Madame Aline’s memoir “I Became a Vagabond Traveler” is now available on Amazon.com.
Living is a variable endeavor. Depending on where you land on this planet, your life can be vastly different from others, but you wouldn’t know it unless you had the hankering to wander.
Self-published author Eileen Carpenter, who writes under the nom de plume Madame Aline, has quite a rich cultural perspective; she details her global travels in her book, I Became a Vagabond Traveler, living a roaming carefree existence. Raised by a less-than-ideal adoptive mother, Carpenter had no reason to cling to her hometown in Canada. So once she had enough scratch saved up, she moved to Europe when she was young.
“I bought a Hillman station wagon in Canada and picked it up in London. I drove that all over the UK, Europe, and Morocco,” she said. “I would stay at youth hostels and I would pick up passengers at the youth hostels, and they would pitch in for gas, and that would pay some of my expenses.”
An author event at The Bookworm on April 5 will include Carpenter sharing some of the stories in her book, which will be available for purchase and signing. Carpenter spent her summers traveling and experiencing as much of each European city and country as she could. During the winter, she would find some kind of work and save up for her adventures.
“When you’re young, you don’t think about anything; all you think about is getting out there and having fun,” she said. “We lived on about $50 a month. Now, I went over there during the early 1960s, so that was more money then, but it wasn’t much. Sometimes we would just sleep in the station wagon on our way from one place to another.”
Her travels included Scotland, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, the Mediterranean, and even Yugoslavia. Though Carpenter never mastered any of the languages, she was able to get by with several, including Italian, French, German, and others.
“I loved all of Europe, but I think I loved Rome the best,” she said. “I liked the history, the monuments, the museums, and just roaming around the city. It is such an ancient city and hasn’t changed in thousands and thousands of years.”
After enjoying her fill of Europe, Carpenter came to the states, and settled in New York. She got immediate work with the United Nations due to her experience with other languages and cultures. Before she knew it, she was working in Panama in the Canal Zone.
“They knew that I could adapt to any culture and language. In other words, I could get along with people,” she said. “I did love Panama; it’s a beautiful, small country. I didn’t live in the Canal Zone because I wanted to live in the culture with the people.”
Though Carpenter was already a seasoned vagabond traveler, who entered Panama an unattached UN worker, she left a married woman, traveling with her husband to Indonesia, where he was called to work. There she got to meet a whole other world and culture she had yet to encounter.
“It was very primitive; we had to ride around the city in a little bicycle-drawn cart,” she said. “We were stationed in Monado. It’s an area where they had never seen white people before. The little children would run up to our little hut and point and laugh at our glasses and rings. They had never seen anything like that.”
After Indonesia, Carpenter and her husband spent many years living in the Pacific Islands, usually living simply, like the culture that already existed there.
“I just love the islands,” she said. “I remember when we lived in the Marshall Islands, and visitors would come for a week or two, I would just think, ‘Those poor people, they have to go back home, and we get to live in this paradise,’ even though they had all the amenities and more food items, [the islands were] paradise.”
The one thing she did miss was the variety in food she couldn’t find on the islands. Luckily, her husband had a knack for hydroponics and growing food, not to mention cooking. Carpenter also got creative by making ice cream out of tropical fruits like mango, durian, and coconut, as well as other foods outside the Western diet.
“We had the only pig pit on the island, so people would come to our hut with a pig, or sometimes a crocodile, and they would bury it in the pit all day with hot coals and let it cook,” she said. “So we had the chance to eat a lot of pig and crocodile, which is sort of like chicken—a tender, white meat. It’s very good.”
Carpenter eventually made it back to the United States and settled in California, retiring locally, near her son and granddaughter (full disclosure: her granddaughter and this writer share the same mother). She still makes a point at least once a year to visit France, where she has a daughter and new granddaughter. She is currently working on a new book, relating her search for her biological mother. Traveling the world and living many places has certainly given her a unique cultural perspective, but the greatest moments of culture shock, she said, come when she arrives back in the United States.
“People in other countries don’t have much, but they learn to get by with what they have, and they are happier,” she said. “They are happy people with very colorful costumes, and always different food, which was very interesting to learn.”
Madame Aline is the mother of Arts Editor Joe Payne’s mother’s husband, Robert, and grandmother to his little sister Loraine. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 3-10, 2014.