Pam Mandel’s The Same River Twice: A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers, Bomb Shelters, and Bad Travel is much more than a memoir. It’s a coming-of-age story, a travel odyssey, and an exploration of how experience shapes us.

In a direct and engaging voice, Pam — an award-winning travel writer and blogger — recounts how her summer at a kibbutz in Israel turned into an 18-month journey that took her as far as the Himalayas in India, with stops in Egypt, Europe, and Pakistan along the way. Adrift and seeking her own way to be in the world, seventeen-year-old Pam says yes to every adventure and becomes fearless in the process.

The book’s title comes from the quote by Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and she’s not the same person.” I sat down with Pam recently, and she shared her thoughts on the joys of getting lost, how travel helps us become ourselves, and her ongoing quest for the strange, beautiful, and unknown.

***

Nancy Middleton: The Same River Twice grew out of an article you published, yet this wasn’t a book you’d always planned to write. The stories were there, but the book came as a surprise to you?

Pam Mandel: My friend Alex had started a magazine called Fields & Stations, and he contacted me to write a piece about being in Sharm El Sheik before it went back to Egypt. It’s a beautiful magazine, but I had been suffering from a really bad depression and said no. He asked me three or four times and the last time we talked about it I put down the phone, turned on my computer, and wrote 1,600 words for him. And then I couldn’t stop. Everything came back. It was like the lights came on. I also took a class called “Rewrite Your Life” and fell into this slot I never expected: that I should be writing YA fiction. And it turned out to be exactly right. My book could be a YA novel. Doing the exercises in that class and Alex asking me to write that piece helped me crawl out of this place where I didn’t know what I was doing with my work. I’m really grateful for the accidental guidance.

It’s not the book that I ever expected to write and neither is the voice. People who know my work are really surprised by it because it’s written in this very matter-of-fact way. The voice is something I’m really proud of. Once I set a course for it I wanted to hold it all the way through. And it was hard. I’m trying to write in the voice of this person who is much younger, and not insert the things I know now. I didn’t want to get into external analysis of why I stayed in this relationship or why didn’t I do x? Now I want to say these things to my former self, but I really didn’t want to insert my present self and the things I know as a grown-ass woman.

Middleton: You were very young and completely open to discovery during all this travel. At one point in the book you refer to it as your “reinvention tour.” I wonder if young people today could make this kind of dramatic break with their past. With the pervasiveness of social media and technology, do you think it’s still possible to get so lost in the world?

Mandel: I think it depends on who you are. It’s harder, for sure, because we always have our phones nearby. We’re tethered to the world in ways that are hard to break now, so you really have to work very hard to become disconnected. Getting lost now is hard. About five years ago in Mexico I did get lost and had to ask someone for directions. And I was so thrilled. It was so exciting. I wasn’t very lost. I just needed orienting. But that’s the closest I’ve come to being lost in ages. It’s exciting to get lost, right?

“Those early experiences let me suspend all the stuff we’re fed about who’s dangerous when you’re traveling.”

Middleton: You’ve mentioned that Alice in Wonderland is your favorite travel book. Is there a connection between your enthusiasm for getting lost and your love for that book?

Mandel: The thing about Alice in Wonderland is she literally drops into this place where she doesn’t know what the hell is happening. She doesn’t understand the rules. So, yeah, I think those things are very connected. Alice is having a great adventure when you think about it. Nothing bad happens to her—not really. She gets wet. She meets some weird characters. She does mushrooms with a caterpillar. But nobody really harms her. She ends up in some situations that seem threatening but really aren’t. I just love that about Alice in Wonderland. I still read it again regularly as an adult and think, “What a great adventure she’s having!”

Middleton: There were some potentially threatening situations during your travels, yet you never seemed too afraid.

Mandel: I was almost never afraid. I didn’t really have a reason to be. There were a few interactions that were legitimately potentially dangerous, but they were very low key as far as things go. In most cases, any implied danger was about either my misunderstanding or the external culture’s misunderstanding of me. It was nothing that couldn’t get resolved by a conversation or some eye contact. I like that my formative experience as a traveler led me to be someone who rarely feels threatened by a situation. Those early experiences let me suspend all the stuff we’re fed about who’s dangerous when you’re traveling.

Middleton: When you got to Egypt and didn’t see many women in public, and even more so in Pakistan when you were told not to go out with your body so exposed, you took notice. That was the first time you were—although not necessarily afraid—exposed to some very different ways that women lived in the world.

Mandel: I grew up on the West Coast, and I’m a child of the seventies and that era’s feminism, so what was happening in those countries was so foreign, for lack of a better word, to me. Women were very separate. They behaved in very specific ways. I had a very limited view of what was happening, so I don’t want to make broad statements about what women in Egypt and Pakistan are experiencing. I can’t speak on that at all. I can only speak from my very limited perspective of how it seemed to me. And the way they seemed to me was separate and behaving in different ways from men. I didn’t see women behaving in the way I was existing in the world. I also didn’t see many young women travelers at the time, so there was no way for me to see how to behave in this context. There were no guidelines.

Middleton: Throughout your book is this idea of feeling like an outsider, yet in a lot of these countries you realized that your appearance could allow you to fit in as a native. Some even tried to claim you as one of their own—I’m thinking of the man in northern India who pointed to your hair.

Mandel: In large parts of the world where I travel, if I am dressed appropriately, I can pass for a native. I’m not really interested in passing. It’s not something I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to hide. Back then, I think it might be more that I was looking for a place to be. Given the sense of detachment I’d felt so much of when I was a kid, I guess I was looking for a place. But that’s getting back into that game of trying to figure out what I was thinking at that time. I do think my appearance made travel easier for me. Egypt and Pakistan aside, there were many places in Europe where it was not a problem for me to just go out and do something on my own. I was not a target. I don’t know that I fit in, but I was not immediately recognizable as someone from the outside.

Middleton: The chapters about crossing the Himalayas have a different feel, more peaceful and measured. You seemed to feel a oneness being so high up and close to the sky.

Mandel: I think about that part of the trip all the time. There are still little things that can make it come back. Where I live now, if I walk just two blocks, I have this view across Puget Sound of the Olympic Mountains. Sometimes the way the air smells when it’s very cold or the way the sky will be a very specific kind of blue late in the summer brings it back. We walked across the Himalayas for about a week just doing this singular thing: getting up in the morning and walking all day to get to the next place. It was very quiet. Occasionally, we would cross a bridge or pass a temple but most of the time it was just this walking meditation. I was just in the flow. And I was on foot, so the pace of the book reflects that. Because of the altitude and the sheer physical challenge, you’re forced to go at a certain pace

Middleton: You ultimately ended things with the boyfriend who traveled with you, but for a long time you seemed to get used to his abuse, almost like you got used to living in a war zone in Israel. It became just part of life, and you didn’t tell anyone about it.

Mandel: I think there is something that happens to people who are in bad situations where they become resigned and believe, “This is just how things are and they’re always going to be this way.” And the worst case scenario is when you internalize it and believe this is what you deserve. That probably happens so much more than any of us really see. I’m not an expert on this topic, but at the time I just could not see that there was any option but to keep living in this way I’d been putting up with.

There’s that resignation you can tap into, but the flip side is that you actually have more power to change the situation than you are willing to grasp. I could have done something about it, but it was not clear what my options were. It makes me feel really sad for my former self that I didn’t feel valued. And because I didn’t feel valued, I didn’t think anybody would throw me a line. So there’s that, too. It’s not that I didn’t see that the situation was bad. It was that I felt so unvalued I didn’t believe anybody would actually help. When you try to be heard and nobody listens, you think, “I guess my voice is too small.” It’s easy to internalize that and believe it.

“I have this craving for other places, that wanderlust. What’s the opposite of xenophobia?”

Middleton: The Same River Twice is such a perfect title, this idea that we are not the same person over time and that even situations we’ve encountered before are experienced anew as the person you are now. Did you have the title in mind all along, or did it come about as you were writing the book?

Mandel: I did have it in mind all along. I actually wrote a short piece with that title, and it’s very much about this idea of being able to go back and change the experience and then realizing, no. As much as there were bad things that happened, no. My wanting to do so is also irrelevant. It can’t be done. The water is always flowing. There’s no stopping time. As a broader theme, what I held with me is that this experience is why I am who I am today. I can’t undo it and shouldn’t really want to.

Middleton: You write that during your travels you’d fallen in love with “everything strange and beautiful and unknown.” Is this still your mantra? Has your search for these things changed or evolved?

Mandel: Absolutely. And it has changed tremendously. I’m increasingly interested in the strange, beautiful, and unknown in the U.S. I traveled in Mississippi not long ago and found some of the best travel I’d had in years. It did all the things for me that traveling in a foreign country does. The history there—while it’s certainly American history and a thing we share as a nation—is very specific to that place in ways that are not apparent here in the Pacific Northwest. And that was just Mississippi. I didn’t fly across the ocean. So the bar for what passes as adventure has dropped. I don’t have to go to Uzbekistan to have a thrilling travel experience. I can go just about anywhere and, if I’m observant and open, I can find it. I have this craving for other places, that wanderlust. What’s the opposite of xenophobia? There should be a word for that. And I acquired that at a very young age. I still get “rashy” when I’m in homogenous places. I thrive on variety. It makes me happy.

Middleton: As someone who regularly writes about travel, you must be frustrated by all the COVID-19 restrictions. When we’re allowed to travel again, where do you want to go?

Mandel: I was supposed to house sit for some friends in Hawaii this spring and will probably go there, although there are so many things I want to do. Honestly, in a more micro context, there is a bar/restaurant down the hill that makes Chinese food and slushy cocktails. Their shrimp dumplings are amazing, and I want to go there by myself and sit at the bar with strangers and have a drink and eat dumplings. I miss strangers so much! I don’t love crowds, but I do love social spaces. Something I’ve always really enjoyed about traveling alone is that it forces you to have conversations with strangers. Even as an introvert I’ve always loved that. And that aspect of our daily existence has been taken away from us. It’s not so much destinations I miss but that social aspect of life that has been taken from us.

I recently picked up my camera again and started taking a picture of myself once a week. I live alone and was starting to feel so lonely and invisible, like I was just going to disappear if I didn’t do something. They’re very “real” pictures. There’s one of me sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee. There’s one of me in my backyard in my pajamas. What I’m looking to say with the photos is: “This is what I’m doing, sitting at my table drinking coffee at 4:30 in the morning because I have COVID anxiety. What are you doing?” It’s more of an invitation than a vanity project. I hope that’s the vibe people are getting from it.

Middleton: Speaking of your photography, in your article “On Taking Pictures in Beautiful Places” there’s a lovely phrase: “the serendipity of noticing.”

Mandel: Having the time to take a good long look at where you are absolutely has the positive benefit of making someplace people might dismiss as being inherently interesting.

Everywhere is interesting if you bother to notice, right? I think if you walk out your door interested in anything you’re going to find, it’s going to be really satisfying. My co-founder at The Statesider [a newsletter that curates the most interesting stories about US travel] took a class once where he had to write about something boring until it became interesting. I tried this in a workshop of my own and it was fascinating. As soon as you turn your attention toward a thing it can become revealed. It always comes back to taking the time, and when you apply curiosity anything can be interesting. I really believe that.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. This means if you make a purchase from our link, Undomesticated will receive a small commission to help us fund more stories. We do not accept compensation for reviews. All recommendations and opinions are our own.