was starting to drag. I was not and am
not an extrovert, which can make for pleasant solo travel but also very lonely
travel at times. The weather was cold and rainy, which always affects one’s
perspective of a place, and my perspective was getting gloomier by the day. I
decided to move on, making my way back across Western Europe to sunnier skies.
On the first
trip over, heavy seas prevented Tom and me from visiting Corfu, Greece. I
decided to try again, and this time I made it. On the train to Brindisi, Italy,
to catch the ferry, I met two women from California, Ann and Dawn, and we
traveled together for the next week or so. Corfu was breathtaking. We rented bikes
to explore the island. At night, these two extroverts were always up for
dancing. Me, less so, but I tagged along. One night, Ann started a dance that
she assured us was Greek. It involved kissing someone at random whenever the
music paused. From the startled looks of the Greek recipients of her and Dawn’s
touristy affections, this “kissing dance” was a myth. Fortunately, they
realized this before the looks of surprise turned to interest.
In Athens, I said goodbye to my new friends, although we would later reunite when I lived in San Francisco. They went home to Northern California, and I flew to Israel.
After a day or two in Tel Aviv, I spent nearly a month hitchhiking around the country, from Tiberius and the Sea of Galilee in the north to Dahab and the Red Sea in the south.
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| My first glimpse of Kinneret--The Sea of Galilee |
As always, the memory of place is brought back to life by the people I met: The farmer who picked up a hitchhiking me, Uzi on the dash of his tractor, as he made his way to a kibbutz near Kinneret; the schoolboys who engaged me in kicking a soccer ball around a street in Nazareth--still one of my favorite photos, which I keep framed on my desk;
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| My Nazarene soccer pals |
the the boys' school teacher, who invited me into his home for lunch in return for sending him a Parker fountain pen when I returned to the States; the young Texan I met in a Jerusalem hostel who liked to walk the stony streets of Jerusalem’s Old City in a Stetson and duster (and who promised that the South would rise again, with disastrous results for Yankees like me); the couple, Ed and Mareet, who I met on a bus in the Negev Desert as we made our way to Dahab (then under Israeli control but returned to Egypt in 1982), where we slept on the beach, under the stars, and discovered by tire tracks in the morning that we had barely escaped being run over by a jeep on patrol.
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| Sleeping under the stars in Dahab |
And then back to the Old City of Jerusalem. I just could not get enough of it. I visited the Western Wall so often that a rabbi approached me one day and asked, in broken English, if I was Jewish. When I told him I wasn’t, he shook his head and insisted I was. After some back and forth, we came to the agreement that we, and everyone in this sacred space, were brothers.
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| The Western Wall, 1979 |
Two young shepherds, watching and waiting to see how long it would be before someone would stop and pick up this hitchhiker.
A market in Bethlehem
Soon it
was time to fly to Cairo to meet up with Tom. I arrived a day before the agreed-upon meet-up date and wandered around Cairo, killing time, not really
taking in much. The next day, I took a bus back to the airport, wondering whether Tom had decided to stay in Africa or had mixed up the dates. There
was no way to know. The various possibilities,
all negative, nagged me until I saw, among a crowd of people heading toward
customs, a familiar orange backpack bobbing up and down. It was Binks, and it
was good to be back together after so many weeks of traveling alone. We shook
hands (this was 1979; males didn’t hug each other back then) and in no time at
all fell into our pattern of traveling together, splitting when we got on each
other’s nerves, and then reuniting.
As we left the
Cairo airport, Tom raised his fist and yelled at the top of his voice, “The
boys are back!”
(Not sure that
actually happened, but it was definitely something Binks would do. And it makes
for a nice Hollywood ending to this post.)
***
That was Then. Click on the video for Tom's interview with Jim about his Now reflections on his solo trek to Cairo.