On the Road with Gloria Steinem

A journey — whether it’s to the corner grocery or through life — is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It’s the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road — combined with our search for meaning — that make travel so addictive.

I started reading My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem on my January 30th flight to Montevideo to begin my Remote Year. It was a symbolically appropriate but somewhat unintentional book choice that started this journey with me.

In October, I read an interview with Steinem in Cosmopolitan, perhaps by following a link from The Skimm or Facebook, and she spoke a bit about her upcoming memoir.

I’ve been living “on the road” for 2+ years now, but I’ve spent all 7 of my post-grad years moving around the world — Morocco, Bulgaria, Austin, and New York City were home before nothing was.

So I was curious to read the insights and experience of a woman, 50+ years older than I am, who has lived her life on the road, listening and speaking and writing, a storyteller — a role model I hadn’t considered before.

A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

I had downloaded the book from the NYPL online to my Christmas-present-to-myself new Kindle (sidebar: I highly recommend using your local library’s ebooks!) and delayed at the gate in Miami, began to read, sock-feet kicked up on the cabin wall, nuzzling my travel scarf.

In the introduction alone, I realized that Gloria and I were going to have more in common than I could have initially imagined:

Until that moment, I would have sworn that I had rebelled against my father’s way of life. I created a home that I love and can retreat to, though he wanted no home at all. I’ve never borrowed a penny, though he was constantly in debt. I take planes and trains to group adventures, though he would spend a week driving cross-country alone rather than board a plane.

Yet in the way that we rebel, only to find ourselves in the midst of the familiar, I realized there was a reason why the road felt like home. It had been exactly that for the evocative first decade of my life. I was my father’s daughter.

Of course, my dad isn’t exactly like hers, but I am constantly discovering ways in which I am both rebelling against my parents’ experience yet simultaneously emulating them.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken to interviewing family members whenever I’m visiting, tap-tap-tapping notes into my Evernote app while they talk and drive.

I always knew I had my dad’s penchant for math, geometry, spreadsheets, for visual language and love of art, for road trips and navigating, but I didn’t know my mom had been a wanderer before she met my dad and had me. I didn’t know we shared similar dreams of adventure or big city success, that we could spend 8 weeks traveling together in a very foreign land and laugh more than cry.

In spite of our fears of being just like our parents, I’m finding our common threads comforting:

I’m not so strange, my inclinations and personality didn’t spring forth from nothing, I’m less freak occurrence and more natural evolution.

I expected the book to be about travel and life, but I didn’t expect to learn so much history.

First, there’s all that I didn’t know about how politics really work, grassroots organization, the Feminist movement.

I still have a lot to learn, but the “talking circle” structure alone is fascinating but sadly uncommon in our modern world of broadcast media or megadome events. Yet it has always been part of human history, and it is still here. We just need to bring it back to the core.

It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.

I had no idea that such talking circles had been a common form of governance for most of human history, from the Kwei and San in southern Africa, the ancestors of us all, to the First Nations on my own continent, where layers of such circles turned into the Iroquois Confederacy, the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Talking circles once existed in Europe, too, before floods, famines, and patriarchal rule replaced them with hierarchy, priests, and kings.

I didn’t even know, as we sat in Ramnad, that a wave of talking circles and “testifying” was going on in black churches of my own country and igniting the civil rights movement. I certainly didn’t guess that, a decade later, I would see consciousness-raising groups, women’s talking circles, giving birth to the feminist movement. All I knew was that some deep part of me was being nourished and transformed right along with the villagers.

This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me:
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.

Second, there’s so much American history beyond what I learned in school, even with my incredible liberal arts education and having taken courses like “British Colonial America and US History to 1861” and “Native Peoples in Latin America”.

Gloria describes learning about America from Native Americans, the shock of realizing how little she knows of the history of the land and original people

At Stonehenge in England, there are guards and tape-recorded tours. Modern Greeks picnic among the ruins and are intimate with their ancient history. Both can count themselves as descendants of past glories.

Here, people arrived from another continent and, by war, disease, and persecution, they eliminated 90 percent of the residents. From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed.

A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs.

Whether out of guilt or a justifying belief that the original occupants were not fully human, history was replaced by the myth of almost uninhabited lands.

And thus the complicated situation we’re sitting in today, layers of guilt woven with race and religion — how can we learn to set aside our egos and our blind protective defense of our ancestors to truly learn and share the full history, to celebrate the strengths of different cultures, and somehow create and accept equal footing for all today. It’s a dream, I know, but hopefully not an impossible one.

It’s a real threat to continue down this path of blotting out the Native culture in particular, not only because of the valuable insights and lessons it has to offer but because it’s an endangered one:

As one Native delegate said, “Other Americans have histories and families and gene pools in their home countries. If French or Arabic is forgotten in America, it’s still being spoken somewhere. We have no other country. If our languages are wiped out, they can’t come back. If we disappear here, that’s it.”

Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule.

Because I’ve become more aware of the need for Feminism over the past 5 years thanks to my experience as an adult woman in the world, I have become curious about Gloria Steinem as a modern mythological character.

I want equal rights and I’m frequently frustrated by many visible and invisible faults in our political and social systems. While in some ways the book made me more frustrated with newly upsetting knowledge, it also gave me hope in history and alternate realities that aren’t fantasies.

“Feminists too often believe,” [Paula Gunn Allen] wrote, “that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware… is necessary confusion, division and much lost time.”

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”

Gloria even speaks briefly about Hillary Clinton and brought up a point I haven’t read elsewhere — that Hillary’s threat to some people is the fact that she’s a strong woman and an equal in her partnership:

If Hillary had a husband who regarded her as an equal — who had always said this country got “two presidents for the price of one” — it only dramatized their own lack of power and respect. After one long night and a lot of wine, one woman told me that Hillary’s marriage made her aware of just how unequal hers was.

… I began to understand that Hillary represented the very public, in-your-face opposite of the precarious and unequal lives that some women were living. In a classic sense, they were trying to kill the messenger.

The book (and I assume Gloria herself) isn’t all serious. She not only speaks poetically about the call of the road but also humorously about how strange humanity and life can be.

Thanks to Surrealism in Everyday Life, I could comment on such events as the high-rise bordellos being subsidized by the government of Holland. All I had to do was comb through the newspapers of the world every Saturday morning — while also watching Soul Train, thus learning new disco moves at the same time — and search for the sort of events about which one says, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

I might have to start a note called “Surrealism in Everyday Life” and keep tabs on the things I see and hear that fall into this aptly named category. Often when I watch movies, I get irritated with the false constructs and ridiculous roles they come up with when real life presents so many rich options.

Life is hard and sad and complicated, but, thankfully, it is also funny.

Laughing is one of the best feelings we can experience — an incredible moment of joy and connection. Being told I’m funny is one of the highest compliments I can receive.

It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive.

But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed — and he cut himself.

Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

Reading this book was timely for me if for no other reason than Gloria’s comments about living on the road and finally having a home.

I’ve talked to my therapist a bit about this — and Gloria takes the words right out of my mouth to describe my current feelings on the matter:

Though I felt sorry for myself for not having a home, I was always rescued by defiance and a love of freedom.

And so I’ve justified my lack of the traditional signifiers of adulthood and success: a home, a partner, a stable job, a retirement fund, etc — but at least I’ve got my freedom, at least I am making my own path.

But then she goes on to explain exactly what my therapist has been gently reminding me of:

Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.

I don’t know whether I will want or be able to have a home of my own in the near future, after Remote Year ends, but I do know that I want one eventually. I want a bed that is mine. I want a space that I have made comfortable and safe for me. I want a place to invite others into.

In the meantime, and somehow for the rest of my life, I’ll be on the road.

The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories — in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

Katherine is a digital nomad, working remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014. She’s a member of Remote Year 2 Battuta, living around the world with 75 other digital nomads from February 2016 to January 2017.

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