Few words manage to embody more stages in life than the word “trippin’”. I grew up in the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s. The early 60s for me were about returning to the United States from Latin America, where I functioned under the watchful eye of a German governess with strong ties to Latin America (not sure what that history might have entailed in the post-WWII era) and with the name of Maria, like the spiritual head of the Von Trapp family singers. That heritage would have been a trip all by itself, but I was also thrust into the American lifestyle of the Midwest (Wisconsin, in particular) where the roadtrip on the nation’s new Interstate Highway system was a national pastime.Trippin’ along the toll roads between Madison and Ithaca and then between Madison and San Diego, defined my early youthful days.
The mid-60s for me were about adjusting to life in the great north country of Maine. There the trippin’ was about canoes on the vast number of lakes to be paddled in summer and the array of New England ski areas with their infamous blue ice that we frequented as we tripped across the wonders of the Vacationland of the northeast.
The end of the decade found me once again in a very different mode due to our relocation to the magnificent Dolce Vita of Rome, Italy. The world was suddenly filled with Vespa scooters and Fiat 500 mini-cars. Italy was just recovering from the devastation of the war and awakening to the marvels of motorized transportation. This coincided with my arrival at driving age and my enthusiasm for the freedom of the open highway. Without the uniquely American institution of the summer job, my days of wine and roses were filled with the roadways of Italy, traveled on one of several increasingly larger motorcycles. By 1970, while American youth was busy trippin’ on ganga or stronger psychotropic drugs, I was trippin’ around Europe, one day covering the 1,000 miles from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Rome in an 18-hour endurance ride through the Monte Blanc tunnel.
As I started the next decade by heading back for college, I got to experience the joys of hitchhiking from Cleveland to Ithaca in the trippin’ spirit of the day. College life is always intended to open the eyes of the naive, and so it did for me. My trippin’ was mostly confined to the year-round pleasures of the Finger Lakes and the soul searching of divining my path into the future. That process sent me to New York City and the banking world of high finance. The Fuller Brush man of finance was my school for learning about selling into the adult world. It took me first throughout my old stomping grounds of New England and then back to my global routes of Europe and the wider world. Along the way, I tripped through every emerging market the world could summon and built my physical and psychological immunities to a globalizing universe that knew few bounds to its desire for more of anything and everything.
I spent 45 years trippin’ through the global markets from London to Singapore and Moscow to Buenos Aires. I built up a repertoire of stories from my travels that I tap regularly in my storytelling. I’m convinced that I have lived several lives in the span of one and that it has all had its roots in my longstanding history of trippin’ my way through whatever circumstances present themselves to me. I have negotiated with dictators (Pinochet being the most noteworthy) and cringed in the face of evil (Lev Leviev, the original Blood Diamond merchant) while getting to spend time with my cinematic heroes like Dale Launer (My Cousin Vinny) and Kathleen Turner in her Romancing the Stone glory days.
My later years have been spent seeing the world through much kinder eyes thanks to my beloved Kim. We have traveled the world and refined trippin’ to a fine art that combines VRBO villa rentals across Europe, North Africa and Mexico, and cruising in places like the Baltics, the South Pacific and, most recently, around Cape Horn. My motorcycle Jones has served us well in trippin’ across Tuscany, Provence, Croatia, Sicily, Greece snd Turkey, where we have seen what others mostly fly over. My board directorship at CARE also allowed us to trip through the exotic and all too real parts of India, West Africa and Central America.
Our global trippin’ is nearing its end. The airport dance is simply getting too tiring and the returns home too dear. We are still planned for a trip through Italy again and a visit to every corner of Malta and then at the end of the year a trip through the Christmas Markets of Europe by steam train and other means. That is currently our last planned international trip, not to say that it’s the definitive last. But trippin’ ain’t what it used to be for us at this point. I drive an electric truck these days more than trip around on either of my two motorcycles. A visit to the nursery or the stretch clinic is my best version of trippin’ these days though I still occasionally do a day trip into the wilds of the California hills.
Yesterday I came to recognize what trippin’ is now all about for me. Rather than dreaming of going more places, I look forward to getting from here to there with as few injuries as possible so that I can, indeed, keep trippin’. I’ve discovered the hard way that the ability to keep trippin’ hinges on the ability to avoid trippin’. On Sunday I came out of the movies to hear that Kim’s brother Jeff had just tripped and fallen in the lobby while walking out to join me in the sunshine. I am very conscious of keeping myself from doing likewise and trippin’ my way into immobility. Yesterday, while cleaning up the games area on the front of our property, I managed to trip over the hose I was reeling up. I am usually very careful with my garden footing, but the more tired I get, the less I lift my feet adequately to hurdle the small obstacles in my path. I fell flat on my face, but luckily on my DG pathway, so nothing too hard to break my fall. I got up and took inventory and best I can tell, the worst of it is a slightly bruised shoulder (not sure how that got tweaked). It’s nothing that a hot tub and ibuprofen can’t handle, but it does remind me. Sooner or later, we all trade in our global trippin’ for garden trippin’ and the moral of that story becomes one of recognizing your limitations and lifting your feet. It feels like there should be more profound lessons to be learned in life, but sometimes trippin’ through life is just about avoiding the wrong kind of trippin’.