"I love Buffalo."Anna eats a veggie wrap as she tells Aunt Claire about her first months living away at college. They sit by the front window at The Spot overlooking the Friday evening street life on Elmwood Avenue.
"I want to live here when I finish school."
Claire ponders her niece’s wish. Anna had searched for a college where none of her friends would be, but the reality of life in a new place with new people has sparked a touch of homesickness.
Marcel Proust wrote about the real voyage of discovery as being more than simply seeing new landscapes. The real voyage of discovery is seeing with new eyes. Claire recently returned to Buffalo with new eyes after living out-of-town for three decades. The beginning of her voyage remains a crisp snapshot in her mind.
September 1974...Claire is finalizing a plan to leave town on an Amtrak train.
"There's a seven o’clock train out of Central Terminal."
Her parents reluctantly accept her plan to travel far away. After working all summer as a waitress at The Swiss Chalet restaurant, Claire saved six hundred dollars to purchase a sleeping bag, tent, backpack, travel cross-country AND begin a new life.
Claire will meet up with Alice in Albany. Together, they will drive off in a green Volkswagen to the furthest spot in Rhode Island to launch a coast-to-coast camping trip.
Turning the page after college graduation, Claire and Alice are bound for mythological San Francisco in search of a larger world beyond home and school.
Claire’s blue nylon backpack contains jeans, pocket tee shirts, essentials. Packed in the front zip compartment is a crisp paperback copy of On The Road, Jack Kerouac’s 1957 tale that defined the spirit of the road during a time when such stories were told mostly by men.
No cell phone, no ipod, no laptop to complicate the flow of imagination. These items wait quietly in her distant future.
Her thirteen year old brother watches Claire prepare for the journey. "Why don’t you like it here?"
"I want to find something my own--a creative life."
Finished with student life drawn in semesters and holiday breaks. Thrilled by the unknown and fueled by fantasy, Claire has little vision of what lies ahead.
She loads the heavy blue backpack into the trunk of the aqua Impala and her mother drives her to the train station that early fall morning.
Truckin’ plays on the car radio.
Engaged in an ancient ritual, Claire hugs her mother goodbye, steps aboard the Amtrak with great purpose and intention. Beginning a life of her own choosing, she waves as the train pulls away from the station and opens the book saved especially for this day.
An array of bus depots, train stations, subway stops, airports will mark Claire’s days. Tangled twists and turns through days in San Francisco, New York, and Denver will define her story. Vivid and timeless chapters of people, places, events dissolve into a dreamlike past, present, future. A filmy collage of jobs, homes, friends, adventures mold into one creation.
Claire is a quoter. Years after the day on the Amtrak, she is reminded of T.S. Eliot’s worn words...
"We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time."
A blue nylon backpack has been traded for a white economy car. With the same purpose and intention Claire once felt stepping aboard the Amtrak, she leaves the wild west and drives east past a highway sign that reads Leaving Colorful Colorado.
Truckin’ BACK to Buffalo, the looped line of her journey delivers Claire with new eyes. She arrives where she began to know the place for the first time.
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