A vacation from anxiety

“Don’t think twice,’’ said my one of my prospective traveling companions. “The Ranch is 30 hours by car from the site of the initial outbreak in Mexico City, and the violence and drug-dealing thing has been going on for years in Juarez and Tijuana. It’s all rival gangs and corrupt cops. What you see on TV is urban legend and Internet gossip. Granted, if I lived in El Paso, I would think twice about going to a restaurant in Juarez on Saturday night. Don’t want to get caught in a crossfire, but there are no worries in little old Tecate.’’

When I was young, I didn’t need the 24-hour news cycle to work me into a froth of inertia. In college, I was on scholarships and work/study, and my money went to textbooks and toothpaste, not airline tickets. The lack of finances meshed perfectly with my fear that I would be a bad traveler, the kind who could only think about how back home she has left the stove on. I was anxious about being anxious and was certain my timidity would seep through the experience in the way that laundry sometimes turns pink.

And then something changed to alter my attitude. The march of time helped, with the old mantra kicking in: If not now, when? Perhaps it was also the desire to be able to make sophisticated and knowing comments about distant places, with the kind of self-satisfied authority I heard in so many accomplished travelers. I, too, would issue wry asides about how the shopping is out of this world at the Rome airport, or the pigeons at San Marco plaza are such a nuisance, or how mornings in Paris are usually perfect, before the bickering odors of car exhaust, roasted chestnuts, and ladies’ perfume kick in.

I began to see the trap in staying put. As Christopher Reeves said in a commencement address at Middlebury College in 2004, “Paralysis is a choice.’’ I went from risk-averse to Adventure Girl in what seemed like a nanosecond with a new policy of saying yes to every opportunity.

And yet, this trip gave me pause. Was I risking my life for a few endorphins and a calorie tune-up? Or, were the dire reports a soufflé of fear whipped up by the media, with real demons bolstered by exaggerated ones? Perhaps there is a specific niche in our psyche comforted by the notion of highly specific geography-based hobgoblins so that we don’t have to consider the entire free-ranging panoply of possibilities. Avoid this one particular place and immortality is yours!

Listening to my friend, I conquered my misgivings and decided to set forth to the land of dust and sun where faces are mapped with wrinkles and the roads wind through hilly terrain.

And this is what happened when I got there: nothing.

The news is, I repeat, no news.

I witnessed firsthand the disconnect between what you read and hear from afar and what you experience in person. Mexico is an honorable ancient place with some terrible, terrible problems from time to time, but it is hardly the cartoon monster you read about so readily in the media.

At the ranch, the air smelled of lavender and rosemary and sage.

I ate fennel and pansies and I passed on the cactus (slimey!). The fish tacos were tasty, especially combined with the impudence and crunch of radishes.

The distant mountains looked the way mountains usually do: like old men lost in thought or like rumpled laundry.

I hiked, avoiding snakes, observing wild horses, listening to moo-cows in the distance.

Health was general, and the only possible criminal element I encountered was myself, when our car got targeted at customs for what they said was a random check. One sniffing German shepherd and 15 minutes later, we were pronounced fit to reenter the United States where I am obliged to report that, for me anyway, the true lunacy would have been staying home.

Madeleine Blais, a guest columnist, is a professor at UMass-Amherst and author of “Uphill Walkers,’’ a family memoir.