Book Review/Heather Seggel

Journeys and Gender

Outside there are crises colliding: The coronavirus pandemic is resurgent, an economic recession is squeezing most of us, and the nation and world are engaged in a protest movement for racial equity. So, kind of a weird time to be reading a travel guide. But “Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel” (self-published, ISBN 9781734875300) feels timely nonetheless. Author Toby Israel offers plenty of practical tips for women who may be reluctant to travel alone, but she’s also extending readers an opportunity to reconsider how they move in the world in general. It’s a thoughtful, sensuous, inspiring jolt of confidence to take in.

Israel writes with a delicate touch about some of the thornier issues female travelers face. If the threat of violence has held you back, it’s bracing to realize the chances of being hurt by an intimate partner are far higher than the risks posed by strangers. Nevertheless, there are basic self-defense tips, strategies to access and begin to trust your intuition, and wise instruction about planning travel with an awareness of your own boundaries; if you freak out in a crowd, public transit in India is not going to be a good time.

This passage speaks to her balanced approach: “When I feel safe and at ease, I prefer to live and relate with an open heart and a big smile. However, when we teach girls to never fight, never get angry, never say no, never be wild, we raise a generation of women who struggle to defend themselves—women who cannot yell, fight, and raise hell when their survival depends on it.” Amen. And in a pinch, remember to drive the heel of the hand into the nose.

There is common sense information about equipment and packing, assessing the cultural norms of a region in order to travel respectfully, and exploring eco-conscious ways to get around, since air travel is such an aggressive contributor to global warming. It’s interesting to read this as the world has hit the pause button for a while in response to the pandemic. What if, going forward, people weighed their potential impact and took steps to lower the carbon footprint of their sojourns? Even wilder, what if we traveled our own neighborhoods with the curiosity and openness of travelers? That’s also an option worth considering.

Beyond practical matters, you’ll find yourself thinking about vagabonding as a way of life. If you’re partnered with someone who cultivates a lot of brief relationships, it may be a side effect of a disposition that leans toward wanderlust. And if that person is you, you may want to take care with the people in your life so they know you are not so much checking out as exploring. All of this is related through brief, emphatically non-braggy travel stories, poems, and prose, so you have the option of taking in just the facts or a more intuitive expression of the same ideas.

I approached this book warily. Self-published titles often lack organization or careful editing, and can generally feel incomplete. The cover design is beautiful, but even that gave me pause: it features a photo of Israel against a backdrop of beautifully sun-drizzled mountains and fog, and she is both strikingly lovely and not wearing a lot of clothing. Was this an Instagram story that somehow made the leap to paper? Those concerns were dispelled by page two; Israel writes like a pirate-poet hybrid and does not shy away from the romance of life on the road, but she’s frank about the loneliness, tedium, and dislocation that come along for the ride.

Again, it’s weird to be reading this right now. Air fares are cheap, but travel is restricted and potentially unsafe. Having never been a traveler myself, I was curious in a vague way to read about how safe things were on the ground in various places and what it might mean to be female and alone in them. It was surprising to find a philosophy not so different from my own, just applied in ways I hadn’t previously considered. That’s a beautiful thing about “Vagabondess,” and one that redounds to its author: If you click with her approach to the topic at all, you will begin to see more opportunities for adventure that don’t require a ticket or passport, in addition to planning your next getaway with more thought and care. Read it with a map in hand, or your grocery list, or your favorite blank book, and remember that adventures may be out there somewhere, but they start within you.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

Populist.com