Now, Where Were We?

O LOST!
 
I write this in Maharaja Class on Air India, chewing betel nuts and feeling good and lost.
 
I was not brought up to chew betel nuts, which is one reason I took them, instead of mints, when the flight attendant came by with a tray of assorted little things to put in your mouth. Betel nuts, I understand, are mildly narcotic, but as far as I can tell they are just vaguely pungent to crunch.
 
“I see that you have taken the betel nuts,” the Bombay businessman next to me remarked a few minutes ago, by way of an icebreaker. “Tell me, in America is confidence placed in Time magazine?”
 
As I mulled my response, a barefoot man in a filmy orange robe came down the aisle, looking wobbly, and entered the lavatory. A man in Western clothes followed as far as the door and stood guard. On his shirt he wore a name tag that said YOGI SECURITY.
 
All this spectacle, and I am just returning from London to New York by the cheapest available means. (Luck got me into Maharaja Class—Tourist was overbooked.) Last time I made this trip I had an even better fare on Kuwait Airways, only we arrived at JFK twenty-four hours late. Weather forced us to land in Gander, Newfoundland, and take a bus to Grand Falls, where I spent the night in a motel room with a Kuwaiti gentleman.
 
“Hello,” I said to him. “My name’s Roy Blount and I never expected to wind up tonight in Grand Falls, Newfoundland.”
 
“Please?” he said.
 
“Hello,” I said to him. “My name’s Roy Blount and I never expected to wind up tonight in Grand Falls, Newfoundland.”
 
“I don’t know,” he said.
 
Now here I am exchanging views with an Indian. “You have a singer,” he says. “She is called Madonna?”
 
Maybe the betel nuts are kicking in, but I think what I am feeling is just an effect of travel: the kind of disorientation that seems right somehow. Outside is all clouds. Maybe we’ll put down tonight in Beulah land. Meanwhile I am lost.
 
I’m going to say about being lost what I once heard a seemingly tasteful sex therapist say (I wasn’t consulting her, this was at a wedding) about the vaginal orgasm: It’s right up my alley. I was born lost, and do not consider it a problem.
 
To say that, of course, is to stray somewhat—I don’t know how far, is the trouble—from the truth. Being lost is in a sense the problem of life. Being lost and in dire need of a lavatory is terrible. Being lost with someone else is a real—therefore most often a regrettable—test of a relationship. Families, for instance, should think it over very carefully before getting lost together. The best people to get lost with are those who are very loose about it. My friend Slick Lawson and some friends of his were in the chase car following a hot-air balloon when they found themselves on a dirt road somewhere in Tennessee that did not show up on their map. “We’re lost,” one of them said. But the country morning air was easy to take, they weren’t the ones who had just disappeared over the tree line in a balloon, and they enjoyed one another’s company. “How can we be lost,” said the driver, “when we don’t care where we are?”
 
Not long ago I was lost, briefly, in the Peruvian rain forest with three people whom I had known for just a few hours. There we were, surrounded by vegetation that did not ring a bell. The trail had trailed out. When we retraced our steps, they trailed out too. Questions of leadership threatened to arise. I hate it when questions of leadership arise. In travel, as in life, I like the idea that there must be some mutually rewarding—even if not readily comprehensible—middle ground where leadership isn’t required. But if one person wants to go in a direction that he has a hunch is east, and another wants to go in a different direction that he feels is east, and a third wants to go in still another direction that she believes to be west (but which is not the opposite of either of the other directions), and no one can tell where the sun is exactly, and no one can remember which side of a tree moss grows on or whether it’s the same below the equator, then where’s your middle ground? In a way I wanted to sit there by myself, in the rain forest, and appreciate being lost. On the other hand, it was a relief to hear an American voice not far away calling out, “Wait up, something sucked off my shoe,” and another one replying, “Something?” Other travelers, it turned out, were on the path.
 
The path. There’s something too single-minded about that notion. The rut. Yet we could not live without linearity.
 
Betel nuts are about as near to a controlled substance as I get into these days, but back during the Nixon administration I liked trying to think on strong marijuana. With other people, even. We’d sit there seeing what kind of sense we could make. I still have a tape recording of one such session:
 
“Wait a minute,” a friend’s voice says. “This is not the train of thought.”
 
“If this is not the train of thought,” says another friend’s voice, “then what is it the train of?” I remember that this seemed an extraordinarily thought-provoking question at the time.
 
I am off on a tangent here. I set out to recount anecdotes of being lost around the world. (My friend Christabel King once drove up to the Aswan Dam and asked two Egyptian men the way to Khartoum. One of them pointed to the left. The other pointed across the first one’s arm to the right. The first one said, “Tawali,” which is Arabic for “forward.” Then they resumed their conversation.)
 
But here’s what interests me at the moment: why being lost makes me feel as though I’ve gotten back home. When I was growing up in Georgia in the Methodist Church, we sang “I once was lost, but now am found,” but it wasn’t that simple. Most of the hymns were about getting somewhere better:
 
 … a higher plane than I have found,
Lord plant my feet on higher ground.
 
To me there was something rambunctious about those songs of uplift. They may have made other congregants feel more rooted, but they made my mind rise and wander.
 
“When did you decide to leave the South?” I once asked Joe Frazier, the great heavyweight fighter, whose boyhood was spent in South Carolina.
 
“As soon as I heard there was a North,” he said. “I took the first train smoking.” But Lord knows the North is not the answer. When I talked to Frazier, he was back in South Carolina buying a farm. I think whatever part of the world I might have grown up in would have made me want to be transported.
 
The first time I was ever seriously lost I must have been about seven. My parents took me along on a Sunday drive to visit friends in what were then the exurbs of Atlanta. Since adult conversation made me want to scream, I went out back of the house to play in the woods. I loved woods because they were all dirt and disorder. I felt engrossed and pagan in them. But when I figured it was time to return to civilization, I came out on an asphalt road. I walked off up it, and persisted for what seemed like hours, thinking, “I don’t see how it can be this far, but …” I was going somewhere by myself.
 
There weren’t many houses out that way, but finally I stopped and rang a doorbell. An adult opened the door. I asked if he knew where the Boozers lived. He said no and shut the door.
 
I’d never met a grown-up who wouldn’t help a seven-year-old kid before. I felt justified, in a way. A citizen of the world. Adult homeowners weren’t always models of conduct. Any more than I was. This was interesting. This was travel.
 
But I was road-weary. Another house came along, I turned myself in again, and this time the people looked the Boozers up in the phone book and called. No one answered.
 
I wasn’t worried. If I had not been secure in the knowledge that my parents would never take the opportunity of my disappearance to run off somewhere with the Boozers, I would have been a different kind of traveler. (Neither my parents nor the Boozers, I might mention, drank.) “They’re probably all out looking for you,” the good samaritans assured me, and that made sense; but it also brought me down a bit, made me feel less footloose.
 
These nice folks drove me to the Boozers’, where my parents were just coming up out of the woods. My mother was in a state. “I could just see you out there, facedown in the creek,” she said. I was glad to get back to her, just as I am always glad to see America again, but I never quite accepted the fairness of her being mad at me, until I became a parent and from time to time it hit me that one of my kids was out of pocket, maybe gone forever, maybe even looking to get lost without realizing the risks that wanderers run.
 
The risks that keep fresh the strangeness of being anywhere. As I was writing the above, two more yogis were accompanied to the lavatory. “They are going to a convention,” I was informed by the man next to me. “They were not true samadhi. They have not renounced the world.” The world! I should think not.