By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index
To travel as a coddiwompler is to move through the world with a larger purpose than usual. Or, as Chuck Berry put it, “with no particular place to go”.
The tourist books might have suggested/memorable/popular places to go (and usually find yourself with a bunch of other tourists crammed together to see the same places or artifact). But what if we had a vision and travel agenda greater than the packaged tours and check-off lists? If you do, then coddiwompling is for you.
A higher, almost transcendent goal – on any budget, within any time frame, age or skill level is ready and waiting for you.
The guiding force behind coddiwomple is to uncover adventure, have fun, laugh, explore, learn, try new things and meet new people – with a basis more similar to serendipity than intention. From glaciers to drunken noodles to accidental encounters of all kinds, new experiences are waiting for you – often far closer than you might think.
In high school, my daughter once had an assignment for a photography class; take a photo in your own yard of something you’ve never looked at closely before. It turns out that there was a world of seemingly mundane wonders literally in our back yard. From tree trunks to spider webs to exotic looking weeds, using the lens of discovery, our mundane backyard was dense with miracles and unexpected dramas.
Each season, time of day and shifting of the clouds above changed the setting of an ever-changing landscape.
And the neighborhood, if not the world, is not so different
It’s not that coddiwomple means to have no expectations, but instead that our expectations are the experience itself – not mediated by tourist marketing or even intentions.
Travel is, almost by necessity, a series of unexpected – and unpredictable encounters with everything from customs officials to local insects or odd reactions to local food or water.
On my last trip to China, for example, I had multiple encounters with police in three days: one was as a witness to a public market fight, another was getting lost and needing a ride back to my room. Neither with the luxury of a shared language.
What I like best about the concept of coddiwomple is the crowd-avoiding, budget-flexible, schedule-fluid opening to those serendipitous encounters that make travel vastly more memorable.
Bucket list?
A few years ago, thanks to a popular film, the term bucket list came into our conversations. As did a plethora of books with titles like “1,000 things you must see before you die”. I have a copy of many of those books – most of them never opened.
For one thing, telling me something I “must see” is not very persuasive. Secondly, it strikes me as tacky, at best, to tell me to do something “before I die”. I should also clean out my garage before I die, but that still doesn’t inspire me to actually do it.
But my real “bucket list” is to explore and encounter corners or aspects of the world, or even my own neighborhood, that lie undiscovered or under appreciated by most people who rush past them on their way to the most marketed and most “popular” sites.
I suggest travelling with a purpose – with minimal expectations of what you will find.
One of my favorite activities, when visiting a city where I have never been, is to take a bus or subway to the end of the line and walk back to where I am staying. Zooming by a subway station or waiting at an airport lobby does not give you any sense of the character and texture of a neighborhood, but walking the streets and alleys (for better or worse) will.
Once, while I was living in Beijing, I attended a concert across town. I missed the last subway (at 10:30) and had to walk home. Sometimes, like this time, doing what you have to do delivers an astounding sense of clarity and purpose – which tend to be sorely lacking on a typical guided group tour. I knew my directions and my final destination.
Keeping on a relatively straight line through occasional night markets and miles of abandoned streets, and getting back into my building (which had 24 hour security) without being able to either explain myself or ask for directions was not something any tourist book could have prepared me for.
“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.” – C.S. Lewis
With our weather, our inexplicable economy and the state of the world in general, it might be a good time to cultivate the fine art of the coddiwomple.
