18 Chapter 18. You Can Never Go Home Again

In the end, the dark spot on my lung proved to be a severe case of pneumonia, not tuberculosis, as I had feared. I gradually recovered physically. With antibiotics, the X-ray spots disappeared. I ate and slept well and soon regained weight. The privileges that had allowed me to travel overland to India had now also rescued me from wasting illness, and perhaps death, in a foreign country.

Psychologically and emotionally, however, I was at loose ends. The sudden shock of being in India one moment, the next being in the far too familiar—but also strange—confines of Canada left me dazed and fraught. I felt as though my body had failed me, or I it. My relationship with the young Swiss woman ended. At moments, I pondered catching a flight back to India, or perhaps to Zambia as I had originally planned, as somehow those places seemed more real, more authentic, than where I was. But I did not, and a lack of money was only one reason. I was caught between two emotional worlds, at sea and untethered, asking, “Where is home?” Whatever the circumstances of our return, many of us likely asked that question.

Given that many of us started out with little money and strung it out as long as possible, it is no surprise we often came home relatively penniless and, as in my case, in less than perfect health. Fergus F. recalled being “freezing and shivering, wearing Indian sandals and Indian clothes” when he arrived at a railway station in London in 1969, after travelling to India. “My brother met me and immediately took me to his house where he gave me some warm clothes.”

I doubt I’m the only traveller whose first appointment upon returning home was to see a doctor. More difficult than the physical adjustment, however, was the emotional and psychological adjustment. Far from comforting, home was stressful. The magnitude of the travel experience—the sheer cultural strangeness—could make the return difficult, especially if it was abrupt or followed a long period away from home.

Victor Turner describes a liminal, “sacred space and time … beyond and outside the time which measures secular processes and routines.”¹ This captures the sense I had after I returned. I found conversing with anyone who had not made the journey difficult. There was an existential gap, a kind of “no man’s land” of experience separating us, one that I can only imagine soldiers returning from a warfront or medics returning from a terrible disaster must feel. This book is in part an attempt to articulate an experience that, in the past, I have only spoken of in dribs and drabs, and not even fully to myself.

Travelling has its own rhythm, so that returning to stable routines, including relationships, takes on a strangeness of its own. I had always been restless; travelling intensified a sense that I was always in the wrong place, that I should be somewhere else. Some individuals to whom I spoke talked about living in a state of permanent unease, of never again feeling quite at home anywhere. Said Karen Rogers, “After nine and a half years living in Europe, and travelling to Afghanistan, I was never again able to fully integrate into American life. Even today, I feel that I don’t belong in the US and still have dreams of leaving.”

Bruce Finch echoed the difficulty of transitioning from the emotional “high” of travelling to the mundane life back home: “I really missed the constant adrenalin of travelling, the edge you always felt. It took me a time to settle down to the routine of nine to five.” David Tomory similarly quotes an individual who remarked, “How could you go back to being a clerk when you’d had a real life? Lots of people could never go back to that.”²

Not being tied to anyone or anything was liberating. Ann Woodruff said that travelling to India gave her “the courage to pack up and go,” to leave her circle of safety. A life of travel means neither possessing nor being possessed. It requires being adaptable and innovative. Above all, it means learning how to do without. “Travel made me realize I could survive anywhere,” said John Wall. “I liked nothing better than arriving in a strange place about which I knew nothing and finding out how it worked.”

My recovery from living between two realities began when I embarked on a new adventure—going to university—but full recovery took several years. In the process, I lost touch with the experience and with several people—those to whom this book is dedicated—who, only gradually, I came to realize I would not meet again.

As David Lane observed, the experience of travelling in your late teens or early twenties stays with you for life: “You always think that some day when the kids are grown up, I’m going to put on that backpack again and go back on the road.” Years after I travelled to India, my dust-covered backpack hung in the garage, grudgingly discarded only during a move to another house. When I began travelling overseas again in 2008, my luggage was once more a backpack.

For some, their first journey to India was not their last. Fergus B. made the overland journey twice, in 1970–71 and 1972–73, as did Alan Dodds in the years 1973–74 and 1975–76. John Wall and Geoffrey Seccombe both travelled to India three times, the former in 1964, 1968, and the early 1970s, the latter in 1969, 1971, and 1973, both staying for a longer period. As I noted earlier, I too made a second trip, in 1983, although I ended up returning home sooner than I’d originally planned. Though I was only dimly aware of it at the time, a new phase of my life was beginning to unfold.

The initial trip to India also stimulated the urge to travel to other countries. While David Hodges later revisited many of the same countries to which he journeyed in 1967, he subsequently went farther afield, driving cars overland from London to Beijing and Hong Kong and from London to Cape Town. After travelling to India in 1974–75, David Dudeck travelled to Kenya in 1976, where he taught with CUSO (Canadian University Overseas Services). In 1980, he taught English in Borneo before travelling the next year to Thailand, Nepal, and India once again.

For some, the impetus to travel had also an intergenerational effect. In later years, Ann Woodruff took her children to India, where her son eventually completed his final year of university at Dharamsala. Bruce Shore and Brenda Grant later travelled with their adult children to Bali, Mexico, and India, where their daughter subsequently spent five months on her own.

Despite the challenges of readjustment and an inclination to future travel, the vast majority of travellers did eventually settle into conventional lives. We finished our educations, began careers, and raised families.

Of the forty-eight individuals I interviewed or surveyed in writing this book, eight ended up working in financial services and five in managerial positions, while two more owned small businesses. Four became university professors, and another four took up other teaching careers. Four became doctors, one a nurse. Three more became psychologists, two were lawyers, and three pursued careers as journalists and writers. Two more became engineers, while another six went into trades such as carpentry and landscaping. Finally, two individuals worked in community services, one was employed as a secretary, and one became a real estate salesperson.

In some cases, these careers led to further opportunities for travel. David Atkings, for example, who travelled to India in 1970 with COMEX 4, went on to become a mining engineer, a career that eventually took him to the coal mines of Turkey, Pakistan, and India. Fergus B. explicitly noted that travel “had a direct and lasting impact on me professionally.” He became an international journalist, returning to India in 1981 and 1986. Travel, he wrote, “gave everything a human dimension,” opening him up to the “political, social, cultural, and religious realities” of the countries through which he passed.³

Beyond its impact on specific life trajectories, the journey also broadened the understanding of most of those who made it. Both David Lane and Frank Sullivan felt that they viewed events in the news very differently than they would have otherwise. To give an example, the American-led invasion of Afghanistan was at the top of my mind as I did my interviews. Several individuals I spoke to were critical of that action, viewing it as a product of hubris and ignorance that could only end in failure.

Many said the journey made them more tolerant of new experiences, more knowledgeable of other religions and cultures, and more aware of their own privileged circumstances. In the end, if for a time some of us seemed to lose our home, we came also to see the world as a larger place where we could live.

1. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 56–57.

2. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 240.

3. In addition to his work as a journalist, Bordewich has had a very successful career as an historian, specializing in the US Civil War and the struggle to end slavery. At the time he responded to my ads, he already had five books to his credit, with a sixth on its way (though he modestly didn’t say so).