When you are staying with another family, some friends or perhaps distant relatives, do you find yourself out of place? Do you find yourself quickly blending into the established rhythms of your hosts' lives? Are you quick to warm to your friend’s spouse and children, or your cousins parents and siblings? How quickly do you integrate into the family? Perhaps you avoid ever integrating, hoping to maintain your individuality, to be more prepared to recall the way you lived before, the way to which you hope sooner than later to return. Perhaps you live around your hosts, like unpleasant roommates to be tolerated, not candidates for bonding. I would have thought the type of person you are, the way you respond to situations likes this, was most likely to determine your success in a workstay environment, as well as in other communal living situations such as hostels, or even car campgrounds. However, as I read once in a hostel review, which sought to divorce their ephemeral experience in the dorms from the qualities of the hostel’s facilities, it’s less about your temperament and more about the people you’ll get to know.
Oh the places you’ll go
Travelling forever is a pipe dream. And if not, I gotta put down the pipe and figure out the logistics of making it work because I love this life. I don’t really mean the eternal vacation, exotic vistas and luxurious spas (but I really shoudl try to fit some of those in at some point between the bug bites, cycle of illnesses, and hot, sweaty farm labor), I mean meeting new people and uncovering new ways of life. Learning about cultures different from my own, especially culinarily. Ah, crimini mushrooms, I guess that probably makes me a foodie, huh? Well, at least I know what to write about later on.
But despite its fiscal infeasibility, it is possible to extend trips quite long through a couple of strategies, and they’re the same ones that allow you to travel further on a dollar to begin with: mass hospitality. Hostels. Campgrounds. Couchsurfing. Workstays. These are the ticket, just like planes, trains (except in the US) and busses are how you get around, cheap communal living is how you stay in places for extended periods of time. They give you homebases whence to strike out regionally. They help you establish or find networks of people who can help you when things go wrong, who will go in on meals, alert you to opportunities, and help you pass the time. And according to Copilot, they are the key to the kingdom, they are the kingdom. WTF
The familiar haunts
Campgrounds
It’s sad, but these days its much harder when camping to meet people. Part of it is location: camping in the cold, like late season or out of season, high in the mountains and so on, makes it hard to meet people. They’re huddled up. If the day is short and the fire bans raging, they’re in their tents or vehicles pretty soon after sunset. Sometimes the sound of my mandolin is enough to draw the like-minded to me, but often times the sound of my singing voice is equally sufficient to repulse them. Another issue, beyond location, however, is just how camping is changing. A lot of people, with the convenience of private lodging and the accessibility by road of natural wonders, have split into the sail-and-bail and hide-in-the-camper crowds. They see the sights and then they move on. Reservations are the damnation of casual socialization in campgrounds, because they create an environment as described by Abbey where people have no need of communicating with each other: there’s nothing to sort out, they have their space and you have yours, and authorities will be involved, acting as intermediaries, should any disputes arise. Walk up-only grounds are superior, save in the eyes of a party’s more anxious members.
Hostels
It’s a roll of the dice to some degree. It’s very easy to wind up in a terrible hostel: they generally have no place to meet other people, only places to conflict with them (small kitchen during mealtime, single shared toilet during pooptime). In Dallas we stayed at a hostel that was absolutely dreadful. In the common area there was one chair. You couldn’t even sit to eat, save on the floor, which was hardwood. There were quite a few bugs but I’m used to camping so these things don’t bother me too dearly. Still, I encountered many people and it was impossible to just have a beer with them because the energy of the public spaces was directed toward passing through, moving on, getting tf out of the way. It was a place to sleep, if you were lucky, and no more. Then there are hostels like those I stayed in (on this trip) in Colorado Springs and New Orleans, which had big, bustling, inviting public spaces, where people met and hung out, with staff that specifically programmed events oriented at getting people introduced. These were the types of places where I shared my food and was presented with intoxicants in return. (Always pick a shareable skill or good going into a hostel — cooking way too much yummy food is mine, so get your own!)
The facilities can make or break a hostel, but ultimately, as becomes more important the more intense a mutual living space is, it’s the people that make the experience ultimately. If the facilities don’t facilitate interacting with people, it’s merely less convenient than being alone. If there’s good opportunity, but its not seized on by the guests, that’s nearly as bad. On the rare chance you find yourself alone in a well-designed social hostel for several days, as I did my first week in Bogota, at least you’ve got the kitchen to yourself!
Stranger danger!
Couchsurfing
I can’t say much about this. I’ve never done it, sadly. Neither hosted nor surfed, due to a combination of being domestically ill-equipped, coming in at the end of the couchsurfing boom, traveling or living with people much less comfortable with strangers than I, and generally blind to it as an option. It’s something I would like to practice over the next year or so, but at least two of the aforementioned challenges do yet haunt me.
Workstays and WWOOFing
Recently we’ve been doing some workstays with which we’ve connected via workaway. We have heard no end of horror stories, but we have also heard of great experiences and certainly had our own. I’d done some informal workstays in the past, bartending at hostels for example, but I’d never WWOOFed as it generally is more demanding of either skill or transport. Even the work aways I’ve done would have been quite difficult — though not impossible per our hosts' attestations — without the vehicle we’re currently beating around the country.
The main difference between my experiences in Northern New Mexico/Southern Louisiana and slinging drinks in Santa Marta is that I’ve been embedded with atomic families, the kind I never grew up with. Integral domestic units to which we are foreign, but so graciously welcomed. We’ve been pretty lucky in that both our host situations have had damn good cooks in their family. Even beyond that, they’ve been of a type, and I suppose most accounts on workaway would have to be, such that they have been both worldly and deeply wedded to their respective communities. Equally well-travelled and well-rooted. I don’t know if I can reliably identify these sorts of people without getting fucked a couple of times here and there, though.
The real experience
I spoke at some length previously about my experiences in Northern New Mexico, but with how busy I’ve been in Southern Louisiana, working on a Nature Reserve ahead of their big Halloween arts festival, I have had little time to blog. More accurately, in New Mexico, the family went their separate ways after an early dinner. Here, we sit and drink and talk until bed time after a rather late dinner. I’ve no time after social hours to dork around on my computer as I had in New Mexico. But I’ve also been quite busy preparing for the art festival, which made me so nostalgic for my days as a festival planner in college: working with a crew of volunteers who were passionate about devoting their time to making something fun and free for so many people to enjoy. It’s a beautiful experience and you grow so close and dear to the people around you, spending so many hours, occasionally very frustrating hours, in the trenches or, to dispense with metaphors for more illustrative language, on top of scaffolding mounting very heavy, very cumbersome artwork. Nothing makes you feel like a family than shedding blood, sweat a tears together. Just as dearly as I hold many of those college event planning compatriates will I the friends I’ve made here.
It does indeed help that there has been as much casual drinking here as there was in college. Social lubrication is a real thing and it’s interesting to me how different cultures treat alcohol usage. How so few have developed healthy attitudes toward the substance and intoxication more generally. It may not be healthy to consume at all, from a physical persepective, but I imagine the mental health benefits of improved socialization (when used responsibly) for facilitating connection and creating opportunities for future collaborative conspiracy must certainly outweigh the physical risks of modest consumption. And because I have zero health training whatsoever, you should certainly take my hypothesis and run with it to the ends of the earth, to whatever strange land beckons your soul, to embed yourself among whatever foreigner or freak finds something kindred about your essence, and drink with them until the bright street lights dim under the sun’s rising rays.
Unfortunately I have no other workstays planned. I’ve got a few in mind for the coming legs of my trip, but I have yet to reach out to them. Time is drawing close, however, and I should really try to open up those connections soon. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at couchsurfing for the first time. I don’t think I would enjoy it, but a single mother traveling with her son by such methods suggested house/pet sitting. Maybe that’s worth a stab.
I just can’t tell them the last time I dog sat I lost one of the dogs. One of my best friend’s dogs. Oh holy hula hoop, the flashbacks…!
The dream
Of course the dream is to live communally entirely, or so I think. I loathe sharing certain facilities (toilet, kitchen, workdesk) but prefer the company of others in general. I am by some measures at my worst around others, but only applying values I’m not sure I share with my society at this time in my life. So doing such no matter where I am, for the indefinite future, whether I am traveling or in some sense “settled”, appeals to me. On some of my upcoming journeys I am worried about the struggles I may face in finding the opportunities I seek. I want to keep working as part of any communities I temporarily join as I have recently. In fact for the first time I am starting to suffer the feeling of wanting to work and being denied by my nationality in a tangible way. Up until now my aversion to traveler tracking and border enforcement was merely philosophical, but now its consequences are more personally tangible. And these lost months I’ve planned are in some ways an impedance to doing this in my home country by choice, rather than by necessity, though they have given me a foundation for that quality I admire in some of my hosts: wordliness. Now if I could just settle into a place and become rooted. Become a part of a community. I worry I’m not of such a type. I worry that, as in Frank Turner’s The Road, forever will my home be the horizon.
But these are mere anxieties. Trifling imaginings that only distract me from doing in the present what I wish. As much as I want to try to make good things happen, finding good people is often just a matter of good fortune. It’s time to roll the dice again and see what’s next. I’m crossing my fingers that it’s small scale fermenting sake or miso!
