Braintree was just a bedroom community, home to the big movie theater and the southernmost stop on the Red Line, but when I was a kid, its name evoked a sense of wonder. I envisioned an enormous oak with a canopy of marbled grey matter.

When I started to take public transportation into the city for high school, and then covered Boston’s neighborhoods as a reporter a decade later, these names started to lose their mystery, because I heard them every day. I could recite the stops on the Red Line in one breath without thinking, like a catechism, and heard the conductor say, “This is a Brrrraintree train, Braintree” so often, it didn’t conjure anything in me anymore. Some days, that commute felt long and endless, like I would be riding Red Line trains until the end of days. I rode the subway so much, I felt like Charlie.

I’m a poor angler. Not that fishing plays a big role in my life as an adjunct lit teacher in Milledgeville, Georgia. My students thread fishhooks into the bills of their caps, and the relationship just about ends there. (Though I guess there’s a shared history, too, between literature and fishing—Aesop, Moby Dick, Hemingway—but that doesn’t exactly haunt me.) The sprawling lakes in central Georgia—Sinclair, Oconee, Lanier: “Georgia’s lake country!”—are all man-made and part of the power grid, so from April to November they’re warm and brown, and from a boat or a pier you can’t see far enough in to tell if there are even any fish alive in there. For a similar experience, try to see if there are any moles in your backyard. But I do know there are fish in Milledgeville’s Lake Sinclair, because little Georgia College has a nationally ranked angling team, of which my old thesis adviser is head, and they host tournaments in that lake all the time. Though I’m not sure if they actually catch the fish with traditional rod and reel, or just float along with a net and scoop all the dead ones off the surface. Lake Sinclair shares its shoreline with a coal plant, and is also host to flesh-eating bacteria.

The hammock I’d bought for the riverboat was nearly too long. I had to tie it as tight as I could so that when I got in it to sleep my butt didn’t sag to the ground. The hammock stretched across the whole of the roof of a barge-pushing boat on the Rio Mamore in the Bolivian Amazon basin. I tied it as tight as I could and when it got dark I got in there and my butt had about two inches of clearance.

We all dine on this rhetoric from time to time: If I could be somewhere—anywhere—else, everything would be okay. I sit down to a meal of it five times a day. I grow fat from it. But, really, I of all people should know better. I grew up in a dumpy motel in Honor, Michigan—which is to say Nowhere, Michigan: Hick capital of the Yankee North. My parents managed and maintained The Honor Motel (THM) entirely on their own, which meant our family lived in a very small “apartment” attached to the lobby; travel, in its purest, physical sense, was virtually impossible: we were anchored, awaiting the sporadic customer—that DING we could hear from the den, kitchen, our shared bedroom. But I never thought of it as entrapment—this was our kingdom: glorious, strange, melancholic.

When I was little, my family and I lived aboard a boat for two years, and we traveled close to the mosquito-fogged jungle coastline of Central and South America. Our boat was a motor yacht, a steel trawler, well suited for mincing navigation up winding waterways, and less vulnerable to the caprice of the trade winds. I was always relieved when we entered the glossy brown Amazonian river waters, weighted and smoothed by the silt they carried. The blue ocean was beautiful to look at, but the trawler pitched and rolled like a barrel, and I wasn’t allowed on deck when we were underway, where the fixed horizon gave me my bearings.