I had something from that time.
From all that sitting on the woodpile that aimless fall, imagining the death of everything from garden tomatoes to small animals to the mailman, that time when I loathed and despaired of the self I had become, whatever self that was, so hastily cobbled together in an emergency, I had something persuasive.
Those gloomy thoughts at dusk with the cigarettes turned from thoughts of my own death, which I, an otherwise healthy and robust and well-mannered nineteen-year-old, couldn’t in good conscience accomplish, to significantly politer thoughts of disappearing, which I could. And soon, out of pragmatic consideration for others and a deeply ingrained adherence to good manners, I had planned my own clever death without actual death. I would leave, disappear, send an occasional postcard and be done with the whole dilemma. Good-bye world! Good-bye New Jersey! Good-bye Family, God, and Country! Hello Eurail Pass.
My mother, still protractedly adjusting in Vermont, now dabbling in “women’s groups” and long herbal-tea-soaked conversations of “spirituality,” kindly sent a list of friends and family in France and their phone numbers, which I planned to tuck away and forget about. My father, now dating all sorts of ill-fitting but dazzling younger women, not only opened up his house for a farewell party to which I invited the whole crew from Mother’s, but he also offered to take on my student loan payments for as long as I was gone. Todd offered a bon-voyage professional-model Nikon camera with a powerful lens that must have cost a thousand dollars. And so equipped, I arrived at a youth hostel in Brugge from New Jersey on a one-way, $99 People’s Express ticket. It was January 1986. I had a heavy backpack, a heavy sleeping bag, empty notebooks, and $1,200 in American Express Travelers cheques. When my idea was formed on the woodpile that fall—a slow and meandering two-year trip around the whole world where I might be swallowed and digested and composted by the earth itself, with the sum of my existence rolled up into a backpack—I failed to account for the weather. It was the coldest winter Europe had seen in fifty years. Each day in January in 1986 was, I recall, below zero. My feet were frozen. My hands were frozen. I just wanted to stay inside the youth hostel and write down my dark thoughts.
This youth hostel, the Bauhaus, was owned by two brothers who came in and out with cases of UHD milk and laundered fitted sheets, both of them tall, with strong features and unruly hair, and between them a cassette collection that included Pere Ubu, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, and Joy Division. The cozy little bar downstairs was pleasantly populated with a few travelers, mostly guys, mostly German and Australian. The girl behind the bar, Aimée, spoke a peculiar accented English that made it impossible to guess her origin, which I admired, and I immediately set about cultivating such an accent of my own. She was there each day and seemed helpful to the brothers in enforcing the rules that govern all accredited and certified youth hostels:
Hostelers out by 10 a.m. each day.
Hostelers may not reenter the hostel until after 4 p.m.
Hostelers must be 18 or older.
In the morning, there was an included breakfast of watery coffee, overly sweet cheese wrapped in tin foil packets, bread, and a few olives, over which you could not linger. Anxious about money, I ate the whole thing hungrily, unsure what else I would eat that day. Precisely at ten a.m., we were pushed out. I began to call it the “youth hostile.” After a couple of brutally long and frigid days wandering around the deserted city, early and easily reaching my fill of the famous but only-decent French fries, I circled back in the afternoons, sheepishly noting that it was barely three minutes past four o’clock. In the almost empty youth hostel, for the rest of the evening I sat alone in the little bar downstairs at the reception area and wrote in my notebooks as a few fellow winter travelers trickled in and sat intensely discussing a certain guest house in Rangoon, while the exquisitely detached girl still behind the bar poured their drinks and braided colored thread into bracelets. Every evening, I ordered glasses of red wine from Aimée and sunk into the comfort of every cassette she played, from Suzanne Vega to U2, as if something familiar, something from your own life, even if it was just the soundtrack