yourlifeisatrip

words + photos by Rachel Dickinson
 
When I travel I always carry a little black moleskin journal that flips open like a reporter’s notebook. I also buy a new pen before a journey that I slip through the elasticized band that encircles the journal. This is my traveling kit – one in which I make notes in longhand and draw sketches to illustrate what I’m seeing. I imagine what I record is like a kindergarten version of what Mark Twain or Robert Louis Stevenson – two great 19th century diarists – might have recorded.
 
Often, when I read through my notebook after a trip, I’m struck by how things going on in the outside world tend to creep into my observations; how my remarks are guided by events that may or may not be in the front of my brain at the time; how I can completely miss the story in front of me in favor of a description of something like a mountain ash tree.
 
I flew to Montreal recently and here’s what I wrote:
 
It was September 11th, the eighth anniversary of 9-11, and it felt like a strange day to fly. When walking through the Syracuse airport to my gate, I heard the beginning of the reading of the list of names of those killed in the twin towers. It was just after 9:00 a.m. – the first plane hit at 8:46 on that morning which seemed so long ago and yet like yesterday.