Speedy Boarding with Adam Nathan
Bergamo, the Camino, and emergency checklists with the writer of 100 Stories
Welcome back to Speedy Boarding, a bi-weekly series on Not That You Asked that is great news for those of you who are getting sick of me. That’s because it’s a series where I ask some of my favourite writers on Substack eight quick-ish questions about travel. So, the vast majority of the words you’re about to read weren’t written by me but by someone else.
This week the questions are being answered by
of . To say Adam’s writing is eclectic is an enormous understatement. He writes fiction, memoir, and about travel - specifically the Camino. His Substack is interesting and varied and has something for everyone. Check it out.Okay, let’s get to the questions.
Where is the best place you’ve ever been and why?
First, there’s a runner up.
When I was nine, my father was given a free stay for three at a resort in St. Croix. With my brother, we snorkelled at an underwater national park in the Virgin Islands. I can still see the clouds of bright blue and yellow fish with their kinda-sorta scary eyes and their wonder-if-they-bite-me puckered mouths. They would be in front of and then quite suddenly all around me, or behind me and then suddenly past. It was a little freaky, but somehow they never bumped into me.
That same resort had a swimming pool bar where you could sit in the warm water and have free drinks with all the cherries you wanted, and you didn’t have to pay for anything. You just asked the man. In those days my family had very little free anything.
And after dark, there were small frogs that jumped across the walkway back to our resort cottage, and my brother and I tried to catch them, but we couldn’t. And we’d never had money for anything like that trip. We’d never even been to Disney World, the gold standard of vacations, and it felt like everybody in my class had been there, but this vacation break I went back to school and shared an adventure that nobody else had ever had, and sharing adventures is such a huge part of having them.
But there’s also a true winner, a “best” place.
When I ask myself “where I would haunt if I were to haunt a place?” it would be Bergamo, Italy where I lived when I was seven and my brother was nine. I would haunt the upper rampart outside of the gate to the upper city. Like a friendly ghost, I would follow the two American children in 1972 down the stone walkway that still looks out over the lower city.
I’d float down-down-down over the chestnut trees and the cobbled path that leads to the lower funiculare station with the chickpea candy dispenser and the smell of espresso coffee, fresh bread and exhaust from Vespas. My ghost would watch the two American brothers enter their Montessori school across the big boulevard, a busy street as I remember it, but one we were allowed to cross alone because it was 1972, and parents were lazier back then and more likely to let their kids take risks without adult supervision.
Also, there are kind ghosts to look after them.
We only lived in Bergamo for a year, but I’d be happy to live there forever. I wrote about it here and here.
Where is the place you most want to visit?
When I was twelve years old, I was able to look through a telescope viewfinder and see Saturn. I’d waited in a long line of schoolkids, and I only got to look for a few seconds, but sure enough, there it was, and it looked like Saturn as it was supposed to, like a science book Saturn. It was larger than I thought any heavenly body might be inside a telescope, and it – she? – had true rings and soft, striated inner-gumball colours.
But my ultimate destination would be a window on the International Space Station. I'd peer out and see Earth. I’d only need to visit for a second. For the span of a second, I’d know that the swirling clouds and the brown deserts and the blue seas were my world.
I love languages more than anything else in travel even the food, and I think there must be a language that only the people who’ve looked out of a space station window down at Earth can speak. Maybe the language doesn’t even have words. Maybe the language of space is a “yeah, me, too” nod that means “You. Me. Earth. Wow.” I’d like to speak that language.
Who's your dream travel companion?
As much as she hears about Substack, Substack, Substack, my wife doesn’t read anything I write on Substack, except, it will turn out, this, but I must “speak my truth” bravely.
Melanie is my #2 dream travel companion. She loves to travel. It makes her enormously happy. We have a deep abiding friendship based on the places we’ve visited together, and everything is just a tad, um, sexier after a good day on a travel adventure. Aaah! the frequent flyer miles! You can only use them on the same airline, but how they’ve accumulated!
The two of us once visited the same Bergamo mentioned above in our twenties, and we were in a café, and there was a sudden torrential, white sheet downpour that overflowed the cobblestone gutters and ran into the shops before being chased out by irritable brooms. Outside, pedestrians raced for cover with newspapers over their heads, and the two gigantic German twin brothers that owned the place leaned out the front door together and admired the rain in that way people look up and admire rain, and a woman with a stroller jumped inside laughing and dragging the stroller. There was nowhere in the world we’d rather have been. This was 30 years ago, but, really, like yesterday, and we’ve both talked about that moment forever, so you know she’s a solid #2 dream traveling companion. With a “bullet” as they say.
My wife is always happy when she’s on the road, and when she’s happy, the world is happy. I could tune into that radio station forever. (There are other stations on the dial, less so, perhaps.). She has adventure in her bones. I’m the meet-er of strangers and the language learner, but she’s the throw-open-the-hotel-shutters, greet the day, and get us up early and out to see the town until you drop or break down in tears and beg her to let us get back to the hotel so I can read. I always want to stop and eat and nap like I’m seven, but she presses on until something magical happens for the both of us. Or we get in an argument for all the reasons I’ve just cited. Pick your own winner who’s best to travel with but keep it to yourself.
But… you very specifically said “dream travel” companion.
Melanie, I love you and I’m sorry, but you can’t come if there’s only room for one.
You see, I have never owned a dog, and I want a dog someday that loves me more than anyone else in the world, and the two of us will travel like hobos together, riding the trains, looking out at sunsets from dangerously open boxcar doors. He’ll always put his head on my legs when I whistle, and I’ll dangle my feet out over the side. I’ll probably gently scratch his head and let him know “our luck is going to turn soon,” and “we’re going to get through this and there’s work in the next town.” It will be 1947 just outside of Portland, Oregon. My dog’s name will be Shep, and we’ll go places together, see the world, just a simple man and a mutt of a dog, and even though he never talked back, not even the one time, when I drank too much and promised I’d keep it a secret if he did talk, still he’d be a great listener, and somehow, I’d know that he saw all the same things I did in his dog-way and that’s what he was always trying to tell me when he put his chin on my knee.
And he’d like to sleep in and have snacks and take naps just like I do.
(Speaking of hobos: check out this guy’s photography from spending a year as a hobo riding the rails in the 1970’s and interviewing guys. Incredible stories. www.followingthetracks.com. This guy lived my dream.)
Great news! I'm going to buy you a hat. The catch is that you have to wear this hat on every future travel trip at all times. What kind of hat would you like?
I would like a red beret.
I would like to be the old, wiry, oak-solid guy who’s up early, walking the hillsides in Devon, strong and confident, always a little irritable, monosyllabic, poking a big knobby staff into the rocky ground and nudging things, the guy that settles down in the pub and rests his red beret smack in the centre of the table, glowers over his pint, and dares anybody to touch it.
My last name would be O’Meara.
If I liked you, and don’t hold your breath, I’d show you the soft, worn fabric inside my hat. There’d be a picture of an angry Chinese tiger with one mighty claw extended.
“Aaaargh!” the red beret tiger roared!
Beneath an elastic strap, I’d have a ragged-edge sepia photo of a girl that I loved in the war. Which war was doesn’t matter. “The” war. On the back of the sepia photo would be two hand-scribbled lines from Yeats you could barely make out because of the faded ink. They’d be the lines that the girl from the war wrote me before she passed from tuberculosis. No, I don’t know which two lines. You’re getting hung up on all the wrong details.
When I die, they will hang the red beret that you purchased for me on a hook behind the barman. If you inquire about the red beret, the bartender will pretend he didn’t hear you. If you ask him again because you thought you didn’t ask loudly enough, he will tell you with hurt and anger that, “You’ll never understand the man who wore that red beret!”
This will be in a strong burly-man accent. “He was a great man,” he’ll yell, the tears swelling in his eyes, “and you don’t need to go poking about things you’ll never understand. Drink up and get out! Out!”
That’s the hat I want.
Where is the place you never want to go back to?
When I finished a pilgrimage walk of a thousand miles, I came up over a hillside in Galicia, Spain and saw the Atlantic Ocean glistening in the distance. I’d walked solo for almost ten weeks from my doorstep in Aix-en-Provence to Finisterre, Spain. It was the greatest trip of my life for more reasons than I can get to here, but I did write a memoir about it.
I’d like to leave the day of my arrival and the view from that hill as I remember it. There are places you should only go once simply because you loved them that much.
Also, the airport in Atlanta.
You've been given a million pounds to live your best life in one destination for a year. The problem is - you're trapped there and can't leave for the year. Where would you go?
I would walk from the southern tip of South America to the wilds of Northern Alaska. I’d spend my million pounds (adjusted into various South American currencies and Canadian and American dollars) to have a new guide every day or two along the entire route. We’d just spend long enough together to become something between good acquaintances and true friends.
Each guide would be selected because they loved that specific stretch of trail more than anywhere else in the world . Most of your million pounds would be spent simply researching and identifying guides. For example, maybe the guy loved a certain stretch the most because he once spotted a neon-red squirrel, and no one ever believed him until he met Melanie, Shep and me, and we did believe him, and he thanked us for believing him.
The four of us will share stories in the evening, daring to kick our boots a little bit into the campfire the way you do when you’re truly listening to someone, and then that trail section guide will be gone in the quiet of a dewy early morning with a small note that hopefully doesn’t make you feel they were just being polite about everything.
Then Melanie, Shep and I will feel a small wave of loss and sadness the whole morning and maybe even snap at each other a bit, and just as that is all getting a little bit out of control, the next guide (who was very hard for your team to identfiy) will meet up with us coming around the bend where our little forest trail opens up onto a purple-skied morning vista. She’ll be very cheerful and point out the spot where you always see the family of bright red squirrels.
Basically, that is my description of heaven.
How do you decide where to visit next?
We’re not old-old by a longshot but we’re not middle-middle-old either. I think the two of us are both aware we won’t see everything now, that the choices need to be weighed. We have a small handful of true bucket list places. India, Japan, Ireland. I’d like Melanie to visit Brazil. I’ve never met lovelier people.
I know that we’ll walk the Camino together some day. Maybe that’s the big bucket list item. Maybe I will scratch what I wrote earlier, and I’ll want to walk down the hillside to Finisterre so that I can see Melanie walk down the hillside to Finisterre for the first time.
There’s a sadness of realizing that there are many cities and countries and lakes and rivers whose names I know, but that I will never see, and I don’t know which ones they are yet. For a long time in life, they are all places you’ll visit “someday probably,” and then they aren’t. They were just places you heard other people talk about or saw on a magazine cover on an airplane seat back.
Sorry! Whoops! I’ve brought everybody down including myself.
Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I’d like to walk the Camino with Melanie.
And Shep.
And finally, what's the one thing you never leave home without when travelling?
I travel a great deal for my work and after years of forgetting something every time without fail, I decided to keep a checklist that I simply run down before I head out. This checklist is very, very useful. It has over 30 items on it, each of them “learned the hard way” as they say. Some of them are things to do rather than take, but I stop for a moment and scan it every time now. It’s been a lifesaver. I’m charmed every time by how many things I’ve forgotten.
I shared my list a few years ago with my niece and her husband (who also travels a lot a lot) and the first thing he saw was “emergency shoelaces.” He thought this was the funniest thing in the world. Oh, how the two of them laughed! “What do you need emergency shoelaces for? Are they bright red? Do you put them on when you’re evacuating a plane in an emergency?”
But someday I hope he’s going to be running late in the morning and tying his shoes in some corporate hotel room in Des Moines and one of his shoelaces snaps on him and he’s going to have that stunned feeling you get when a firecracker goes off and you weren’t ready. In fact, I hope both of his shoelaces snap one after the other and that he takes a minute to really stop and think about what he said about item 33.
A huge thanks to Adam for agreeing to be part of Speedy Boarding. If you liked this post please do consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Not That You Asked. If £4.99 is a bit steep in this economy there’s a 50% off forever sale on at the moment to celebrate two years of Not That You Asked.
The next Speedy Boarding will drop on the 1st of August!
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“I’d float down-down-down over the chestnut trees and the cobbled path that leads to the lower funiculare station with the chickpea candy dispenser and the smell of espresso coffee, fresh bread and exhaust from Vespas.” 💕 💭
I, too, once had rail riding fantasies. I met a guy who did that for a living (which is not the right word for the tiny amount of money he made). He was paid by companies to accompany large freight and rode in the cars as one would if one were hopping the rails. His tales disavowed me of the dreaminess, to be honest. But perhaps we just had different kinds of imagination, he and I.
And your dream walk with travel guides in love with each leg — swoon. I have made long overland journeys by bicycle and days long treks by foot and longer ones with a mix of public transport thrown in. The Camino is on my list. And I’ve eyed same long road through the Americas. But this addition of the perfect guides. Friggin brilliant!! I’d enlist you as my dream trip dreamer upper, Adam!
Thanks to you and to you, Tom, for sharing this space.
I'm so charmed by this idea of traveling like a hobo with a dog who loves you more than anyone else in the world--I hope Adam gets his Shep!