I was embarrassed. The friend who had challenged me to create the list was aghast. She had spent her entire life within fifty miles of the city in Maine, where she had grown up. She asked me what I remembered most of them. Not much, I confessed. The memories were of the journeys between locations. Of “moving to and fro in the earth and up and down in it.”
“So now you identify with the Devil?” she quipped. “No, not exactly. It’s just a good response to people when they ask you where you’ve been traveling.”
“The real moving experience isn’t where you wind up. It’s how you get there.”