december-2009

70
DECEMBER 2009 | UNITED.COM
I bear the burden of refusing to
be grounded, of kicking against
permanence. It’s an uphill battle.
Especially when travel websites fi ll my
inbox with email after email detailing
their last-minute vacation packages.
For various reasons—most of them
involving said websites, some of them
involving laundry—I don’t think I’ve
stayed in one place for more than two
months. Ever. There was once a popular
term that described this passion as the
vice that it really is: Wanderlust. I’m
bringing it back. In fact, I’ve started
capitalizing the “W” to diff erentiate
between innocent postcollege summers
spent backpacking around Europe and
the full-blown case of Wanderlust that I
eventually developed.
I suppose my condition was
incubating long before I was born.
My dad joined the Royal Air Force
right after medical school. During his
fi ve years in Her Majesty’s service, he
lived in Germany and Cyprus, slept in
abandoned leper colonies and dangled
from helicopters above the icy North
Sea, before becoming a heart surgeon.
My mom played international tennis,
volleying from the clay courts of Roland
Garros to the soft lawns of Wimbledon.
They met on a hotel pool deck in Cape
Town and were engaged two weeks later.
For the fi rst few years of their marriage,
they traveled. And traveled some
more—to Taiwan and Hawaii, to North
Carolina to see the Jaws opening run and
to New York for cheesecake at Carnegie
Deli. But they wanted to start a family,
and children meant bottles and diapers
and nursery rhymes, not tray tables
and baggage carousels and prefl ight
safety announcements. When my mom
got pregnant, they decided to kick their
Wanderlust à deux—cold turkey.
After less than a month, they
relapsed. At three weeks old, I was
sitting on my mother’s lap on a fl ight
bound for the Bahamas, soaring high
BATH WHIZ Reading Cheever in the tub
leads to a Wanderlust epiphany.
above the world I’d just entered. By
the time I was two, I had already fl own
116,334 miles. By my 10th birthday,
I’d been tear-gassed and infected with
parasites. That same year, my dad tried
to buy four Coca-Colas at an airport
in Zimbabwe. The barman pulled a
machine gun on us. Then, for the very
reasonable price of $20 a bottle, the
barman put down his Kalashnikov and
gave us our drinks. With a smile.
Meanwhile, of course, I’d seen the
world. And I loved every minute of
it. My youthful memories are viewed
through the prism of a Boeing 747. I
built my childhood fortresses not with
sofa cushions but with thin airplane
I built my childhood fortresses not with
sofa cushions but with thin airplane blankets
draped over seatbacks.
blankets draped over seatbacks. My
occasional stomachaches were treated
by friendly fl ight attendants bearing
ginger ale. After another young
Wanderluster—my sister—joined the
family, our pillow fi ghts were largely
ineff ectual battles, thanks to those small
airline pillows. When I started school,
my tray table became a collapsible desk.
I ate Goldfi sh crackers in the airport
lounge at Heathrow for my afternoon
snack. We were a family united by a love
of wandering, and I was always along
for the fl ight.
I slowed down a little for high school
and college, but after that my condition
increased markedly in severity. One
Wednesday afternoon, the thought
crossed my mind that I’d never been
to Machu Picchu. By Friday I was
standing outside my friend’s apartment
in Cuzco wearing New Balances and an
elementary school backpack, convinced
that this was all we’d need to conquer
the Inca Trail. (I fi nally acquiesced to
my friend’s far more mundane idea of
taking the train.)
The advent of travel websites—no
more telephone calls, no more travel
agents—meant that I could meander
the fi rmament free from third-party
interlopers. I upgraded to a new credit
card seeking the extra miles, airport
lounges, free sodas (the free sodas alone
paid for the credit card). I began to
spend more time in airports than I did
in my own bedroom.
But where to next? What if a family
wedding at one end of the globe
coincided with a writer’s conference
at the other? No problem. My life was
in constant motion. From Miami to
Los Angeles to Sydney to Cairns I’d
go, backtracking from Sydney to Los
Angeles to Miami, and then on to Paris
and St. Petersburg. That particular
odyssey took place in 12 days, after
which my fi rst two weeks in Russia
were a cacophonous blur. I didn’t know
when to eat or sleep. And I couldn’t
have been happier. I was a full-blown
Wanderluster—with all of its attendant
side eff ects.
Later that year, I was reading John