Few Wichitans can claim to be so prominently associated with a popular worldwide movement as Rolf Potts is with the concept of “vagabonding.” The 49 year old Wichita native’s first book, also called Vagabonding, has sold a quarter of a million copies since being published in 2002. Just as importantly, it has helped popularize a movement whose followers seek a lifestyle that is centered around long-term travel – not a week or two, but multiple weeks, months or even years of travel. This notion of travel leans toward contemplation and experience as opposed to scurrying from attraction to attraction. Potts’ work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Slate.com, Outside, Sports Illustrated, The Guardian (U.K.), and many other publications. Travel Channel aficionados might remember Potts from his show American Pilgrim. His three other books, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, Souvenir, and The Geto Boys continue his exploration of the intersection of philosophy and travel that has marked his career as a writer and essayist since he graduated from George Fox University in 1993. Though he no longer lives in Wichita, his experiences at OK Elementary, Hadley Junior High, North High School, a Wichita Wings soccer camp, and Twin Rivers Swim Club all figure prominently in the emotional connection he maintains with his hometown.
Tim O’Bryhim: Do you still consider yourself a Wichitan?
Rolf Potts: I do. I’ve been living in Saline County for 15 years now. It’s a different emotional relationship. I’m sitting in Salina right now, but I don’t feel like a Salinan. I’ll always feel like a Wichitan. It could be because I was a pretty good track runner in the day. I did a lot of running through the city. I just know the city really well, geographically. I know all the neighborhoods…well, [laughs] I know all the 1989-era neighborhoods in the city…the central part of the city. My parents were teachers, and I grew up with a pride for the city and an awareness of the city. That never left me. I still very much feel like a Wichitan even though I don’t go there a whole lot.
TO: Did you buy into the east side-west side thing as a kid living in Wichita?
RP: A little bit. I was a west-sider. I used to ride my bike out past the zoo and it was just cornfields. Of course, now you have like 10 miles of Wichita left when you get past the zoo. I never bore any ill will toward east-siders. I knew there was this vague rumor that east-siders were wealthy. I swam for Twin Rivers Swim Club and every once in a while I’d have a meet against kids like that. Oh, and I played junior golf at Sim Park, which is probably the jankiest of the junior golf parks. I qualified for the city tournament one year, mostly because I sort of cheated, you know, like when you are adding up your strokes. That was when I really felt east-side versus west-side. It was maybe the only time I was sort of treated like the white trash guy. I wasn’t very good at golf. I was wearing my Nike dashers I wore for indoor soccer games, and there were these country club kids who clearly had no time for me. That’s when I felt it the most.
TO: When you do visit, does it feel different?
RP: I would say, “No.” As you age, you visit the city of your imagination. If I have time, I’ll drive back to my old neighborhood at 21st and West. My memories are so specific to that era of my life and it doesn’t feel that different. About a year and a half ago I went to Wichita to visit some friends and I rented an Airbnb and I went running on my old running routes. I went to Sycamore Park, and I went running in the Big Ditch, because there was a specific running route there I used to use, and it didn’t feel that different. It’s a bigger city but it doesn’t feel any different. That could be an imagination thing…that relationship you have with your home as you get older.
TO: Where did the Wichita Wings soccer team fit into all this?
RP: There’s a window, like 1979 to 1985, when the Wings were very essential. I played indoor soccer at…I don’t know if you remember Soccer West. I literally cried when the Wings lost that [1981] playoff game to the [St. Louis] Steamers. That was the emotional peak for me.
TO: How big of an impact did the Wings have on you?
RP: It meant a lot. When I reread your book, it gave me some arms-length perspective on what the Wings were. When the Wings came in 1979, I had been playing soccer for a year and so I had that narcissistic kid perception that the world was coalescing around Wichita, Kansas. I figured it would only be a matter of time before the Olympics came to Wichita…not that I had been any place else in the world. I loved playing and watching soccer. Weirdly enough, my parents were a little cheap, for lack of a better word, so we didn’t have season tickets. But usually I would go to a few games a year and would watch them on TV. It was huge, in that kid way, when you are good at a sport, you have that direct parallel. For whatever reason, it didn’t seem strange to me that Wichita had a major league sports franchise. Of my top 10 heroes in my life when I was 10 years old, probably three of them were Wichita Wings.
TO: Which players did you gravitate toward?
RP: Norman Piper, who I think was on the very first team, Kim Roentved, and probably Mike Dowler. There were so many from that era who were my Harrison Ford or my Eddie van Halen. They were part of the pantheon for me. It didn’t occur to me that people in San Diego, California might not know who Norman Piper was. I was really excited to go to that soccer camp. It was a one-week clinic at Wilbur Junior High. Because my parents were not into spending a lot of money on sports things, my only Wings T-shirt was from that camp. So I pretty much wore that shirt until it fell off my body. When I read your book, I realized that some kids’ parents had season tickets and they went to all these events. I didn’t have that same sort of access because you only have so much agency when you are 10. But attitude-wise, I was all-in.
TO: Was it me or did Pizza Hut have some kind of hold on 10 year old Wichita kids in the 1980s?
RP: Yes, it was part of a constellation. I still remember the theme song to Applegate’s Landing. That was owned by Pizza Hut. I’m a fifth-generation Wichitan. I just grew up knowing that Pizza Hut was the home team. It was very much on the radar. I remember when personal pan pizzas became a thing. At Twin Rivers [Swim Club] they’d have pizza parties and of course you’d order it from Pizza Hut.
TO: Looking back, now that you’ve experienced the world, what are Wichita’s flaws? What sort of things do you wish Wichita had done better?
RP: Well, I’m a little bit defensive of Wichita because it’s seen as a backwater in some places. I spend a lot of time in New York City for example. A lot of my publishing people are there. There’s this assumption among people who’ve never been there about what Wichita is like. And I’m sort of a glass-half-full guy and maybe a little sentimental, so my pro-Wichitaness might outstrip the reality of Wichita itself. I think sometimes Wichita can have a small-town mindset. There’s a tendency among Wichitans sometimes to disparage Wichita. In high school, the kids want to leave. It’s funny, the kids who couldn’t wait to get out of Wichita all live there. That’s one fun thing about the social media age. I’ve been on the Wichita Life podcast and the people I follow on Twitter are pro-Wichita people. The grumpy people aren’t on my radar, in part because I don’t live there anymore and I don’t catch the negative side. I love to see that the flag has exploded. I was such a Wichita nerd when I was a kid that I could tell you what it looked like when I was 10 years old. In the last five years it’s everywhere, which is cool to see. I went back to my childhood home on Kessler Street and their curb number was painted like the Wichita flag.
TO: How does your philosophy of Vagabonding change from age 30 to 50?
RP: I had just turned 30 when I got the contract. I was 32 when it came out. I think it depends on the person. I think someone who is almost 50 can be just as excited as someone 30 if they’ve never done it before. There’s something that’s really thrilling about realizing that you can do it. There are so many ways in America we are told we aren’t supposed to do it, or to wait to do it, or to save x amount of money to do it…when it’s not that difficult. It’s different for me to travel 20 years on. I’m a lot more relaxed about things. Weirdly enough, I’m less worried at almost 50 than I was at 30 about seeing the whole world. I just know it’s out there. I travel a little slower. I spend a little less time partying.
A year ago, I was in Sumatra. I just love that very simple, slow, Southeast Asian-style travel where you just take your time and every day is new. That’s not limited by age. For people coming into it, there are different mindsets. A person in their early 20s is going to have a different agenda when it comes to traveling. That’s totally normal. In fact, when I speak at universities sometimes, I say, “Don’t be afraid to party when you travel.” Because, eventually, you’ll get tired of it. On a week’s vacation you’ll party every day and you won’t grow at all. But if you travel for six months you’ll get tired of partying after several weeks, or at least you’ll mix it up. Whereas for somebody pushing 50 that’s just not wise to party every day [laughs].
I often encourage people to let the road teach them, but not to inhibit themselves. Let yourself be bored when you travel. I have nothing against short-term travel, I just wrote a book about long-term travel. The travel industry encourages people to pack their itinerary full of things. And that’s fine, but part of the fun of traveling long-term is being bored and doing things that completely surprise you and stumbling into serendipity. Just letting a day go by in a slow way that you don’t allow yourself to have at home.
TO: Letting the experience come to you, as opposed to running toward as many experiences as you can?
RP: Exactly. Sometimes we have this micromanaged attitude that we take overseas and it can be the worst way to experience a place. I teach a class in Paris every summer and my students will order lunch and will get antsy when the food and bill are slow to arrive. It’s France! They eat slow here! Rushing through lunch so you can go to the Louvre on time is the worst way to see France because French people will actually spend time having lunch and will enjoy every platter that comes out and will drink wine. Basically, we forget sometimes as American travelers when we travel in this very structured American way that we miss so much…
TO: I traveled alone to the British Isles a couple of times. Nothing too exotic. What are the virtues of traveling by yourself?
RP: It leaves you open to all kinds of happy accidents. And maybe some happy intentional things. If you are traveling with a friend, you might find yourself sitting in Allahabad, India talking about a Wings game you went to when you were ten, right? Just because that’s the frame of reference with your friend. Whereas, when you are alone you are sort of forced to confront your boredom and your loneliness. You naturally interact more with the place. I’m sure that’s something you noticed in England. You are not laughing and joking with your travel companions. Nothing against traveling with other people. There’s no excuse to sequester yourself, unless you are completely addicted to your smartphone. It just forces you to interact on your own and solve your own problems. There’s no better way to get to know a place. So much in life we experience as a consumer. But you don’t have to experience travel as a consumer. So many people go overseas and every experience is a consumer experience. It’s when you go alone and are a little bit lonely, lost and bored; then you really get those gifts of travel that you could never have planned on and don’t cost anything.
TO: How did you go from being a man who enjoyed that vagabonding lifestyle to making a living as a writer centered around that?
RP: My transitional media was when I was a columnist for Salon.com from 1999 to 2001. It’s easy to forget because Salon.com is a little bit click-baity now. I don’t read it. But it was sort of The New Yorker of the internet in the late 1990s. It had great writers and I lucked out because I had saved money from teaching in Korea, I was traveling on my own anyway, so I didn’t require a lot of money. An editor there, who sort of became a mentor to me, gave me a column, which I called “Vagabonding.” So every other week I was writing in a publication that also published Garrison Keillor and Camille Paglia. And I was in Best American Travel Writing of 2000. Bill Bryson actually chose my story. That was all before Vagabonding. I felt like I made it then.
There is a Wichita connection with Vagabonding. I was in Best American… and I felt like my career was on the rise. Because a lot of people read Salon.com back then, Conde Naste Traveler invited me to write for them, and some other big magazines too. So just as I was transitioning from my 20s to my 30s I felt like I was making it. I started this little email newsletter that went to about 40 people, including my [North High School] teacher, Bill Jenkins. And he wrote me this funny email about going to Arkansas. So I included this little email in my newsletter, which is about going through Asia, which is where I was at the time. Another one of his former students who worked at Random House read it and thought, “Hm, I think I’ve heard of this Rolf Potts guy, but I’ll check out his website.”
At the time, I hadn’t planned on writing Vagabonding but I’d given this advice, because when I was writing for Salon, people would write me about two big things: “How do you become a travel writer?” and “How do you travel so long if you’re not rich?” I didn’t know how to answer the first question so I started interviewing a travel writer a month. I still do that, and have been doing it for 20 years this year. And the other question, for me, my ability to travel for years at a time instead of weeks at a time, wasn’t about savings accounts and how to roll my T-shirts, it was about philosophy. So, I wrote this travel guide that had a lot of Henry Davis Thoreau and Walt Whitman in it.
So Joni Rendon, this other North High graduate who was at Random House, she read it, and I was in China and got this email. She said, ‘Hey, you don’t remember me from North, but I’m at Random House, and do you think this could be a book?” So I sent her a pitch and she went for it. This was for an imprint at Random House called “At Random.” They hadn’t figured out e-books yet and it was supposed to be an e-book… Then they moved it to Villard Books which is Jon Krakauer and Tim Cahill’s imprint at Random House.
Basically, it’s sort of like being Best American Travel Writing-famous versus book-famous, and I use the word “famous” lightly. There’s something about writing a book that eventually becomes a bestseller that becomes a part of your life. I’ve written four books now, but Vagabonding is the book that everyone wants to talk about.
TO: Do you have any associations of music with places? Any albums that instantly reconnect you with a place you visited?
RP: I went to Houston because of the Geto Boys. There’s this real psycho-geographical aspect of that book. It’s by far my least read book. I’ve had all my books on a table at AWP [Association of Writers conferences] and people will not even pick it up.
TO: That’s your Make This Town Big book [laughs].
RP: [laughs] It’s totally niche. The Geto Boys are just sort of scary in their own way. … People are so sensitive now. And the Geto Boys are just mind-blowingly offensive. That was their whole point. … For about one month when I lived in Oregon I was listening to the Geto Boys and that led me on this adventure in Houston, which was a very affecting thing. In my Paris classes I teach my students to try to explore Paris psycho-geographically. Don’t just use a paper map. Find some feeling or color or sensation that takes you through the city in a counter–inituitive way. For me, in Houston, I went to find the Geto Boys’ version of Houston, which was interesting.
But it wasn’t like I was really into the Geto Boys. I was a grunge baby. I went to school in Oregon when grunge was blowing up. I used to see a band called Heatmiser, whose singer/guitarist was Elliott Smith, before he became this iconic suicidal voice of his indie songwriter generation. I’ll never listen to music like I did in my twenties. … I went to a lot of live music and Lollapaloozas. I had full-on grunge hair. I was a landscaper in Seattle at the peak of grunge…
When I was first cutting my teeth as a vagabonding traveler in 1999, on Bangkok’s Khaosan Road you could buy these pirated cassette tapes: Cake, the Chemical Brothers, and this weird grab bag of British, Australian, and American music that I listened to during that very affecting time of my life.
TO: How did writing a book called Souvenirs about how people collect souvenirs change the way that you actually collect souvenirs? Or did it?
RP: I wouldn’t say it changes the way I collect souvenirs, although, I have this real meta experience now whenever I buy a souvenir. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I studied this for eight months. Now I know more than anybody about souvenirs.” What I realized when I was writing the book was how many souvenirs I had in my house that I didn’t know were souvenirs. For example, I have a bunch of Kansas City Royals stuff from their World Series run which have an emotional resonance that is comparable to something I got in Korea or India. The same could be said of the Burger King Wichita Wings cards in my closet. Souvenirs are often attached to travel, but they are really attached to memory. In French, souvenir is “too remember.” I walked every street in the 5th arrondisement of Paris as part of my research, which is really fascinating. But just going into every room of my house made me realize that I had way more souvenirs than I realized. Every object I’ve chosen to keep has been for a reason that I haven’t really unpacked. Anybody could do this. You look at these things in your house and ask, “Why do I have that coffee mug? Oh, yeah that was my grandma’s coffee mug!” Almost everything in one’s house that is more than 10 years old is still around for a reason. Souvenirs have their purest expression through travel, but they don’t limit themselves to travel.
TO: That’s very true. I don’t know if you’ve watched any of the Marie Kondo shows, but you are supposed to look at your belongings and decide if it “sparks joy.”
RP: Yeah, she actually put a word to something that I’ve felt for a long time. There are certain things that you have no problem parting ways with and then there are other things that you would never part ways with for reasons you can’t completely understand. In the book I write about this shell I got on the shores of Lake Michigan when I was seven. I’d never seen an ocean before, but I’d never seen a lake where you couldn’t see the other side, so it felt like if I didn’t make it to the ocean in life when I was seven, I would at least have this shell. I don’t know what happened to it. There was probably a 15 year old part of myself who had seen the ocean and then that shell was no longer that exciting. I’d love to see that seashell now but these objects have different power at different times of your life. I remember that T-95 had a handbill that had the 100 Greatest Songs of All-Time on it. According to the DJs at T-95 at least. So “Stairway to Heaven” was No. 1. In a way, I wish I still had that list, just so I could see what T-95 decided in 1983 were the greatest songs of all-time.
TO: [laughs]
RP: There’s this matrix of objects in your life that their importance changes at different times. There might be someone who you were in a relationship with and they gave you something. And then you break up with her and don’t see her anymore and don’t feel like you want to see this in your house every day.
TO: Why is it so hard for people to travel light?
RP: There’s a lot of reasons why. This is something I’ve thought about a lot too because I went around the world with no luggage 10 years ago. A lot of people freaked out. They said, “You’re going to smell terrible.” I didn’t say I wasn’t going to shower!
TO: [laughs]
RP: When I was traveling around the world, I saw these backpackers – they are my people – and they were traveling lighter than the business tourists. But they have a bag full of very dirty clothes, and I was washing my clothes every day. I sort of taught myself lessons that I didn’t realize I still had to learn about traveling light. … I think we just assume that the things we need at home are similar to what we need on the road, when in fact, we don’t really need them at home either. Maybe this is going back to the “spark joy” idea.
Recently on Instagram I posted what I took to Asia last year. It was super light. For three months I traveled with a bag that would fit in the overhead bin. But I probably didn’t use 20% of that stuff. People think they need these things, and there’s a travel industry, some of whom sponsor my podcast, that convince you that you need these certain things to travel. In fact, you really don’t. A good bag, a good pair of shoes, a simple rotation of clothes. Everything else you need is there for you out in the world. You can buy toothpaste and you don’t need diversions because the world has all these entertainments for you. It’s a hard lesson to learn…until you are actually on the road and you realize it’s an illusion to think that you need all the things you packed and that they are: 1) going to make you happy; or 2) you’re even going to use them. I think a lot of people find that after they travel for a few months they travel so much lighter than they did in week one.
TO: I was watching a speech you gave, and you talked about how time is the truest form of wealth. And you talked about how to challenge yourself to not just do something you’ve been doing, but something more innovative. Not to put you on the spot, but what are you challenging yourself with in 2020?
RP: I’ve always been into screenwriting. I’ve been working on a screenplay and was in Los Angeles talking to some production people – I can’t comment about that on the record – but someday I hope to get a screenplay produced.
A lot of people discover vagabonding through Tim Ferris. He is like Oprah for bros. He’s a big vagabonding fan. He’s great. He’s a good guy. He has offered to have me write some stuff for his blog. So I’m going to write about “time-wealth”: seeing time as a form of wealth. When I was in Los Angeles I was talking to a writer friend and she didn’t really understand what it was. She thought it was about making your life more efficient. So I realized that we are so inculcated with this idea that time equals money, when in fact, no, time equals wealth. Money is an abstraction when time is the substance of how you live your life. So I’m working on that for him now. Vagabonding is shot through with ideas about how time is wealth. I’m going to try to articulate it for his audience in a way that isn’t travel-specific.
We have a bunch of stressed out billionaires who can’t spend time with their families. This is something I might illustrate through travel. Very wealthy Americans will go to a village in Cambodia where everyone is literally impoverished and they’ll watch a father spend more time with his kids than they spend with their kids all year. What I’d like to do through this series is to remind people that there is a different way to embrace wealth. Ferriss has so much influence that [these pieces] might have reverberations. First, I need to write a good blog entry for him. But if the blog is successful then that literally could be a book too.
TO: It really is true that time is so much more valuable. Much more important.
RP: It’s what you have.
TO: It’s your life.
RP: Literally.
TO: What sort of absurd tourist destinations have you encountered in your travels?
RP: A place called Pensuk in Thailand. It’s a cowboy ranch in Isan in the northeast part of the country. … Americans go to Thailand and they visit the very specific Buddhist cultural sites, the temples, mountains, beautiful beaches and the great food. But the Thai people have lived their whole life with that, so they go to Pensuk. It’s a very politically incorrect version of Wichita’s Cowtown. … It’s just amazing. There’s an archery range and rifle range and a lot of country music. There’s a cowboys versus Indians extravaganza show that is just so wrong. I mean, if you are an American, it’s just…[laughs]. I don’t want to insult the Thai people who put it on, but it is obviously a vision of a 1950s movie version of cowboys versus Indians. The Indians win the fight but it’s just ridiculous. … They just want to see some fighting, shoot some guns and drink some beer. And it was a blast, but it was pretty hilarious having grown up in Wichita where one of the major tourist attractions was Cowtown.
TO: Is teaching a passion for you or is it a supplement to the traveling?
RP: It’s both. It’s the family business. My parents were teachers and my sister is a professor [at Bethany College]. I just have good instincts for teaching and I enjoy it. I probably enjoy writing and podcasting better; that’s really more my passion. It’s a seasonal thing for me. In the summer I go to Paris, and this year I go to London too, and I teach there. Sadly, we live in an age where teaching is just a lot more renumerative than writing articles or non–bestseller books. That, and being based in Kansas, allows me more intellectual and creative freedom that I would have if I was living in NoHo NYC or Silver Lake LA.
My brother-in-law works at the Land Institute. When I was traveling the world, my sister and her husband came [to Salina] because he got a job there. I said, “Why live in janky hotels in Thailand or people’s couches in San Diego when you can just buy a house in Kansas that doesn’t cost that much?” So I bought 30 acres and went in on it with my parents. So they are my neighbors. They live in a nice house and I live in what would have become a meth lab that is now my office. My sister lives 1.5 miles away. I wrote most of Souvenir and Geto Boys there.
TO: The Royals, the Wings, love of the movie Kicking and Screaming…you and I have a lot in common.
RP: We have a lot of concentric interests.
TO: I’m sort of the unadventurous Rolf Potts [laughs].