Southern Musings: Beginning my travels at home

I’m a sucker for the words of Henry David Thoreau. I consume them like peanut M&M’S. He wrote in Journal in 1851 about the idea that men must get thousands of miles from home before they can say they began their travels. Why, Thoreau asks, can travels not begin at home?

If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that our travels can, and sometimes must, begin at home. When I was sent home to work indefinitely, our son was two months old. The COVID-19 pandemic is something I wish had never happened, just like everyone else in the world, but it did afford me infinitely more time with the baby. I have witnessed every milestone in person, from his first laugh to the first time he pulled himself up. It also allowed me an extra hour of sleep, an hour I’d have otherwise spent commuting.

I’m an old soul, so new technologies often befuddle me. But in the last year, I’ve learned some things. I’ve downloaded and used the DoorDash app, though it still overwhelms me. I’ve clicked the “Place Your Order” button on Amazon a thousand times and even purchased a drone, which I haven’t so much sent gracefully gliding through the clouds as I have jerked it away from pine tree limbs. Also in the technology realm, I started a podcast, which I use to talk with journalists, city leaders, coaches and more.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been traveling at home if it weren’t for television. The last year was the best time to binge watch anything you haven’t gotten around to. Thousands of options across dozens of streaming apps, and we still rewatched The Office four times.

I also watched game wardens in Maine and New Hampshire save an injured broad-winged hawk from death in the roadway and rescue a loon from a frozen lake using a plastic storage tote. I sprinted through the first three seasons of Yellowstone quicker than a quarter horse, and I’m fairly certain I’d accept that “Y” brand on my chest if it meant living in the mountains of Montana.

I have been watching what may be my favorite of all these, Aerial America on the Smithsonian Channel. This show takes viewers across the United States from the chin of a helicopter. I have seen the Gilded Age homes along the 400 miles of coast in Rhode Island, the round-shaped church in Vermont that Henry Ford tried to buy and move to Michigan, the Texas ranch that Lyndon B. Johnson called home, and hundreds of other scenes from Sacramento to Savannah.

Someday I plan to see every corner of this country through the wide windshield of a Tiffin motorhome. I want to fill it up with enough groceries to last a month, because I am certain I will still fumble my way through that DoorDash app. I want to fly a drone high above the Grand Canyon, where I cannot crash into a pine tree, but a pit of red rock. I want to talk with locals in every state and build a travelogue of sorts, like John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, and fill up dozens of spiral-bound notebooks with descriptions, thoughts and interviews.

What a plan for the decades to come. Truly, every one of these future travels has begun at home.

Gary Lloyd is the author of six books and is a contributing writer to the Cahaba Sun.