(The title of this post is a reference to a song by that name by the rappers Fashawn and Blu. I loved this song. It came out when I was in college and I listened to it constantly back then especially when I was traveling and feeling homesick. You should check it out.)
Hey fam,
Here we are again in this little digital dispatch. I write to you from “home” by which I mean my current address outside of Boston which will not be my address come June. Come June we’ll move back to the midwest to an as of yet unknown place somewhere in the general vicinity of Madison, WI and then I hope I will not move anywhere for a long time. I’m tired of that kind of moving. But I’m not writing today about that kind of moving.
Today I’m thinking about traveling.
I’ve thought about travel for a long time. In my last book I have a poem about my fraught relationship with the idea of vacation called “ode to vacation.”
Travel is one of those things that many of us do in some form or another but we don’t always think about the implications of it for ourselves. Given that I think I want to take some time to think out loud about my own relationship to travel.
Right now I should be traveling. We were supposed to travel to Kansas City for the AWP Conference, which is the big national professional conference for creative writers and such. We had to cancel our plans on somewhat short notice to focus on health and recovery. I’m bummed to miss it. AWP is a conference that can be overwhelming and that many writers hate openly for some good reasons. Despite that I sort of love it. I like seeing random friends and colleagues and writers I like and frenemies and enemies and all that. I also admit that this year being on fellowship and being in a city where I don’t know many people and don’t have much social connection or time/energy/space to build social connection has been hard. These days I am primarily operating as husband and dad and I love those roles but I also like being a writer. AWP is a space that makes me feel like a writer so I’m a little sad to miss it. Ah well. I’ve been to a bunch of them (I weirdly went to my first one at 18) and I’ll be back.
Thinking back though I think maybe the most foundational experience in my youth to the way I experience travel was going to ‘smart camp.’ From the age of 9 until 17 every summer I went to various forms of academic summer camp. These camps, usually at fancy universities were always a highlight of my year. The first one I went to was at Northwestern. Even though Northwestern is only a little more than an hour from my childhood home on the South Side it… felt very far spiritually. I don’t know a better way to say it.
I could write hundreds of pages about the way that those camps impacted my life (and I probably will one day) but one of the central ways I think they did is that they started to put a little code in my mind that travel meant I was going to do work. I was going to have a lot of fun and make friends and memories and have adventures also. But I was going to work my damn ass off in the middle of the summer when a lot of my friends were presumably at home kicking it or playing all day or whatever. I was in a college classroom taking fairly intense courses for 3 weeks every summer. Eventually after having a… controversial experience at Northwestern’s camp when I was 14 (long story) I started to go to camps at other fancy colleges. Johns Hopkins and Georgetown and Harvard among others. From 13 on all these things were paid for by a scholarship program I became part of and that program also required some summer travel and that continued to push that work=travel button in my brain.
I don’t mean to say these were the only times I traveled. I have an aunt who we visited a few times in Houston as kids. We went to Wisconsin Dells when I was 5 or 6 and it was the coolest place ever. We went to Detroit a few times when I was young to visit family. In high school my mom took us to Vegas once and my dad took me to Houston and Louisiana to visit family. These trips were all cool but they were also somewhat sporadic and the summer camps were so regular that they really fundamentally shaped how I think about travel.
The smart camp thing sort of naturally led into the travel dimension of my life as a writer. I started doing writing related travel as a youth poet going to other places in the midwest for readings and things. The first times I ever visited Madison or Ann Arbor before living in either city was for youth poetry events. Again it was great fun and I made so many friends but it continued to reinforce that pattern. And so once I got a little older and started to try to make a real life as a writer it was a natural part of my practice to be willing and ready to travel in this way and because of things like the Louder Than A Bomb documentary I had a ton of opportunity to do that stuff even in college. I remember my senior year of college I was president of my fraternity chapter and a regional board member for the organization and in the summer I plotted out our entire event schedule for the year. Basically any weekend I didn’t have Kappa events I was likely traveling. I wrote as many papers that year on planes as I did in my own room.
Again I’m not mad at this dynamic or the life I’ve led in terms of travel, which has largely been charmed and cool. I’m just thinking about this relationship and how it is somewhat particular.
I want to think about my favorite travel memories that aren’t work things. This isn’t an exhaustive list but yeah.
After my line brother Jeremy graduated from his masters we took a cross country road trip from New Haven, CT to LA. It was great. We rented a little VW bug because it was cheap and we had no concrete plan except our flights out of LA 2 weeks later. We went to DC, Knoxville, Nashville, New Orleans, Dallas, Tulsa, Denver, the Grand Canyon, and Vegas. We saw our other 3 line brothers and mostly stayed with frat brothers the whole time. I think we only got 2 nights in hotels the whole trip (and we even had a hookup for cheap hotel rooms thanks to another frat brother). It was incredible. Everybody should do something like that once in their life.
In December 2021 Alison and I spent a long weekend in Maine with our friends Amanda and EM. It was fantastic. We played mad games and cooked and walked on the cold beach and it was great.
Several years ago me and José took my nephew to DC. This trip was… slightly work-adjacent. We worked on our book projects in the morning and then in the afternoon we went to museums and in the evenings we would hang out with friends or just watch movies and talk. It was my nephews first time on a plane and I was so happy and proud that I could show him those things. I want to be sappier but he’s a teen now and I don’t want to embarrass him so I’ll chill.
In college the one spring break I didn’t go back to Chicago to host poetry slams me and my college girlfriend drove to Dallas to visit her family and then to New Orleans to visit my family down there. This was maybe my first time taking a road trip without a grown up. Also it was the first time I went back to the home place (what we call where my Granny is from in Louisiana) driving myself. It was hard to get directions because it is so country out there it wasn’t on GPS at the time and GPS was a separate machine you bought and not built into your phone. I had to call multiple cousins before someone could explain how to get there. Everyone knew how to get there but nobody could explain it. The directions I finally got included going past the tall sugar cane and the short sugar cane and a broken down bread factory. It was a great trip. It also included my first time buying a hotel room myself and seeing Mos Def in the French Quarter just standing around but being too afraid to say anything (he was wearing beautiful two-tone penny loafers).
In grad school I went to Vegas with my middle sister because she lived in Denver and wasn’t gonna go home for Thanksgiving and i was in Michigan and went back to Chicago all the time so I just told her to pick somewhere and we could go or meet up or whatever. It was fun! Vegas during a holiday is kind of sad but also empty in a way that made it nice and more bearable for me. Also we were there for like 4 or 5 days which is probably too many days for Vegas!
For our honeymoon we went to Ouray, Colorado and stayed there for a week. We drove out right after our wedding and listened to the Beyoncé album that had just dropped and then I talked a lot about house music’s history. We stayed at a hot springs and didn’t make any plans and got dinner and dessert on the little main strip in town every night. It was great.
There’s other trips that stand out to me but I think what I’m learning is that I love a road trip. I love visiting people. I love things where there’s not much of a plan or plans are flexible and can change. I love to travel with loved ones especially if they’re chill and don’t yell about my driving (sorry mom). The other thing I’m thinking about is all these trips had pretty significant things go wrong. Jeremy left his license in New Orleans and so he didn’t have it until we got to LA. We left Maine a little early to beat a snowstorm and one of the days there I had a virtual job interview (with Wisconsin) and was 30 sec late because I mixed up time zones and had to sprint from a beach walk back to our place and put on the top half of a suit and find the best corner for cabin wifi. I got my first speeding ticket in a speed trap in Louisiana and it was an expensive ticket that made me very broke the rest of the semester. Stuff happens.
I think travel can be good. It can be eye opening and fulfilling and sustaining and many other things. I think I’m considering this now because this least I’ve traveled ever in my adult life and its somewhat funny and random that I’m bound to such a random locale as suburban Boston for this stretch.
I suppose I’m also thinking about this now because having a kid makes you (or at least it makes me) introspective about life and about the things that shaped mine and what things I’d like to shape hers, god willing. So yeah.
What are your favorite vacations? What is your relationship to travel? Share whatever you feel. I’m curious.
Peace,
Nate
PS. Today’s song from my long ass playlist from my youth is Growing Pains by Ludacris feat. Fate Wilson and Keon Bryce
Okay this was a fascinating song to revisit. I love the sample I love the nostalgic theme of the song. I think I’ve always loved this particular brand of popular song that is nostalgic for a bygone era. Hip-hop has countless versions from Ahmad’s “Back In The Day” to Eric B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend” to Kanye and Twista’s “Slow Jamz.” They all rely on that kind of mythmaking. Let me be clear that I don’t believe the myth that things were always better back when but I’m fascinated by the impulse and I admit I do often traffic in my own nostalgic delusions. Anyway this song is interesting to me because I think Luda mostly gets outshined. Fate has 2 verses and Luda only has one. Luda’s verses are more expertly delivered with his trademark booming voice and humor and smooth cadence but Fate’s verses paint a more vivid and specific picture of a bygone youth. I’m curious as to why this song ended up on a Luda album and my only guess is that maybe it was meant for Fate but Luda took it because he was the bigger artist or something. At any rate I love Ludacris and think he’s one of those artists who was huge but seems to fade from people’s memories but he had so many jams. Also he has one of the great voices in hip-hop and I think maybe because he was so funny and expressive people missed how great of an MC he was at the level of language. He’s worth revisiting. He was my sister Jamesa’s favorite rapper growing up and my boy Shaun loved him and between the two of them I ended up listening to a lot of him and really appreciating what he brought to rap. His movies are fine I guess. He has a holiday movie on Hulu that is not great but we watched around Christmas and it was a charming enough way to spend 2 hours. Shoutout Ludacris, one-time suburban Chicago HS kid turned Atlanta rap legend.
I always enjoy your writing, brings back memories for me too. I loved watching you grow and being your mom. I'm very surprised you didn't mention your travels to see Thaddeus White in the summers! A very nice and smart family who nurtured a friendship between you two. My memorable travels were to Montgomery Alabama in the summers with my parents. There were back roads where we passed tin roofed shacks, then along came the "super highways" that my dad marveled at. Folding maps and big ass Atlas. Going through areas where you couldn't pick up radio stations. NA related travels to conventions were some of my most enjoyable, a feeling of belonging to something bigger than myself, spiritual in nature with concrete outcomes. Now, I love traveling anywhere any of my children are because I love them and miss them so much. Often, I think of them and weep.