My father traveled a lot. Because his company was in Austria, which was neutral during the Cold war, he was able to do business in the Eastern bloc. He went to the Soviet Union a few times. He got arrested and interrogated at gun point in Yugoslavia and communist East Germany. His Russian-built plane got hit by lightning and almost crashed somewhere over Africa. He went to Iran and Iraq even after the US imposed sanctions on them. Being from Austria, those sanctions didn’t apply to his business. Writing this, I realize that all this makes it sound like he was an international arms dealer, when all he sold was sawmill equipment. The closest he came to trading in weapons was when the Saudi government asked him if he would supply blades for guillotines, and he said no.
After he retired, he kept travelling and added a few more adventures. The last time he visited me in California, I asked if he wanted to try Japanese food. He agreed, but he refused to try Sushi. “Why would anyone eat raw fish?” he wondered. He was adventurous in some ways but not in others.
Last weekend, I took my family sailing on San Francisco Bay with someone of my father’s generation. R. had been in the U.S. navy his entire working life and had been to every single country my wife and I could think of. He spent three years in Antarctica, flying the planes supplying McMurdo and conducting search-and-rescue missions (“more search than rescue,” he admitted). R. spent another three years in India in some special advisory function he couldn’t get into and which involved him becoming fluent in Urdu and Hindi. He had been on Colin Powell’s staff. In short, a life of adventure. “I wouldn’t have done well in an office cube,” he told me.
At the end of our sailing trip, my kids gave R. a nice, big pomegranate they had picked in our neighborhood. The next day, he texted me, asking me to thank my kids for the fruit. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a pomegranate, and it was delicious,” he wrote.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except perhaps this: Being adventurous when it comes to food is very different from being adventurous in terms of travel.
