Painted Souvenir Wooden Shoe

Holland, 1971

My first solo trip abroad was a disaster.

I was just out of high school and eager to get away from my combative home in Plainview, New York. A youthful obsession with solo travel had grown out of two films—Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey—as well as a photography book called Navajo Wildlands by Elliot Porter. The world was beckoning.

My plan was to spend the whole summer—10 weeks—exploring Europe. But at 17, emerging from a confidence-shattering family life, I was too weak to survive as a stranger in a strange land. Shortly after arriving in Copenhagen on a $99 excursion fare, a pall of anxiety and depression fell upon me. I became inexplicably, desperately homesick. Though my humiliation was acute, it was an overpowering condition. No amount of scrawling in my spiral-bound journal—which I filled with self-flagellating prose and religious claptrap (I was observant at the time)—did anything to calm my mind.

Motion seemed to help. Desperate to relieve my angst, I wore out my Eurail Pass, racing from Denmark to Germany to Italy, through France and Belgium, snapping picture after picture with my Kodak Instamatic 104, as if a visual record of my checklist tour would absolve me of my failure as a solo traveler. Photos were not always enough; buying souvenirs was necessary as well. An Omega watch in Geneva; Belgian chocolates; a small but weighty replica of Michelangelo’s Moses in Rome; a wooden Dutch shoe.

Nothing worked. After a few weeks, I flew back home in disgrace.

Soon after, I discovered an easier (and cheaper) escape route. One night, after partying with some friends, I painted the Dutch shoe gaily. It was instantly transformed. No longer a reminder of my hobbled journey, it became an accessory on my new journeys: a psychedelic ashtray, holding the smoldering joints that, for a few years, replaced one kind of trip with another.