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I have, bizarrely, been into a lot of castles in my life. I’ve slept in multiple. I’ve toured even more. I’ve photographed them, I’ve researched them, I’ve been lucky enough to see them in fog, in mist, in snow, in bright green grass with blue skies, on the coasts dissolving back into the sea, or sitting atop dormant volcanoes. I remember them, all of them, with a fondness and a strange mix of Game of Thrones epic excitement and fairy tale wonder.
Still though, when I get melancholy for travel, for a return to my wandering life, it’s never, ever, the castles that my mind drifts off to. It’s not the epic, it’s not the palatial estates or stone hewn spiral staircases, it’s not the moats or the old drawbridges that I long for, that I reminisce on. It never is.
It’s the gas stations.
I know this sounds odd, I know it sounds like I’m making it up for the purposes of self-help or introspection, but it’s not that. It’s something more, and it’s something that crept up on me and came subtly as it’s often at the end of a long winter that feels like it’ll never end that my brain floats away to all the places I have been. I realized, with stunning clarity, that my melancholy (and I get melancholy a lot, I’m built this way) is always aimed at something else.
It’s not the marquee moments, the castles, the #epic memories or views that I long for in travel, that my silly mind plays back like a slideshow of history on the movie screen of my imagination. It’s the mundane bits of a trip, it’s the random drives through towns we probably already forgot the names of, it’s the times we were annoyed, or lost, or tired, or stumbled upon some tiny peek at what a real life in that place would feel like. It’s the pumping of gas, really, the chore we do all the time here, but for some reason stands out when you’re far from home.
I’ve done that, pumped gas, in a lot of far-off places. I’ve pumped it on islands, beside sprawling fields painted in a green that only Ireland can create. I’ve wrestled with strange buttons on strange pumps in medieval cities, in places that feel carved from old movies about old knights, on desert highways, and before high altitude mountain passes. In rainfall, in snow whilst driving a rental 2-door Mercedes sports car with 2-wheel-drive that we got upgraded to but never wanted, I’ve pumped gas there. All the theres. I remember them, all.
I remember the conversations with the attendants and the incredulity on their face when they heard my American accent and wondered what the hell I was doing there, I remember the strange assortment of snacks I’d never heard of, the mostly disgusting bathrooms you had to hold your nose to use. It’s the mundanity, in the end, the little glimpses, that my unruly thoughts seem to evaporate into.
This is life, too. It’s the little things that make up a life.
There’s a rule called the “80/20 Rule” and it basically states that 80% of all outcomes come from 20% of all causes. You can go really deep down this rabbit hole, but it’s been applied to thousands of things, from sales, to even the best way to structure your overall diet or exercise, but I believe it applies here too. 80% of your life is mundane, 20% (if you’re very lucky) will be marquee. I believe this.
Sure, we’ll never forget our weddings, the births of children, the surprise parties, the times we got promotions or got fired, graduations, first dates. But, more than this, it’s washing dishes, it’s cleaning up after meals, it’s making the meals in the first place, it’s grocery shopping, errand running, book reading-TV watching-dog walking-treadmill running-work doing mundanity. It’s pumping gas.
A thousand thousand of these little things, you’ve got a life, as a human being(!), a lucky lottery winning event that, according to Buddha, is more rare than a blind turtle, swimming in the whole of the ocean and only rising for air once every hundred years, coming up for that breath in the hole of a golden yoke. Isn’t that something?!
This is what travel has taught me about life, this is what travel has become for me, a chance to create mundane moments in places my mind, my heart, does not yet know. It’s these gas stations, these tiny roads through pinprick towns, that pull my imagination, my memory, like some magic rope when I sit and stare out at the town I call home and miss that wanderlust.
I do not understand the why of this, I don’t quite compute the machinations of memory or the way it can infiltrate the workings of a mind like mine on any given day, but I also don’t know that I need to. I get lost in these drifting daydreams, I sit back sometimes and vanish from where I am, I float down tiny two lane roads and feel the hedgerows blur by outside the window of the car I once drove, I smell the petrol and the air that for some reason smells so much different than home. I remember the grocery stores we wandered into, the feel of the shopping baskets in my hand, the heaviness of the water jugs we bought, the stickiness of the soft-serve ice cream cone I wipe off of my wife’s hand with a napkin.
I remember the sandwiches we made in the airport hotels the night before an early flight, I remember the Liverpool games watched in small pubs not far from the sea. I remember the dirty looks when our American accents popped into the air of the French bakery outside the cathedral that Joan of Arc knelt inside, I remember the trad music on a Thursday night, the cups of tea we were given free by a bartender than found it hilarious we ordered peppermint tea instead of a pint. I remember the roads, the thousands of thousands of miles of roads spread across both hemispheres.
I remember the damn gas stations.
I think I always will. It ain’t the castles, after all. This is life, too. We’re given grand, and we’re given simple, and for some reason I don’t think I’ll ever quite comprehend, more often than not, it’s the simple we’ll hold on to.
At least 80% of the time.
It’s not the castles
that bring the melancholy,
it’s the gas stations.
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