As the title suggests, Traveling is largely about the taking of journeys—and not only literal travels, in the serpentine course of Mitchell’s life from her childhood in the snowy environs of Saskatoon, Canada, through important visits to Greenwich Village and Coconut Grove, Florida, to the communes of Laurel Canyon that defined Mitchell for a while (and which Mitchell, in turn, defined) to the tonier, hissing lawns of Los Angeles, which she ended up, finally, calling home. In Powers’s framing, Mitchell’s work has been a product of intellectual, emotional, and social traveling that maps loosely over the course of her physical vagabonding. “Your life becomes a travelogue full of picture postcard charms,” Mitchell sings in “Amelia,” a paean to the lost hero of early aviation and the temptations of her own wanderlust, from Hejira. The title for that album was derived from the Arabic term for Muhammad’s journey out of Mecca to Medina, marking the beginning of the Islamic era. Mitchell found the word in a dictionary, Powers tells us, and embraced its translation to “pilgrimage.” Once again, Powers employs a biographical trope, the life as a journey. But she sets it up mainly to complicate it, and avoids reducing places to picture postcards.
Mitchell made what constitutes a pilgrimage to Greenwich Village in her first years as a folk-ish songwriter and singer clearly emulating her predecessor, the “folk queen” Joan Baez. She didn’t let herself get subsumed by the cutthroat bohemianism of the Washington Square careerists, though; there was “just too much game there, all the energy spent on feeling immortally important,” Powers writes. Mitchell left the Village and took a less-traveled path to its southern Florida approximation in Coconut Grove, a tourist-brochure collage of tiki bars, Cuban dance clubs, and coffee houses. Mitchell connected meaningfully there with David Crosby, recently cast out from the Byrds, through a lesser-known musician named Bobby Ingram. In her pilgrimage to the various sites of Mitchell’s travels, Powers tracked down Ingram, still living in the Grove.
Powers has a sharp eye for detail and a lyric-lover’s appreciation for concision; the passage describing her visit to Ingram is just one of many tight, vivid narrative playlets in her book. She drove through “the thick weave of palm trees encroaching the bungalow,” and entered “through a storm-sturdy wooden door” to find Ingram waiting. He “sat in the enclosed porch off the living room, surrounded by knicknacks. White thatchy hair, rumpled plaid shirt, big smile; he was settling into the remembering phase of his life.”