An antsy bookstore gift card led me to the travel section one day, where Rita Goldman Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad (Three Rivers Press, 2001) caught my eye. It turns out to be a diary of Gelman’s life since her divorce at age 48, when she abandoned a glitzy life among the elite of LA in order to get to know the rest of the world. By smiling often, sampling every food she was offered, and asking everyone she met about their children in a genuinely interested tone, she inserted herself into communities in Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, New Zealand, and Indonesia. Serendipity is her guide. She typically picks an intriguing country almost at random and flies there on the meager profits of her children’s books (which include such colorful titles as More Spaghetti, I Say! and Stop Those Painters!). She then places herself in the remotest backwater village she can reach and chats with locals until someone invites her to stay in their home. She absorbs the local culture and language from her hosts while helping out with chores (preferably in the kitchen) and giving English lessons. When her visa expires, she moves on.
Most of the people she called friends in her old life believe that her divorce severely traumatized her. They accuse her of running away from the situation, making up for her husband’s withdrawal by insisting on being accepted by everyone else she meets. Or of purposefully removing herself from any possibility of long-term relationships by refusing to settle in one place. Gelman responds that she is not running away from anything, and instead she is running toward something. (Funny, that’s the same response I once gave when someone asked me why in the world, as it were, I was going to spend a year in New Zealand. And I thought I was being so smart, turning around his accusation like that.) Is it so crazy to want to be liked and accepted by strangers? Or to be curious and crave challenges? There are worse ways to deal with curves in the road of life. Gelman chose to go off-roading. Her book’s purpose is to explain how positive a nontraditional lifestyle can be. She hopes to be an inspiration, especially to older, divorced women. They still have a lot of living to do, and they might as well spend it on adventures, new friends, and a renewed sense of helpfulness.
At times, though, Gelman makes her life sound impossibly idyllic. She marches into remote corners of the world, making devoted friends out of whole villages on nothing but a smile. Her determined optimism finds ways to tack happy endings onto even the most revolting bad luck. (She succeeds in turning an ugly bout with a whole-body skin infection into a beautiful snake-shedding-skin allegory.) Plus, to make her modest ends meet, she gets to be a writer. She conducts research simply by living. She rarely admits to a wistful thought. But there must be something undesirable about her life. How does she handle so many long-distance relationships, particularly with her parents and children? Does her bank account ever run threateningly low? Does she ever spend five minutes passionately hating children’s books before settling down to finish a story about an exuberantly grinning monkey dressed in a floppy red hat and a gold necklace? How does she plan on living when she’s 90? Does she ever get antsy at the keyboard like I do, itching to go out and collect more neat experiences instead of sequestering herself away to write about the past? Does she ever wish that her life was even a teeny bit different? Her book is an advertisement describing the absence of regret in her nomadic life, a kind of so-there letter to her baffled former friends. But it sometimes sounds as exaggerated as the second half of a drug commercial, after the actress has gulped down her pills and now is running for president. It’s a premeditated strategy for encouraging potential nomads, but if I were seriously considering selling my silverware for a ticket to Borneo, I might want to prepare for the tough parts as well as look forward to the wonderful ones. (Then again, mystery is part of the adventure... Still, the book remains unbalanced.)
If her own life is idyllic, the lives of the people she visits are less satisfying. She prefers the company of indigenous communities whose lives are entwined with tradition. Her hosts are often relatively poor and live in developing countries. Gelman struggles to balance two noble goals: on one hand, wanting to help improve her friends’ lives, and on the other, respecting traditions which are often wonderful but sometimes troublesome. She strives to accept new cultural frames and to see life through the eyes of the locals. When she sees one host family throw their food wrappers to the wind during a roadside picnic, she resists her urge to find a garbage can for her own litter, forcing herself not to judge their actions by the standards of the culture she grew up in. But what would you do if you watched your drunken host beat his wife, knowing that it was “culturally acceptable?” (Acceptable by whom, I wonder?) What would you do if you recognized a great artistic talent in a kid whose destiny it is to wash windows in the family woodcarving gallery? Gelman gave this kid a carving kit, with which he created inspired sculptures, but she stopped short of asking the family to give him time off to develop his talent, fearing that her request would be seen as meddlesome. “Interference” is a slippery concept whose definition slides into that of “helping” without obvious borders, made even more difficult to discern when surrounded by an unfamiliar code of manners and lurking local politics. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from “interfering,” she decided it was time to pack up and continue her journeys. She interprets her urge to interfere as a sign that she has been somewhere long enough, that she has settled into her surroundings enough to feel comfortable passing judgments and suggesting changes. (Then again, maybe she just needs an excuse to keep moving, to feed her addiction to newness.)
After a bit of internet research, I see that there is a small but growing community of older, typically divorced, women travelers. How exciting, and reassuring, to discover a new kind of freedom at an age that we whippersnappers associate with dentures and canes. I almost wish I were 60 right now, so that I could join that crowd, confident with the wisdom of years—and the bank account of years. Or at least a promising work-from-“home” business idea. Sigh, I just hope that a long and boring career from which to launch such a business isn’t a prerequisite for world travel. I wonder how Gelman would advise younger women who are making, instead of remaking, their lives?
Gelman does reach her goal of inspiring potential travelers and showing us how easy and rewarding it is to connect with people who seem, at first, so fundamentally different. Granted, near the middle, her narrative turns into a straight-from-the-diary list that could be entitled “Neat things that happened to me this month:” this is what I cooked on that day, then I flew there, here’s how I found a house, these are the people I went to that ceremony with. Passages that emphasize important events and tie them to Gelman’s life-philosophy become shorter and rarer. But despite my few critiques, I’m ready to hop on a one-way flight to the deepest jungle where no one’s ever heard of English. (Don’t worry, friends and parents, I wouldn’t thrive in Gelman’s shoes. First of all, she can have the tropics, give me a good snowfall. Besides, she repeats that her passion is people, whereas mine is landscapes. Her expertise in chit-chatting opens her doors, literally. I, on the other hand, would head for Nowheresville in order to leave it and go hiking nearby, so I guess I’m still searching for a role model. Still, writing books while hiking around Vatnajökull Glacier sounds sorely tempting.) There is, apparently, more than one way to live a successful and rewarding life.
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Other Eye-Catching Titles:
Not So Funny When It Happened (ed. Tim Cahill, Travelers’ Tales 2006)
Madam, Have You Ever Really Been Happy? (Meg Noble Peterson, iUniverse 2005)
Currently on my coffee table:
Tales from Nowhere (ed. Don George, Lonely Planet 2006)
Two Thumbs Up:
Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer, Anchor Books 1996)
Southern Exposure (Chris Duff, Falcon 2003)
Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge (Jill Fredston, North Point Press 2001)
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998)
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