If you’ve been reading my deep travel tales, you’ll know how un-smart I am.

Count the times I’ve been run down on the road less traveled!

I was barely home from my travels in Africa and Asia when the gods pulled a U-turn and made roadkill of me yet again.

I was filming in the Canadian Rockies

I was shooting a film on the geomorphology of the high country. Think erosion. Even solid granite breaks up over time and washes to the sea. Everything disintegrates, including the human psyche.

Especially mine.

After an exhausting day filming on scree slopes above a chain of turquoise lakes and then debriefing the tapes over dinner with the sound tech we drove to Lake Louise to be closer to our next location. It was midnight by the time we found a tent site on the perimeter of a campground.

We pitched our tent and fell asleep.

I woke at dawn with rain drubbing softly on the sagging canvas.

I heard something else.

I crawled half out to peer around the tent—

Grizzly! Not six feet away from me.

Front paws on the picnic table, she sniffed our cooler, our food supply. Last night we had unloaded the jeep and then hastily secured one end of our pup tent to the table before passing out.

I’m sorry! I told you, I’m not that smart!

The bear took a second to fix me in the cross-hairs of her cold gaze.

I nudged Ken and whispered, “Grizzly.” He wanted to see. I shook my head furiously. He stuck his head out, withdrew, looked at me: “Three cubs.”

Worst case scenario. Now what?

Now what?

The tent collapsed.

The weight of the cooler and everything spilling out—bacon and steaks and yogurt, and bread, coffee, apples, raisins, nuts and milk and a week’s supply of Snickers Bars—it flattened the tent with us beneath it.

Four bears were sitting on us, eating. And not quietly, I might add.

While we lay still as death.

I thought of Fred.

Fred and I had played hockey at university. He was 6-3 and damned good-looking before he met the grizzly who left him minus one hip, a broken back, no scalp, half a face, and a chewed elbow, and those were just the physical injuries.

I was eroding inside, already.

I’d been here before, my life stopped dead in its tracks. (The cheetah comes to mind, remember?) My granite sense of self becoming “Fred,” I couldn’t muster the necessary thoughts to convince myself that life had meaning.

There was nothing left to obscure the fact that life has no meaning.

There was nothing left.

Hold that thought.

If you’ve read Story Structure Expedition, you’re familiar with how I recruited authors more eloquent than myself to do the heavy explaining through moments like this. Well, here we go again:

John Gray (The Silence of Animals), he sounds like he’s been under a grizzly’s picnic tablecloth:

“Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.”

That’s it! What every crisis has taught me.

If Mr. Gray moves over we can squeeze physicist, Alan Lightman, into this dilemma:

“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. Underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”

Lightman is describing the fictional protagonist waking up in the Act II Crisis.

At the heart of the story, heroes see the world as it really is.

Un-smart like me

I’m not saying I’m a hero, but I certainly have been serially un-smart. My talent for not being too smart for my own good has earned me the moral authority to enter the Act III of my life.

And now, writing from the perspective of the final act, I want to share with you some of my discoveries (however arguable they might be):

1. The meaning of a human life is to realize—by whatever means possible—that nothingness is our most precious possession 
2. The best fictional protagonists do just that
3. Which aids and abets our own struggle to see the world as it really is
4. And that’s why we read fiction
5. And perhaps why we write it.

CUT BACK TO ACTION:

Behind the falling rain, low voices. The canvas was suddenly snapped back to reveal a uniformed park official standing over me with a rifle. He shook his head in dismay, or disdain.

I know, I’m an idiot, I’m sorry.

Mama lay in a heap, tranquilized, while her three cubs found refuge up a tree. Campers, soggy in the early morning rain, watched in disbelief.

I know, I know,  I’m sorry! It’ll happen again, I assure you.

Because:

Good writers—like good protagonists—are never too smart for their own good.

[POST SCRIPT: All this “meaning” business notwithstanding, I didn’t sleep well in a tent for a few years after that.]

People do die.

We die of heat exhaustion on the train from Bombay to Delhi.

We die in a taxi cab short of making it to a hotel where we die of despair.

We die of a broken heart. Betrayed. By ourselves. By our stupidity!

I lay on some deluxe deathbed in some beige hotel room somewhere in that suffocating gray limbo called New Delhi and for two or three days I drank blood red orange juice. Where did I find the money for a 3-star hotel? I thought I was broke.

As empty as I was—or perhaps because I was so empty—the image of the beggar in Bombay haunted me. No arms, no legs, not much left of him at all, he was beyond defeat.

The scene won’t quit my head even now. Not sure what I’m seeing as I remember him nudging his begging bowl with his forehead through a thicket of legs, a gauntlet of feet and fumes and cattle and cart wheels and spokes and grime and dogs and shit and broken asphalt. There is no Bombay for me above the knees of that miraculous city. I am down there with him getting trampled and I can’t escape.

At some point it occurred to me—I’m not taking a trip, this trip is taking me.

I was no less curious than the fly on the wall of that hotel room about what would happen next, and how far a person could run on empty.

I’m sweating again on a Delhi street so thick with smog you would be excused for thinking the city had exploded. I’m looking for the offices of British Overseas Airways (BOAC) because I have to escape this blessed country. Where did I get the money to buy an airline ticket? I must have held a few traveler’s cheques in reserve. I can’t remember.

Who can remember everything that happened so long ago? And yet I sometimes remember things I’m not sure I ever saw. The beggar, for instance, whom I saw for only a minute, what I remember about him changed my life.

As the 707 lifted off and banked on a trajectory for Hong Kong I would have been thinking of that beggar. Even as I swore to never ever ever ever set foot in India again, I was carrying him with me. Oaths notwithstanding, I would return to India four more times over the next 20 years.

Why? Because I was looking for answers?

How far can you run on empty? And what happens when you get there?

Hong Kong. What a relief. Clean, efficient, sensible, and above all polite. They were very, very sorry. The Immigration official, he was sorry to tell me that I could not enter Hong Kong. No onward ticket, it hadn’t occurred to me. “Very sorry you come to Hong Kong with no money, so sorry.”

He sent me to the BOAC agent who looked at me as if I might have had a begging bowl protruding from my forehead. He was manufacturing a ticket before I’d finished my sob story. A ticket entirely bogus. Immigration stamped my passport, they were perfectly happy.

I applied to the Canadian High Commission for a loan to see me home. After all, two-years of volunteer work on Zambia’s rivers had left me with schistosomes cavorting in my blood stream, and what’s more my funds had been “stolen” in Bombay, so that here I was running so precariously on empty that by this time tomorrow I would be begging for my supper.

You have to admit, that’s not a bad pitch.

But the High Commissioner wasn’t buying scripts for TV movies. “You have parents,” she explained. “They’ll wire you money.”

While my SOS telegram did its nasty work, I retreated to an offshore monastery.

I didn’t know much about Buddhism or Zen except that the philosophy was Stoic and the life was Spartan. You enter a monastery, you leave everything behind. Fine by me, there wasn’t much left of me. A bamboo mat on a slab in a stone alcove, fine by me. Small log for a pillow, why not?

Oh, yeah, and next to the pillow—a wooden bowl.

The universe was working overtime trying to tell me something.

It’s pretty obvious what the purpose of a monastery is. The silence and simplicity presents a challenge to the monkey-mind. Thinking soon proves pointless, in the aftermath of which things just are. Three bowls of rice a day were a miracle. If they were trying to empty me out, well, I was already losing my urgency to get anywhere.

My final destination might not be a place, after all. Maybe it’s a new way of seeing things.

After a week I returned to Hong Kong to discover that my telegram had not been delivered. “Recipient not home.” I returned to the High Commission and was told to “get a job.”

One Hong Kong dollar—I remember this detail—it was all I had to underwrite my next move. I entered a bar. Was I seeking darkness? Or to speak with someone. I can’t remember.

I found myself gabbing with a friendly face, another Canadian, a round-faced farmer from a small community not far from my home town, as it turned out. I told him of my African sojourn and of my blunder in Bombay and the gift of the beggar and the monastery and being told to get a job, and as we were laughing he ordered us another round, and he slapped some dollars on the table and kept on slapping to the tune of 600 US dollars. I didn’t know him from Adam.

“Pay me back when you can,” he said.

I never saw him again.

I’ve heard it said that the gift seeks the empty place. I suppose emptiness ensures that the gift will be used, consumed, not hoarded but spent. The giver by giving becomes empty and is now in a position to receive. And around it goes like that.

Arriving in Vancouver, I needed $35 dollars to fly over the Rockies to Alberta. A friend from university came to the rescue.

What do you make of all that?

Have you ever survived on empty? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT! We love stories about people getting run over on the road less traveled. It seems you have to almost die to hear the heart of the world beating.

From Africa I flew to India.

I would return home through Asia, circumnavigate the globe, prove the world was round, see it with my own two eyes.

Bombay. Wow! The smells. The crush of humanity! A beggar with no arms or legs.

My god, he had no face, either.

His begging bowl—if you can picture this—he nudged it along the street with his forehead. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t not look.

For a second I couldn’t breathe.

Have you ever been so far from home that your brain wouldn’t compute?

I don’t know how many rupees I dropped in his bowl, probably a lot, because suddenly and inexplicably I felt more alive. I swore to never again bitch about anything, and isn’t that what travel is about?

Travel puts distance between us and our tired old way of seeing things.

What if you could travel twice as far from home?

What if someone approached you in the lobby of your Bombay hotel with a promise to take you twice as far from home? Would you listen to his pitch?

He is tall and impeccable and impossibly smooth-talking as he invites you to sit down so he can make his case. You’re all ears. Where is this place? How do I get there?

“Very easy, my friend,” he says. “Firstly, you allow me to con you out of all your money.” He is joking, of course, this Mr. Patel. “You have traveler’s cheques, yes? Very good. May I see them? No? All right, later perhaps.”

He hails a waiter and orders wine. “In any case, once you have been fleeced, my goodness, you look in the mirror—are you sick?”

“Depressed, I would think, for sure.”

“No, no, I mean sick, sick. You most certainly need a doctor. Here, I can give you his phone number. He confirms that a parasite infects your blood stream. Perhaps you have been exposed to stagnant water. In Africa? That explains everything. I’m afraid it can be fatal. You must be treated soon. But without money you are going nowhere.”

The wine arrives, a Bordeaux, for goodness sake. Who is this Mr. Patel?

“You cannot escape the heatwave we are having here in Bombay. The humidity in advance of the monsoon is unspeakable. But a cheap hostel is all you can afford, a bare mattress upon which you are lying spread-eagle. You are clinging to it for dear life. Otherwise you would run to the window and hurl yourself onto the street below. Such is your despair. Such is your remorse. You have been such a fool! You no longer trust the thoughts that arise to resolve this calamity. I’m afraid to say, sir, that you thoroughly hate yourself.”

Patel raises a glass in a toast. “You cannot travel farther from home than that, my friend.”

I take what must look like an unsophisticated glub of wine.

“But I can see you are not sold on this expedition. And I understand perfectly. It is not part and parcel of the human condition to collude with one’s own demise. We must go unwittingly. Kicking and screaming as it were. Ha, ha! So be it.”

I have no memory of Patel saying any such things, although I do recall the Bordeaux and that he was a businessman in need of foreign currency for an overseas trip, more than bank regulations allow. He offered me a handsome premium on the face value of my traveler’s cheques, leaving me with cash to convert to currencies for my onward journey.

“We will transact this business over a meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel, yes?”

How to travel too far—be gullible, be greedy, be an idiot!

The Bombay Taj, like most 5-star hotels, smells of money. Money having been spent and money being squandered everywhere you look.

Patel threw a heap of rupees at martinis there in the posh mezzanine lounge—and at various kebabs and little lamb chops and chicken tikka—so it didn’t seem inappropriate for me to hand over my traveler’s cheques for his inspection. It seemed appropriate that his uncle, the hotel’s comptroller, should want to verify the cheques. That Patel should confer with his uncle alone sounded suspicious, so I tagged along as far as the elevator where I lost him!

He slipped into an elevator behind doors that closed in my face.

I bolted down the grand marble staircase of the Taj Mahal Hotel to Reception where I learned that no such money manager existed. Three Patels were registered at the Taj and I hammered on each of their doors in vain.

Deep travel—are we there yet?

I applied for a refund at the American Express Office and was told to check back in a week, by which time I would have examined the mug shots of every criminal known to the Bombay Police. By then I could no longer ignore strange fluids leaking from my body. A doctor prescribed antibiotics and a flight home.

Broke but for the cash in my pocket, I downgraded to a hotel without air-conditioning. I remember lying on my bed naked and sweating under a feeble fan and gripping the mattress in mortal fear of having traveled far too far.

I decided to escape Bombay—to Delhi by train.

If Bombay was a sauna, the Rajasthan desert was a furnace. You opened a window at the very real risk of burning yourself. Every whistle stop along the way provided an opportunity to rehydrate, but instead I gorged on ice cream thinking it would cool me down, and I was right. I began to shiver feverishly. And vomit and retch until my muscles seized and I lay on the wooden floor of the 3^rd-class carriage as hopeless as a leper.

A leper without arms or legs!

How far from home was I? I had passed self-loathing hours ago. I was going to die and the sooner the better. I was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he tells Ingrid Bergman. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”

This is where the fictional hero bottoms out. If only! If I were a fictional character, my writer would save me here at the heart of my story. But this is a true story and I have no one to blame but myself. What do they call this in India—karma? How much more was I supposed to suffer? How much more could I take?

What was I supposed to do—push my begging bowl with my forehead?

If that’s what it takes, okay!

I heard someone mention the Taj. We were passing through Agra, home of the real fucking Taj Mahal, one of the so-called Wonders of the World. I didn’t have the wherewithal to throw up. There was nothing left. There wasn’t much left of me. I didn’t think I would survive till Delhi.

I had never felt—and I have never felt since—so far gone.

To be continued…

Have you ever gone too far? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT!

We are all starving for stories about people who are greedy for life.

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