Paul Theroux’s Travel Wish List

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 16 Januari 2013 | 17.35

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Montana, one of the places the author still wants to see.

WE travel for pleasure, for a door-slamming sense of "I'm outta here," for a change of air, for edification, for the big vulgar boast of being distant, for the possibility of being transformed, for the voyeuristic romance of gawping at the exotic; and sometimes we travel because we have been banished. I was banished once, and it fortified me.

In the stifling, non-air-conditioned lecture halls of 1960s Singapore, where I was an underpaid university lecturer, one of the texts I taught was Shakespeare's "Coriolanus." This play kept me upbeat and provided a bracing antidote to the sneering presumptions ("Get a haircut," "Stop smoking ganja," "You're a hippie") that prevailed in the tiny xenophobic (as it was then) island.

The Roman general, Coriolanus, is bold but unappreciated, an elitist you might say, a patrician who speaks his mind so robustly he is banished from Rome. Far from being fazed, he denounces the mob saying, "... thus I turn my back:/There is a world elsewhere."

That became my watchword in the tiny city-state that disapproved of me. Had I a coat of arms and an escutcheon, one of my heraldic elements would be that motto. After my three-year contract wasn't renewed I left, and kept going.

"You've been everywhere," people say to me, but that's a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long but, in many cases, blindingly obvious. Yes, I have been to Patagonia and Congo and Sikkim, but I haven't been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho or the Dakotas, and I've had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I want to see them, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of "Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards with a man called Doc ..."

Nothing to me has more excitement in it than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much on earth can beat it in travel for a sense of freedom — no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then "Eat my dust." The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald took just such a trip in a 1918 Marmon roadster, from Connecticut to Alabama in 1920, three months after their marriage. Scott wrote a jaunty account of it, "The Cruise of the Rolling Junk," recently republished as a short book.

Many other roadies followed: Henry Miller in "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare"; John Steinbeck, who interestingly fudged and fictionalized some of "Travels with Charley" (see the online book "Dogging Steinbeck" by Bill Steigerwald); Jack Kerouac (a bit more fictional fudge); William Least Heat-Moon in "Blue Highways"; and many others. The road trips Nabokov took all over America with his wife at the wheel, seeking butterflies, resulted in "Lolita," a novel that is also incidentally a road trip. We have the best roads in the world, and it is not news to anyone that such roads are a liberation.

Last fall, with time on my hands, I set off from home and made a great 4,300-mile sweep in my own car on the back roads of the Deep South: all of it new to me. This was a road trip of discovery so enlightening and so pleasurable, so full of happy and dramatic encounters, that I intend to repeat it as soon as I can, but widening my itinerary, delving deeper. (By the way, my gas and oil bill for those miles was around $1,000.)

My Deep South road trip is just part of my wish list. Places I have not been, that I would love to go to in my car include a trip north, starting in Cape Cod and taking in Quebec, and continuing until I run out of road, then turning west, seeing the rest of Canada, land of my fathers. I have seen only a small bit of it, but the rest of it beckons, the very names: Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife, Moose Jaw, down through Alaska — months of it, maybe a year, and why not?

PAUL THEROUX is the author most recently of "The Lower River." His new book of African travels, "The Last Train to Zona Verde," will be published in April by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 13, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the person quoted as saying, "What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920." He is William S. Burroughs, not Williams Burroughs.


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