DECIPHERING YOUR TRAVEL DNA
Taking a look at your travel DNA forces you to think about what it is that places, people and cultures have given you.
Thomas Johnson couldn’t have helped me.
Johnson, my grandmother’s Norwegian grandfather, came to the United States from Christiania (now Oslo) in the early 1800s. He fought in our Civil War, so it’s not as if he didn’t know how to pitch in when he was needed.
But I was standing naked at the edge of an ice plunge bath in a co-ed spa locker room in Berlin, trying to gain the courage not only to jump in, but also to get back out, still naked, in the company of a few dozen strangers.
It was a situation in which having Thomas Johnson as my great-great-grandfather — and contributing to the fraction of Norwegian heritage in my DNA — was not going to help. I would have to rely on something more relevant.
It’s not that our DNA isn’t generally relevant. Increasingly, more of us are taking a tiptoe through the double-helixes, most commonly to learn a science-based answer to a child’s question: “Daddy, where did I come from?”
The technology to decipher DNA has become more accessible and more affordable. Genetic testing that for practical purposes was only for law enforcement, drug research and the very wealthy, is now available through kits that cost less than $150.
Among the most popular is 23andMe, a company that mails you a kit with sample containers that you drool into. Send it back and within a few weeks, 23andMe emails you a link to your results — your regional heritage, broken down into percentages. (The company also can factor in medical history and come up with conclusions about your health and potential issues.)
Similarly, National Geographic’s Geno 2.0 takes your drool and gives you a “breakdown of your regional ancestry by percentage, going as far back as 200,000 years,” as well as a “deep ancestry report” and a hint at “which famous ‘geniuses’ you could be related to.”
Among the outcomes of receiving the results, according to the folks at 23andMe, is that customers said they are more curious about the places they “came from.” Curious enough, it seems, to get off the couch and travel to destinations they would not have otherwise considered.
While I believe almost anything that encourages people to travel is positive, I’ve come to believe in a nonscientific formula that is more relevant to me: travel DNA.
In an odd twist on the nature-versus-nurture argument, who we are as people relies to some extent on where we have traveled and what we did. Each trip, each place, each culture changes who we are. Some trips are minor, others transformative. Your travel DNA mutates as you go, usually for the better.
Using the same format as the real DNA testers, I tried to assign percentages to those places that had an impact on my views, my preferences and my decisions (including whether to jump naked into an ice bath), and quantifying how much they are a part of me.
My travel DNA would look a little like this: Omani, 3.8 percent; Korean, 2.9 percent; Latvian, 2.7 percent; British, 4.8 percent; Malay, 1.2 percent; Moroccan, 2.1 percent; Palauan, 6.3 percent; Panamanian, .0001 percent (don’t ask). And so on. For example, the possibility that I might be 0.1 percent Scottish according to real DNA testing has a lot less bearing on my life than a night I spent in Glasgow, part of it at a crusty locals pub that claimed to have the longest bar top in Scotland.
A gnarled, white-haired man who could well have fought alongside Rob Roy ambled up to the bar and thanked me. For what, I asked. “For bee-in ah Yahnk,” he said. An experience in his past with an American had changed him. This experienced changed me.
If nothing else, taking a look at your travel DNA forces you to think about what it is that places, people and cultures have given you, as well as to look at how you were changed in the process.
Still standing in front of the ice bath in Berlin, I noticed that a genetically perfect couple in their 30s, both blond and without even a hint of tan lines, were watching me with a smile.
I shrugged at them and they laughed.
“You don’t have to jump in,” the man said in Bavariantinged English.
“Yeah,” I said, “sometimes you do.”
So I did. Now it’s part of my travel DNA. German ice bath: .03 percent.