Globetrotting
David Jedeikin, Author of Wander The Rainbow
by Jim Gladstone
One should never feel locked in to a specific itinerary. So it is in travel, and so it is in life. The byways and detours are sometimes harrowing, sometimes delightful, but if you're able to keep moving, adapt to your circumstances, and be open to opportunity, great adventure is yours for the taking.
Meet David Jedeikin, the 41-year-old author of Wander The Rainbow (www.wandertherainbow.com), a globetrotting memoir in which he travels the world in an effort to leave some baggage behind. In 2007 Jedeikin split with his partner of four years, who he calls Bradley in the book. Earlier that year, their troubled journey as a couple had reached a far frontier: Jedeikin became a living organ donor, giving a portion of his liver to Bradley in an unusual surgical procedure that likely saved the man's life (Bradley had lived with a rare condition called biliary artesia since childhood). The operation didn't save the couple though.
"In a series of ever-degenerating squabbles," Jedeikin writes in his book's opening section, "Our own relationship began to founder." Jedeikin's peripatetic work life as an IT consultant had him flying around the country most weeks, only able to spend weekends at home with Bradley in Boston. A few months after the surgery, the pair planned a move to San Francisco where Jedeikin lived once before and had an existing network of connections. He would likely be able to find a local tech job that would allow him to travel less and spend more time with his partner. Bradley though, was suddenly healthier and feeling less dependent on others than he'd felt for his entire life and, as Jedeikin writes: "When my condo back home finally did sell, he panicked, did an about-face, and announced he wouldn't be joining me on my move west."
Jedeikin, it turned out, wasn't ready to settle down quite yet. During his years with Bradley, they'd often discussed traveling abroad, but given his partner's health, and the fact that the Montréal-born Jedeikin was still awaiting his official US citizenship, that was off the table.
In California, just after citizenship finally came through, Jedeikin stumbled upon his life's next giant DETOUR sign: an article in The New York Times about around-the-world travel that he couldn't get out of his mind.
"I'd never been comfortable with that whole spiritual Eat, Pray, Love idea of healing through travel. But I was feeling at loose ends. I felt like I needed something to shake off the turmoil of the breakup," Jedeikin tells me over drinks at a sunny café in San Francisco, where he now lives and works—again, in software development. (Another lesson worth remembering: taking a detour doesn't mean veering permanently off course.)
"I'd saved a decent amount of money, and I'd been stockpiling frequent-flyer miles from my business trips in the hope that Bradley and I would finally travel together some day," he recalls.
So, it began. Seven months of wandering through 29 countries (Yes, there are plenty of lusty moments in Jedeikin's written account of his new singledom). From Europe to Africa, the Middle East to Asia, to Australia to South America and back home stateside, Jedeikin took the long road out of his post-breakup funk, not only clearing his mind, but putting it to unexpected new uses.
"I wasn't planning on turning this whole experience into a book," says Jedeikin. While he'd dabbled in screenwriting for a bit in his early 20s, he began the text of what eventually became Wander the Rainbow as blog entries, typed on a notebook computer during his travels. "It wasn't even a blog that I was trying to build traffic for. I wanted my friends and family, and the people I met along the way to be able to know what I was up to, because I was going to be in motion for so long."
 "But writing those blog entries had a whole unexpected value for me. There I was, in one interesting place or another: Paris, Tokyo, Capetown, the full moon party on a beach in Thailand, and I found that as much as I enjoyed seeing the sights and meeting new people, I really got a huge amount of satisfaction out of sitting in a café for a few hours or bunkering down in a hotel room for a whole evening, and thinking about what I'd been doing and what I'd experienced. Sitting still and processing it all turned out to be as important a part of travel for me as running around and doing it all."
"I also found," says Jedeikin, sharing another of those edible-prayerful-lovey-dovey insights that he ended up having in spite of himself, "that there was an unusual intensity to the physical and emotional connections I had on my trip. Part of it may have to do with the fact that I was finally moving beyond my old relationship, but I also think there's a kind of incandescent friendship that can flare up when you meet someone you like, and you know you'll only be together for 48 hours or so."
In Wander the Rainbow, Jedeikin weaves together polished versions of his blog entries, focused on his personal experiences with brief cultural and political histories of the places he visits and reflections on his extended family's geographical history. While he hadn't traveled overseas much himself before the book's epic journey began, Jedeikin's Jewish relatives have been part of a great diaspora, living far and wide in Russia, Latvia, Israel, England, Italy, and South Africa. In roaming the globe and paying visits to old and current homesteads, Jedeikin makes parts of his trip form a sort of moveable family reunion, staking out the whole globe as his home.
Continued
|
