Always the Adventure: Finding the good in goodbye
Bigfork High graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.
The bitter irony of travel is that for an endless chain of new beginnings, it is built on the foundation of endings. I have never been particularly good at goodbyes, and yet they plagued every destination I visited.
Over my first month and a half of travel, I said a lot of goodbyes, shocking myself with how difficult some of them were, but my hardest goodbye was to Oxford.
Preparing to leave, I realized all the things I had taken for granted. I would miss the haze of antiquity, the constant gaze of stone gargoyles from atop turrets, the perpetually green grass, and the wisteria blossoms of early Trinity. I’d miss tripping on cobblestone streets and passing the iconic Radcliffe Camera every day. But most of all I would miss the familial feeling that Oxford gave me. Driving away, I heard the fanfare of chiming church bells, a chaotic sound I had grown to love because it was so uniquely Oxford, and I mouthed one final “Cheers” to the place that had grown to be so much a part of me.
Being a restless spirit, I went abroad with the expectation of adventure, not attachment, but I was quick to learn the former means very little without the latter. No matter how amazing the destination, how beautiful the sites, people are what make travel truly special.
Relationships among travelers are unique because travelers themselves are all of the same unique vein. Like an explosion, these friendships are instantaneous but tragically temporary. No sooner would I meet and befriend someone that we would have to part ways. Yet the finiteness of these bonds are perhaps what make them special, the same way we value sunsets and the scent of the air before a storm, because they are fleeting. It is easy to become cynical when you live your life by goodbyes, but for every person I walked away from thinking I would never see them again, I was reminded how small and unpredictable the world is. One time, at a hostel in Bratislava, Slovakia, I randomly ran into a girl I had befriended over a month before way up in Tallinn, Estonia. Even today, enabled by the great and terrible blessing of technology, I still remain in close contact with many of my fellow travelers.
On a fateful day in an Estonian hostel, an elderly Danish woman named Inge told me, “The connections you make when you’re traveling, they don’t fade. They just take effort.” She was traveling with an American woman, Margie, whom she had met nearly fifty years ago when the two were solo traveling through Africa. They had been in contact ever since and were back on the road together.
Margie and Inge taught me that goodbye is an arbitrary term. Its meaning ranges from “goodbye forever” to “see you tomorrow” and thus symbolizes the unpredictability that governs our lives. We as humans fear this disorder but I learned you cannot let the fear of a goodbye stop you from saying hello.
As the last piece of my travel column comes to an end, I want to share a quote by Chris McCandless by which I grew to live. I wrote it everywhere: the header of my blog, hostel walls, guest books and trail logs, and probably in a lot of places I should not have. It states, “The very basic core of man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy in life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
These words embody my philosophy on travel, saying goodbye, and life in general. A little known secret about saying goodbye is that it signals new beginnings just as much as it does endings. No matter what is behind you, there is always a new horizon just ahead.