My Personal Path to Travel and Transformation
One of my first memories of travel involved going nowhere at all, at least physically. I was maybe nine or 10 years old, and Pedro Almodóvar’s masterpiece Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was playing on Cinemax. Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, back then, I didn’t speak a lick of Spanish and if my parents knew I was watching a sex romp featuring pill-popping soap stars and adulterous cads, they would have canceled all the pay channels immediately. But I was in thrall to the colors of Madrid, to the sounds of castellano, to the high drama of Pepa and Ivan, and Candela and “Carlosh,” played by a 20-something Antonio Banderas. A new world beyond the black-and-white banality of North Florida opened to my barely decade-old already-quite-gay self.
Over the next few years, after taping the Almodóvar movie along with Mary Poppins on a 240-minute VHS cassette, I remember memorizing lines of dialogue and researching the classical music played during Pepa’s infamous setting-the-bed-on-fire scene. It was Rimsky Korsakov’s aptly named “Capriccio Espagnol.” Each element of each scene, from the language to the music to the clothes to the cityscapes, transported me into another world, into a newness, an explosion of color and light and, well, glamour where I could be just as melodramatic and r-trilling (rolling my Rs) as Pepa and Candela.
I also remember, during my childhood, visiting Walt Disney World down near Orlando two or three times a year—those were the days of the $21 Florida Resident Special—and noticing that many of the signs had a strange language written underneath English, a language with letters like “ñ” and “y” all by itself, and slanted dashes over some of the vowels. It took a while for me to connect that heretofore incomprehensible script to the occasional rat-tat-tat rhythms of language coming from a few of the other park guests, a language I rarely, if ever, heard in my corner of the state. But I was hooked and wanted to know more, wanted access, wanted in on this other language, this other world.
Travel didn’t start off for me as something so obvious as going from one place to another by plane, train, boat, or automobile. It started off by getting into a traveling mood, by being open to an unknown experience, awareness, or sensation that led me to wonder what it must be like to live someplace else or be someone else. It helped that I was blessed with parents who were educators and who stoked my innate passion for learning. It helped that I had an innate passion for learning, too, which is just a fancy way of saying I was a nerd.
It was that very same passion that spurred me to take Spanish classes, starting in the 9th grade. I had classmates who only took the two years of foreign language required to graduate high school, but I wanted to go deeper and travel farther. I continued studying Spanish through college and finally studied abroad in the Dominican Republic, living with a host family, and taking Spanish and Afro-Dominican history and culture classes. It was also an immersive experience that had truly taken me to another country. I went to my first-ever gay club and first Pride parade in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo that summer.
A few years later, I succumbed to the call of the world, moving to Colombia after graduate school to teach English. A few years after that, I moved on to Brazil, then Germany, then South Africa, then Canada, living and loving in six countries and traveling to seventy, going from teacher to journalist to teacher to journalist again. Along the way, I’ve broken hearts, bones, and promises, and I had the opportunity to mend them as well. I’ve gained friends, lovers, employment, language skills, cultural knowledge, compassion, understanding, and—most of all—I’ve gained a greater appreciation of myself and of this beautiful world we live in.
No other undertaking can be as transformative as travel. No other undertaking offers the opportunity to connect across background and boundary, to experience the ways that we all cook, eat, dance, sing, cry, laugh, and love. Starting with the smallest inspirations—a foreign movie on cable television, an entrancing and evocative song, a sign at a theme park—travel lets you become whoever you want to be. How will you show up in the world? How will you transform?
Check out Ernest’s website for details about his TV series, Fly Brother with Ernest White II, and follow him on Instagram for his most recent travels and transformative experiences.
