Retox.

"It was good to take up one's courage again, which had been laid aside so long, and feel how comfortably it fitted into the hand." - Rebecca West


There's no way for me to change the channel and so I'm forced to watch my own addiction, though I don't realize that's what it is right away. 

The only thing the screen has shown since I boarded the plane is the four-inch image of a vehicle parked in a concrete cube. It's not until the aircraft backs into reverse and the little vehicle shrinks from four inches to three, and more of the surrounding loading dock comes into view that my hunch is confirmed, along with the location of the camera. I've watched tarmacs roll by from window seats, walked on them while exiting jets at smaller airports like John Wayne, Long Beach, Kiev, driven on them in shuttle buses, but never seen them from above. I've never had a little camera mounted to the bottom of my airplane to watch the runway digest away in realtime during takeoff. Which means I've never inspected what they truly look like up'close beyond the rosier, rounded-up view of the big picture. Past the broader concept of travel and international airports, the runways themselves are bruised rivers of pavement, pock'marked with the weight of the unrelenting.

Early on in the taxiing process I notice the stray twin tire tracks. The outliers. Spaced out enough to think those were just rough landings. Ill-trained or overworked pilots bringing in their planes too fast, too abruptly. But as the craft picks up speed, so comes the realization. That just about every flight leaves its mark on the ground below. And as we hurtle forward, the unruined grey is swallowed into a lake of blackened damage so complete that the unscarred pavement is no longer visible. Every flight that has ever landed at JFK, etched in burned and cooled rubber atop the tarmac. A tangible personification of every trip taking its toll. And as I search the ground for any hint of the before picture, looking past the puncture wounds for a fresh vein, we pull up and aloft and I remember I'm in one. 

Somewhere in the cargo hold just above the camera is the also-fading grey and black of my REI backpack. In my pocket is my passport, which quickly remembered the contours of my leg that it's been forever molded to fit. They're back with me for my first backpacking trip in almost two full years. The sacrifice of adulthood and career responsibilities was treading lightly on requests for time-off. Several California weddings, discovering my love for New Orleans, but all brief vacations without earning visas. Only fainter echoes of my chosen intoxication. The time away allowed me to understand that this is an addiction. Even in absence, it was a constant topic of conversation, an unavoidable influence in my daily life. Eight months of 3am conversations at work with my favorite editor, a forty-something former Israeli Defense Force'r who traveled for a year following his service in the late Eighties. Listening like fairy tales about a time before guidebooks and Hostelworld.com, of crossing unmarked rivers in Bolivia by looking for the freshest set of ascending tire-tracks climbing the opposite bank. Twenty months of planning for this trip, of imagining myself scaling the abandoned steps of Buzludzha only to discover that now the backpacker graffiti was being erased, the monument interior being rebirthed and renovated- robbing it of all allure it held. Sealing off the potential for narcosis. Any bored hours at work, waiting for an assignment or killing time when I was finished but still on call, was spent clicking through slide shows, making a list for future trips scaling lava to San Juan Parangaricutiro or rowing in Tam Coc. Borrowed minutes from the future, like patches of slow nicotine getting me by. An addiction with lessened vices. I'm not looking for rehabilitation, just further revelation.

Plenty of drugs improve your life in the short-term, in the moment the chemicals hold total sway. It's when the timeline is drawn out that the cons grow ultimately heavier. Traveling is one of the few addictions that earns respect, that exudes worldliness that can't be gained from leaves crumbled into a bowl or powder railed onto a mirror. But let's not shit ourselves. When it's tallied up, I'm really not that different. I'm chasing a fix, same as those others. And maybe among those that travel I'm in the minority. People who buy postcards by the dozens, who stay at the Hiltons or Courtyards by Marriott, who are replicating America pocket by pocket in foreign capitals- for them the departure lounge isn't a gateway to dependency. But I can also tell you, we're consuming different levels of potency. The purer experience you tap, the more you need it again. 

My addiction, this sea change in my personality that came from travel, or was at least awakened forever by it, is what made New York City eternally more appealing than Los Angeles or San Francisco. Because a home here, in this sprinting city, would mean a constant low-level state of that intoxication, the same sensation of being abroad. A life forever lived on the balls of the feet. Leaning forward, shoulders tensed. "On to the Next One." The necessity of this constant fix is what would keep me from enjoying the mellow lifestyle of the West Coast. Because I remember too vividly what happens to sharks that don't stay in motion. 

These are my thoughts when I leave America. Seventeen days abroad at the expense of so many other experiences that this money and vacation time could have bought. The missed weddings of friends, the foregone concerts to save money, seeing my immediate family in Pennsylvania and my friends in California only two weekends a year. All those burned tire'tracks stacked atop one another. More instances of the compass needle and the damage done. The decisions I make that leave me vulnerable to being called a bad friend, a disappointing grandson. But I can live with the names, those damning designations, because they're conscious decisions. I've thought carefully about them, weighed the alternatives. And I really do believe that this is a drug that makes me better in the long run.

The hours pass on the plane and the tiny screen is commandeered again, the channel arrows rendered useless. The addict turned self-voyeur. The approaching tarmac comes into view below and more constellations of scars come nearer and nearer. The wheels impact the concrete, presumably adding another set of permanent bruises to the countless already compiled. My eyes hug closed and I take a conscious breath and slip back into the familiar warmth of the unknown.