Food for the Journey

Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel
by Elizabeth J. Haynes
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.95 ISBN 9781771872690

Calgary novelist and short fiction writer Elizabeth J. Haynes has just published a new book, and this time it’s an essay collection. Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel is the kind of book I can really sink my teeth into. As I read these engaging essays about the author’s far-flung travels, family dynamics, heartbreak, a health crisis, history, politics and her former profession (Haynes is a retired speech-language pathologist), I quickly ascertained that the “food” here is much more than literal.

Mining experiences from a lifetime of global travels, the introverted and interesting author comes by her love of travel honestly: her father worked on a fisheries project for the British Colonial Office in Nigeria in the 1950s. “He arrived on a freighter, squinting into a bloody sunrise on the Gulf of Guinea,” Haynes writes. She concludes her first essay with an observation of her father’s “big, gnarled hands holding the knife that sliced cleanly through ham and bread and cheese and the fire-red peaches.”

In my experience, one of the most exciting things about travelling is the surprises, and Haynes shares several. She and her sister spent eight months backpacking around Asia, and her “Souls of the Ancestors: Walking around Torajaland,” concerns their time among the remote, hilltop-living Torajans in Sulawesi. In a Batutumonga homestay, the sisters learned they were sharing a house with owner Mama Siska’s deceased grandmother: “Her partially embalmed body apparently lies, as it has for two years, in a room at the back of Mama Siska’s house.” Mama Siska takes in guests to “make enough money to buy a buffalo to sacrifice” at the funeral.

I relate to Hayne’s assertion that in “coming to a new place … the senses are sharpened, and everything seems new.” She ably demonstrates this via many poetic turns of phrase in this poignant collection, ie: in North Carolina for her sister’s wedding, “The sky is drowning in stars.” In Peru at dusk: “the sky dark as a new bruise.” Her Cambodian experiences gave me goosebumps.

Cycling in Cuba with another sister—whom Cuban men continually hit upon—the Spanish-speaking Haynes learned much beyond what a regular “turista” might, ie: that “the whole country celebrates International Women’s Day.” In Bolivia she met a Cuban professor, Pedro, who “must give 75 percent of his wages to the Cuban government,” but fortunately he still earns enough to buy his ill wife’s medication.

Haynes is an adventurer after my own heart—cycling in Cuba, kayaking in the Sea of Cortez, canoeing past Floridian alligators, trekking in Peru—but she also recognizes the beauty in Canada. As a youth in Kamloops, she’d explore “the cactus-covered hills” and exult in “a field of mariposa lilies, a storm of tumbleweed, an arrowhead, burrs and cacti thorns sticking to our socks.”

Food? There are some mentions, ie: “fresh lavash” and “sharp-tasting sheep’s milk cheese” in Armenia, but the book’s titular food is indeed far more metaphorical than actual; it’s the essays themselves that are delicious.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM