I'm reading a book about travel. Not your usual kind -- this one, titled Airplane Mode: an Irreverent History of Travel, by Shahnaz Habib, really digs at the essence of our movements for pleasure. It's not an easy book to describe and I don't remember how I found it -- probably through a review somewhere -- but it is to me a more important piece of travel writing than, say, a guide book, or any of your typical travel essays, journals or suggestive readings. I'm not done with it yet, but I do want to mention it because here I am thinking about my future travels and I realize that my travel opportunities will likely diminish over the next years (less strength, fewer resources) and so I think very hard about what is it that I still want to get out of travel to distant lands. Habib helps me shape those questions.
For a long time now I've thought about how much I feel completely alienated from tourism. Funny how that is, given that many would describe me as an incessant tourist. But there is a difference between tourism -- following a prescribed path to "must see" sights (who decides on this list anyway?), whether with a group or with the assistance of a guide book -- and traveling, which to me, is just being somewhere far away from your own home. Sure, I've been a tourist in my life -- most recently when traveling with Snowdrop -- but at some level it always seems wrong for me (the exception -- walks taken with locals who showed some flexibility and individual preference in where we walked and what we talked about). And even traveling can get complicated: there is a difference, I think, between traveling to stand back and observe (so often this means gawking at other mortals doing quaint things, from our own cultural, typically white and privileged, perspective), and immersing yourself in some fashion in the life around you, taking it in with all your senses, giving in to a place that is not your home. Eating their food, learning their habits, tapping your foot to their music. Sure, the lines are sometimes fuzzy -- for example, when I take out my camera and photograph something that I find uniquely charming -- that comes awfully close to gawking, no? Still, as Habib's writings have reminded me again and again, it's important to maintain curiosity about the entirety and to put yourself into the history of a place, and by that I mean into the perspective of the people who have for years and years lived there, and to whom you are the outsider. A guest, perhaps reluctantly welcomed by the locals.
And as I plan out my next year of travel (because I am a person who has from her childhood loved roaming the planet out of an insatiable curiosity about what's "on the other side"), I think about how is it that I decide where to go. Maybe it would surprise you to know that I do it in this way: I stare at a map and I ask myself -- where is it that I feel good about being on this next trip? What feels right? What place is worth the long flight, the resources spent, the time away from family, from Ed? And I imagine myself in one place -- no, that doesn't feel right for now. And another -- no, not that either. And eventually, perhaps in a few days, after a few tries and a lot of browsing, something strikes me as exactly right for that trip: yes, I can see myself waking up there, walking, eating, taking it in.
Most of my travel -- from the time I came from Poland to New York to work as an au pair and onwards -- has been solo. As a woman traveler, usually without great backup funds to pay for mistakes made, I've had to be cautious. This is something that big guy Ed has never quite understood. And when I was younger, I refused to acknowledge this inherent frailty as well. I remember landing at an airport in Sicily where I dragged my sister on a wild trip around southern Europe (we were both just around 20 years old). We had a room booked at a bed and breakfast far away from the airport. How did I imagine we'd get there? These things didn't worry me. I asked around at the airport and was happy when a clerk at one of the counters offered to drive us to our destination (maybe two hours away by car) after he finished work. However did I think this was a good idea? And when he first drove us elsewhere, because he was also giving his buddy a lift after work, and they asked us up to the apartment for a cup of tea before we set out again, it never struck me that following these two strange men was perhaps unwise. (Ed, by contrast, often hitchhiked alone, took up strangers on their invitations, and never gave any of it a second thought, with good reason -- he had little to fear. I suppose he does look Jewish, but it's not as if he wears a yarmulke or claims this as an identity. Compare his weakly suggestive appearance to being female and alone -- and even that is one step up from being a black or brown female and alone in a strange and desolate place!)
Without doubt, I have always felt safer walking and hiking alone in Europe than in the U.S. Maybe it comes from watching too many violent movies here, but honestly, I don't think so. Ed will tell me that statistically speaking my being robbed, mugged, attacked, raped on a solo trek are small here or there. But to me there's no joy in hiking through a deep forest, or late at night on empty streets and getting hit with panic when a rustle of the leaves or a click of a boot on the pavement reveals suddenly the presence of a stranger. Male. Coming toward me. Somehow on my hikes in France or Scotland or late at night in any of the cities across the ocean has never generated the same feeling of primal fear. As an adolescent walking the streets of Warsaw late at night, I used to joke that I had no problem outrunning a drunk. There, unlike here, being afraid of random violence, of guns on the streets, guns in schools (guns in schools!!), guns, period, is unimaginable.
I read and I think about this on one more day of stellar weather. The walk to the barn is lovely...
The air is a bit cool early on, so I take my breakfast outside, but I chase the sun around the table to stay warm...
And I talk to Ed and we mumble a bit about going on a biking trip, maybe next fall, maybe in Wisconsin, and then I notice the time and it is one of those days when the morning belongs to obligations and the afternoon to the kids. I take my car for a routine maintenance at the dealer and this leaves me with just enough time for a short walk, to the park, where I am bathed in an ocean of gold. That's September in south-central Wisconsin for you!
... and before long it's time to pick up the kids. It's ice cream day today!
The bubble that usually envelops the whole first week of school has not yet burst. They're full of good stories of friends, always the friends, of books, of specials (gym, art, library, STEAM), and somewhere in all that there is, I am sure, lots of learning taking places. A broad scale learning that includes getting on with many different people in many different ways.
In the evening I return to my music, my cold soup, my book. I had skimmed some of it, but chapter 3 was un-skippable. It was perfect. A description of the author's father who hates travel. This essay, about someone who despises leaving his home in India, is possibly the best travel essay I have ever read. I'll end with giving you just one paragraph from that chapter. I'll let you make of it whatever you want, whatever it means to you:
The religion of tourism, its holy books and its rituals, is deep within me even when I strike out on supposedly non-touristy paths. I am like the Jewish atheist in the famous joke who recoiled in horror after his son went to Catholic school and reported back about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: "Son," he responded, "there's only one God and He doesn't exist!" My aversion to tourism is a kind of faith in its power. Nothing in the world is a must-see, I told myself, while slowly roasting under the Roman sun in a two-hour line to step inside the Colosseum. Nothing at all, except here I am.
With a smile...
