Driving Home, page 21
They will soon be at home to their friends at their new residence on East Main Street, Buckley.
The bride is a young woman of reserved habits and is held in high esteem by all who know her. She has been a resident of Buckley for a number of years and her friends are not a few.
The groom is one of our hardware merchants and has been here for a period of eight or nine years. In that time he has built up a good business and is highly respected by all who know him. THE BANNER joins the host of friends in wishing them many years of unalloyed pleasure.
Ottie was twenty-five, Alonso forty-eight, though in the pictures of the couple one might mistake her for the older of the two, she is so ample and matronly, Alonso so spruce. (I suspect him of dyeing his hair—or, possibly, of persuading J. Foseide, Artistic Photographer, to work some darkroom magic on it.)
Ottie had babies—three sons and a daughter. Alonso went into local politics. He was on the school board and the town council. He was town treasurer and later mayor of Buckley. In 1913 he was elected to serve as a state congressman at Olympia. In the young and fluid society of western Washington, this rolling stone from the East Coast had become a fixed pillar of the community. In the portrait that I’ve propped beside the typewriter he is looking up from his papers in the state house at Olympia: his eyes swim behind his glasses; his broad mouth is set in a downturned arc; he exudes that air of sombre rectitude that might gain him election to high office. He looks too refined for the large, practical hands he keeps closed, as if they embarrassed him.
Ottie’s health broke in her fifties and she died in 1935, aged fifty-eight, but Alonso continued to run the hardware store in Buckley, which spawned an offshoot in Kirkland that was managed by their son, Mariner. When the United States entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, Alonso—who could remember his grandfather talking about the War of Independence, and who had himself lived through the Civil War—was still in business. He was eighty-seven in 1942, when he died at his daughter’s home in Seattle on July 19. I was then five weeks old—old enough, by a whisker, to count this pioneer of the Pacific Northwest as living in my own lifetime.
The newcomer here should at least be able to feel that he or she is in the historical swim of things, for the history of the Pacific Northwest since 1792 has been a history of newcoming and newcomers, a braid of interwoven Alonso-and-Ottie stories. The stories are all around us—in the fabric of the houses we live in, in the names of places and streets; they go begging at yard sales and can be fished out of Dumpsters.
My own house (built in 1906 in the wake of the Alaskan gold rush, a creaky timber warren of rooms with sloping floors and doorways that have twisted out of true—a relic of another wave of newcomers to the region) stands just below Mount Pleasant cemetery on Queen Anne Hill. I like to walk among the tombstones there, where so many of the dead are buried thousands of miles from where they were born. Carl Ewald, born near Marienwerder, Prussia, June 12, 1817, died in Seattle, June 27, 1909. Mary M. Ziebarth, geb. Kneable … Caroline Jacobs, born in Norway, died at Seattle, Washington … Isabella Blair Ormston, native of East Lothian, Haddington-Shire, Scotland … William Dickson, native of Belfast, Ireland … Anna Lloyd Tinkham, born May 28, 1849, Wales, England [sic], died Feb 9, 1908, Seattle, Wash. One inscription pleases me particularly: Sylvester S. Bower, born Newfield, N.Y., April 19, 1854, came to Wash. 1889, died July 12, 1936. That the date of his arrival in the Pacific Northwest should be commemorated as one of the three salient facts of Mr. Bower’s life seems exactly right. That’s how it feels to me, and how I want it on my own tombstone, please: … came to Wash. 1990 …
You can’t look out of the window here without seeing that you are in an uprooted and homesick land. Seattle’s domestic architecture pines for a world elsewhere. The old German Club on 9th Avenue, with its tall and narrow second-floor windows, harks back to some tree-planted strasse in nineteenth-century Hamburg or Cologne; the well-to-do English who settled around St. Mark’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill had their own mullioned and half-timbered enclave of replica manor houses, their details copied from Chamberlain’s Tudor Homes of England, the great architectural sourcebook of American mock Tudor. Close by the English quarter, a graystone Russian dacha glooms over a lordly view of Interstate 5 and Lake Union. Down in the International District, the glum brick buildings with balconied shrines set high over the street are homesick for Shanghai, while the “classical” terra-cotta friezes of downtown, with their gargoyles and cartouches and anthemions, are homesick for history itself—anybody’s history, and the older and grander the better. Stand near the corner of 3rd Avenue and Madison, and look up at the wild and dizzy conflation of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, English Gothic, Art Deco Egyptian, French Empire, Italian Renaissance, all handsomely molded in Green River mud. Out in the countryside, one finds a Bavarian mountain town, a Norwegian fishing village, and, in the Skagit valley to the west of Mount Vernon, an entire landscape that even a Dutchman (with a slight case of astigmatism) might plausibly mistake for the flat farms and poplar-fringed villages of Friesland.
What is true of the architecture and the landscape is even truer of people’s domestic interiors here. When I first visited Seattle, to research a chapter of a book, I got used to the oddity of parking my car outside a ranch-style bungalow in a street of more or less identical ranch-style bungalows, then, once through the door, taking off my shoes and entering the cross-legged-on-the-floor life of an immigrant Korean family, with its rugs and carved chests. Outside lay Greenwood, or Ballard, or Phinney Ridge: inside, we were halfway back, at least, to Seoul or Inchon. When I came to live here, I found that half the houses I visited in Seattle were like this—nostalgic reconstructions of another time, another place. A ground-floor apartment turned out to be a Greenwich Village loft, the plaster on the walls hacked off to expose bare brick, the ceiling strung with decorative, nonfunctional plumbing. I’m writing this with a mild hangover, incurred at a party last night in the Madrona district: the American owners of the house were Anglophile enthusiasts of Early Music, and stepping through their front door one entered a sort of legendary Merrie England of shawms and sackbuts and psalteries, of morris men and maypoles. The pictures on their walls were watercolors of the great Elizabethan piles, like Moreton and Hardwick halls; the books on their shelves had the sort of bindings that you rarely see outside the set on which Alistair Cooke used to introduce Masterpiece Theatre; the books themselves were described to me by an awed friend who had checked out the library in the downstairs bathroom as “works of medieval feminism.” I like to think that the next-door neighbors were passionate Arabists whose living room was a faithful reconstruction of a merchant’s diwan in a house deep in the Aleppo souk; or maybe tribal-Africa buffs, with a houseful of spears, blankets, and goatskin drums.
For Seattle tends to slop about in time and space. In New York, you’re rarely in doubt that this is New York and the time is the present, but there’s less here-and-now in Seattle than in any city I’ve ever known. Its woody plots and inward-looking houses, screened from their neighbors by thick tangles of greenery, allow people to live in private bubble worlds of their own construction. My neighbor’s Seattle isn’t mine—or yours. There are days when the city seems to me to be dangerously like an old-fashioned lunatic asylum: here’s the lady who believes herself to be Anastasia Romanov; and there’s Napoleon; and this gentleman is Alexander the Great; and here’s a teapot … Seattle does not insist—as both bigger cities and smaller towns do—on its own overbearing reality. It is unusually indulgent to those of its citizens who prefer to live in dreams and memories. If you want to bury yourself in a cottage in the trees, pretending that you’re living inside a nineteenth-century French novel, or that you’re back home in another decade and another country, Seattle will do astonishingly little to disturb your illusion.
My Seattle is a city of émigrés and migrants, and inevitably I see deracination as part of the basic fabric of the place. But I’ve planted a much deeper root here. My companion of the first para of this piece became my wife, and we have a child, now a year old. My American daughter—a Washington Native, as they say on the bumper stickers.
Even now, I see our two cities diverging.
For Julia, the word “tree” already means the shaggy cypress and the drooping fir, whose inky green will never convey to her the alien and depressive associations that they have for me. To my English eye, the Douglas fir has a sort of grim splendor, but it seems to me a congenitally unhappy vegetable. To Julia’s Pacific Northwestern eye, it’s the most homely tree she knows; it’s where the squirrels live and where the little pine siskins fuss and flutter.
So, too, the word “water” is coming to mean the deep and dusty stuff of Puget Sound, on which she has already been afloat. To me this water, which drops to more than a hundred fathoms just a few yards out from the shore, is uncannily, shiveringly deep, and queer things live in its ice-cold profundity, like Architeuthis, the giant squid, and the brainy, jet-propelled Octopus dofleini. I grew up in a country where the wild things were rabbits and foxes; she is coming into possession of a world where killer whales live in the watery suburbs of her native city, where real bears raid trash cans on the outskirts of Everett and mountain lions are sometimes spotted in Gig Harbor. God knows what she’ll make of the wild, exciting world of Beatrix Potter’s Lake District animals, Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher.
Growing up in the mock-antique, mock-heroic architecture of Seattle, Julia won’t be amused by its comedy or touched by its pathos, as I am: it’ll just be old to her—as real Tudor and Jacobean architecture is old to me—and dull, as merely old things always are. When she gets to see Florence and tires of the long, hot hike around the Uffizi and the Bargello, she may be fleetingly reminded of Seattle; as when she visits her English grandparents in Leicestershire, she may notice some battered, down-at-heel versions of buildings that are in a fine state of upkeep back home.
As children of migrants to the West must do, she’ll grow up with a sense of distances unlike anything that either her New Yorker mother or I knew as children. Her maternal grandfather lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her English grandparents in Market Harborough, and Julia has been born into a house where the phrases “back east” and “in England” are constant, almost daily reference points—where two shadowy worlds-elsewhere hover in the middle distance behind the world she lives in.
This is such a standard feature of West Coast life that I bet Julia will share it with half the children at her school. I’ve heard people born in this region talk of it as “out here,” as if to be a westerner was to be in some sense, however faint and ancestral, in exile from the warm center of the world. I hope my daughter doesn’t grow up to speak of her birthplace as “out here,” and doubt that she will: if the present tilt of the world economy continues, if there’s even a grain of truth in all the boosterish talk about the Pacific Century, then Seattle will be, and perhaps already is, a good deal closer to the center of things than either New York or London.
This is her city in a way that it can never quite be mine; and as newcomers must take their cues from the natives, I now have to learn about Seattle from Julia. I’m making a beginning. I’m relearning the meaning of the word “tree,” and a whole enormous syllabus looms ahead. But I am—in my daughter’s American English—a quick study. I’ll get to figure it out.
Edge Walking on the Western Rim, Sasquatch Books, 1994
Why Travel?
A CURSE OF TRAVELING is that one is so often made to supply reasons for doing it. STATE PURPOSE OF VISIT, demands the visa form. “Pleasure” sounds downright suspicious—I imagine the “blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, framing the word, letter by letter, on his application to enter the United States. Better to come up with a phrase that conveys some wispy and innocuous thread of intention, like Robert Byron’s pretext for wandering in Persia on the trip that became The Road to Oxiana, “to look for coloured architecture,” or Alexander Frater’s happy excuse for going to India, because he liked rain.
If you admit the real reason, you’re liable to attract the attention of men in white coats, or the police. For travel is a kind of delinquency, more often rooted in the compulsion to escape the boredom and responsibilities of home than it is in any very serious desire to scale the Great Pyramid of Cheops or walk the length of the Great Wall of China. It’s kinder to say, “I’m going to Surabaya,” than just to say, “I’m going”—but as you wrestle your bags through the front door and into the street, it’s the leaving-behind, the going for the going’s sake, that quickens the blood and makes the street itself look suddenly different, full of promise even on this bleak morning. Yesterday it was a dead end, today it’s the beginning of the road to who-knows-where. Oh, Surabaya, maybe; and maybe not.
The street looks different, and so does the person standing on it. Yesterday’s creature of duty and habit is today’s free spirit, a traveler, open to adventure as the dictionary defines it, That which happens without design; chance, hap, luck. Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservations, and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things and to encounter whatever chances the journey may throw up. It’s when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the prebooked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name you’ve never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest.
Nowadays you need to work quite hard to open your life to the workings of hap and luck. Nothing short of a terrorist hijacking is likely to deflect the modern traveler from his inexorable path as he jets from one major city to another, from Trust House Forte to Holiday Inn, with CNN talking him to sleep from one end of our shrunken-orange world to the other. You have to find some other way of going.
I like to travel as much as I possibly can in a boat small enough to manage on my own, and gratifyingly rarely do I land up where I’d meant to go. The wind gets up nastily—or dies altogether—in otherwise perfect weather; a gale warning is broadcast over the radio; I misread the tide tables and on the harbor approach find the entrance to be a scarifying cauldron of boiling milk; idly gazing at the chart, I notice a deep cleft in the woods, well protected by a sheltering headland; a jellyfish blocks the water intake, and the engine overheats; the summer haze suddenly thickens into fog so dense that a swimming seagull is lost to view in it at thirty feet … and so on, ad inf. It’s not at all like flying British Airways 087. It makes getting from, say, Ipswich to Newcastle (over a period of a week, in fair weather) at least as interesting and eventful as riding the turnpike in the age of the highwaymen, and every so often it reminds one of the roots of travel, buried deep in travail and trepalium, the triple-staked torture of the Inquisition.
Bad weather and mishaps have led me to all sorts of curious places, from Port St. Mary on the Isle of Man (where I landed up living for a year) to a strange island village in British Columbia, where all the men spoke in the Falls Road accent and responded to me as if I were the Special Branch in oilskins. In my experience, nowhere in the world is more compellingly beautiful than the cluster of houses around the harbor into which you’ve floundered out of a gale at sea: glorious Grimsby! kindly Pwllheli! merciful Dover! A five-foot swell with a cross-sea breaking over it can make a between-the-wars council house seem a fine piece of architecture, and an open pub a greater wonder than Chartres Cathedral.
The rougher the travel, the more you value the places where you stop and the people you meet there. Most of the glory that has attached itself to legendary destinations like Samarkand, Timbuktu, and Mandalay derives, I suspect, from the dangers and miseries of getting to any of them. By the time the Renaissance traveler at last had the citadel of Samarkand in view, he was in such a state of exhaustion, wonder, and relief that he would have been no less ecstatic to find himself within sight of Potter’s Bar. It’s hard to replicate that sensation now, unless your plane has just made an emergency landing and you’ve helter-skeltered down the inflatable yellow chute, or you’ve sailed to Grimsby in a small boat.
I keep on writing you. I mean tu—the second person insistently singular. For this kind of pure, serendipitous travel is a solitary vice. Going with a companion is cozy, but you might as well be going on a bus excursion. The marital parliament has to sit in order to debate and settle the issue of lunch. You leave unexplored all the turnings that you would have taken on impulse if you were alone. The stranger doesn’t approach you in the dark bar (you’re up on the terrace, drinking cappuccino), you don’t get off at the wrong station, you don’t go netting larks with the retired lieutenant of police. Adapting Clausewitz, traveling in pairs and families is the continuation of staying at home by other means.
Most damagingly of all, in the luck and hap department, you are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions. “I was hemorrhaging with loneliness …” wrote Edward Hoagland in African Calliope. That captures a mood. For spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen. It’s when you haven’t spoken to a soul for days, when your whole being feels possessed by the rage for company, that even the withdrawn social coward feels an invigorating rush of desperate courage. Then you start risking things you wouldn’t dare at home. Steeling yourself, you make that call; you go over to the stranger’s table; you gratefully accept the dubious invitation. This is how adventures begin. This is why people find themselves waking up in strange beds and don’t go home again.
Every journey is a quest of sorts, though few travelers have more than a dim inkling of what it is they’re questing for. Most of us leave the house with, at best, a tangible absence in the heart, a void of indeterminate proportions, that we vaguely hope to fill with—what? Some person as yet unmet? Some life beyond the life we’re leading? How can I know what I’m looking for until I see what I’ve found? But that sense of incompleteness gets us on the move. As the boat slips its moorings, or the familiar city tilts suddenly away, free of the climbing plane, and you remember with a pang the unlocked kitchen window and the unpaid telephone bill, you think, It doesn’t matter, everything will be different when I come back; I will be different when I come back.
The bride is a young woman of reserved habits and is held in high esteem by all who know her. She has been a resident of Buckley for a number of years and her friends are not a few.
The groom is one of our hardware merchants and has been here for a period of eight or nine years. In that time he has built up a good business and is highly respected by all who know him. THE BANNER joins the host of friends in wishing them many years of unalloyed pleasure.
Ottie was twenty-five, Alonso forty-eight, though in the pictures of the couple one might mistake her for the older of the two, she is so ample and matronly, Alonso so spruce. (I suspect him of dyeing his hair—or, possibly, of persuading J. Foseide, Artistic Photographer, to work some darkroom magic on it.)
Ottie had babies—three sons and a daughter. Alonso went into local politics. He was on the school board and the town council. He was town treasurer and later mayor of Buckley. In 1913 he was elected to serve as a state congressman at Olympia. In the young and fluid society of western Washington, this rolling stone from the East Coast had become a fixed pillar of the community. In the portrait that I’ve propped beside the typewriter he is looking up from his papers in the state house at Olympia: his eyes swim behind his glasses; his broad mouth is set in a downturned arc; he exudes that air of sombre rectitude that might gain him election to high office. He looks too refined for the large, practical hands he keeps closed, as if they embarrassed him.
Ottie’s health broke in her fifties and she died in 1935, aged fifty-eight, but Alonso continued to run the hardware store in Buckley, which spawned an offshoot in Kirkland that was managed by their son, Mariner. When the United States entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor, Alonso—who could remember his grandfather talking about the War of Independence, and who had himself lived through the Civil War—was still in business. He was eighty-seven in 1942, when he died at his daughter’s home in Seattle on July 19. I was then five weeks old—old enough, by a whisker, to count this pioneer of the Pacific Northwest as living in my own lifetime.
The newcomer here should at least be able to feel that he or she is in the historical swim of things, for the history of the Pacific Northwest since 1792 has been a history of newcoming and newcomers, a braid of interwoven Alonso-and-Ottie stories. The stories are all around us—in the fabric of the houses we live in, in the names of places and streets; they go begging at yard sales and can be fished out of Dumpsters.
My own house (built in 1906 in the wake of the Alaskan gold rush, a creaky timber warren of rooms with sloping floors and doorways that have twisted out of true—a relic of another wave of newcomers to the region) stands just below Mount Pleasant cemetery on Queen Anne Hill. I like to walk among the tombstones there, where so many of the dead are buried thousands of miles from where they were born. Carl Ewald, born near Marienwerder, Prussia, June 12, 1817, died in Seattle, June 27, 1909. Mary M. Ziebarth, geb. Kneable … Caroline Jacobs, born in Norway, died at Seattle, Washington … Isabella Blair Ormston, native of East Lothian, Haddington-Shire, Scotland … William Dickson, native of Belfast, Ireland … Anna Lloyd Tinkham, born May 28, 1849, Wales, England [sic], died Feb 9, 1908, Seattle, Wash. One inscription pleases me particularly: Sylvester S. Bower, born Newfield, N.Y., April 19, 1854, came to Wash. 1889, died July 12, 1936. That the date of his arrival in the Pacific Northwest should be commemorated as one of the three salient facts of Mr. Bower’s life seems exactly right. That’s how it feels to me, and how I want it on my own tombstone, please: … came to Wash. 1990 …
You can’t look out of the window here without seeing that you are in an uprooted and homesick land. Seattle’s domestic architecture pines for a world elsewhere. The old German Club on 9th Avenue, with its tall and narrow second-floor windows, harks back to some tree-planted strasse in nineteenth-century Hamburg or Cologne; the well-to-do English who settled around St. Mark’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill had their own mullioned and half-timbered enclave of replica manor houses, their details copied from Chamberlain’s Tudor Homes of England, the great architectural sourcebook of American mock Tudor. Close by the English quarter, a graystone Russian dacha glooms over a lordly view of Interstate 5 and Lake Union. Down in the International District, the glum brick buildings with balconied shrines set high over the street are homesick for Shanghai, while the “classical” terra-cotta friezes of downtown, with their gargoyles and cartouches and anthemions, are homesick for history itself—anybody’s history, and the older and grander the better. Stand near the corner of 3rd Avenue and Madison, and look up at the wild and dizzy conflation of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, English Gothic, Art Deco Egyptian, French Empire, Italian Renaissance, all handsomely molded in Green River mud. Out in the countryside, one finds a Bavarian mountain town, a Norwegian fishing village, and, in the Skagit valley to the west of Mount Vernon, an entire landscape that even a Dutchman (with a slight case of astigmatism) might plausibly mistake for the flat farms and poplar-fringed villages of Friesland.
What is true of the architecture and the landscape is even truer of people’s domestic interiors here. When I first visited Seattle, to research a chapter of a book, I got used to the oddity of parking my car outside a ranch-style bungalow in a street of more or less identical ranch-style bungalows, then, once through the door, taking off my shoes and entering the cross-legged-on-the-floor life of an immigrant Korean family, with its rugs and carved chests. Outside lay Greenwood, or Ballard, or Phinney Ridge: inside, we were halfway back, at least, to Seoul or Inchon. When I came to live here, I found that half the houses I visited in Seattle were like this—nostalgic reconstructions of another time, another place. A ground-floor apartment turned out to be a Greenwich Village loft, the plaster on the walls hacked off to expose bare brick, the ceiling strung with decorative, nonfunctional plumbing. I’m writing this with a mild hangover, incurred at a party last night in the Madrona district: the American owners of the house were Anglophile enthusiasts of Early Music, and stepping through their front door one entered a sort of legendary Merrie England of shawms and sackbuts and psalteries, of morris men and maypoles. The pictures on their walls were watercolors of the great Elizabethan piles, like Moreton and Hardwick halls; the books on their shelves had the sort of bindings that you rarely see outside the set on which Alistair Cooke used to introduce Masterpiece Theatre; the books themselves were described to me by an awed friend who had checked out the library in the downstairs bathroom as “works of medieval feminism.” I like to think that the next-door neighbors were passionate Arabists whose living room was a faithful reconstruction of a merchant’s diwan in a house deep in the Aleppo souk; or maybe tribal-Africa buffs, with a houseful of spears, blankets, and goatskin drums.
For Seattle tends to slop about in time and space. In New York, you’re rarely in doubt that this is New York and the time is the present, but there’s less here-and-now in Seattle than in any city I’ve ever known. Its woody plots and inward-looking houses, screened from their neighbors by thick tangles of greenery, allow people to live in private bubble worlds of their own construction. My neighbor’s Seattle isn’t mine—or yours. There are days when the city seems to me to be dangerously like an old-fashioned lunatic asylum: here’s the lady who believes herself to be Anastasia Romanov; and there’s Napoleon; and this gentleman is Alexander the Great; and here’s a teapot … Seattle does not insist—as both bigger cities and smaller towns do—on its own overbearing reality. It is unusually indulgent to those of its citizens who prefer to live in dreams and memories. If you want to bury yourself in a cottage in the trees, pretending that you’re living inside a nineteenth-century French novel, or that you’re back home in another decade and another country, Seattle will do astonishingly little to disturb your illusion.
My Seattle is a city of émigrés and migrants, and inevitably I see deracination as part of the basic fabric of the place. But I’ve planted a much deeper root here. My companion of the first para of this piece became my wife, and we have a child, now a year old. My American daughter—a Washington Native, as they say on the bumper stickers.
Even now, I see our two cities diverging.
For Julia, the word “tree” already means the shaggy cypress and the drooping fir, whose inky green will never convey to her the alien and depressive associations that they have for me. To my English eye, the Douglas fir has a sort of grim splendor, but it seems to me a congenitally unhappy vegetable. To Julia’s Pacific Northwestern eye, it’s the most homely tree she knows; it’s where the squirrels live and where the little pine siskins fuss and flutter.
So, too, the word “water” is coming to mean the deep and dusty stuff of Puget Sound, on which she has already been afloat. To me this water, which drops to more than a hundred fathoms just a few yards out from the shore, is uncannily, shiveringly deep, and queer things live in its ice-cold profundity, like Architeuthis, the giant squid, and the brainy, jet-propelled Octopus dofleini. I grew up in a country where the wild things were rabbits and foxes; she is coming into possession of a world where killer whales live in the watery suburbs of her native city, where real bears raid trash cans on the outskirts of Everett and mountain lions are sometimes spotted in Gig Harbor. God knows what she’ll make of the wild, exciting world of Beatrix Potter’s Lake District animals, Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher.
Growing up in the mock-antique, mock-heroic architecture of Seattle, Julia won’t be amused by its comedy or touched by its pathos, as I am: it’ll just be old to her—as real Tudor and Jacobean architecture is old to me—and dull, as merely old things always are. When she gets to see Florence and tires of the long, hot hike around the Uffizi and the Bargello, she may be fleetingly reminded of Seattle; as when she visits her English grandparents in Leicestershire, she may notice some battered, down-at-heel versions of buildings that are in a fine state of upkeep back home.
As children of migrants to the West must do, she’ll grow up with a sense of distances unlike anything that either her New Yorker mother or I knew as children. Her maternal grandfather lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her English grandparents in Market Harborough, and Julia has been born into a house where the phrases “back east” and “in England” are constant, almost daily reference points—where two shadowy worlds-elsewhere hover in the middle distance behind the world she lives in.
This is such a standard feature of West Coast life that I bet Julia will share it with half the children at her school. I’ve heard people born in this region talk of it as “out here,” as if to be a westerner was to be in some sense, however faint and ancestral, in exile from the warm center of the world. I hope my daughter doesn’t grow up to speak of her birthplace as “out here,” and doubt that she will: if the present tilt of the world economy continues, if there’s even a grain of truth in all the boosterish talk about the Pacific Century, then Seattle will be, and perhaps already is, a good deal closer to the center of things than either New York or London.
This is her city in a way that it can never quite be mine; and as newcomers must take their cues from the natives, I now have to learn about Seattle from Julia. I’m making a beginning. I’m relearning the meaning of the word “tree,” and a whole enormous syllabus looms ahead. But I am—in my daughter’s American English—a quick study. I’ll get to figure it out.
Edge Walking on the Western Rim, Sasquatch Books, 1994
Why Travel?
A CURSE OF TRAVELING is that one is so often made to supply reasons for doing it. STATE PURPOSE OF VISIT, demands the visa form. “Pleasure” sounds downright suspicious—I imagine the “blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, framing the word, letter by letter, on his application to enter the United States. Better to come up with a phrase that conveys some wispy and innocuous thread of intention, like Robert Byron’s pretext for wandering in Persia on the trip that became The Road to Oxiana, “to look for coloured architecture,” or Alexander Frater’s happy excuse for going to India, because he liked rain.
If you admit the real reason, you’re liable to attract the attention of men in white coats, or the police. For travel is a kind of delinquency, more often rooted in the compulsion to escape the boredom and responsibilities of home than it is in any very serious desire to scale the Great Pyramid of Cheops or walk the length of the Great Wall of China. It’s kinder to say, “I’m going to Surabaya,” than just to say, “I’m going”—but as you wrestle your bags through the front door and into the street, it’s the leaving-behind, the going for the going’s sake, that quickens the blood and makes the street itself look suddenly different, full of promise even on this bleak morning. Yesterday it was a dead end, today it’s the beginning of the road to who-knows-where. Oh, Surabaya, maybe; and maybe not.
The street looks different, and so does the person standing on it. Yesterday’s creature of duty and habit is today’s free spirit, a traveler, open to adventure as the dictionary defines it, That which happens without design; chance, hap, luck. Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservations, and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things and to encounter whatever chances the journey may throw up. It’s when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the prebooked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name you’ve never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest.
Nowadays you need to work quite hard to open your life to the workings of hap and luck. Nothing short of a terrorist hijacking is likely to deflect the modern traveler from his inexorable path as he jets from one major city to another, from Trust House Forte to Holiday Inn, with CNN talking him to sleep from one end of our shrunken-orange world to the other. You have to find some other way of going.
I like to travel as much as I possibly can in a boat small enough to manage on my own, and gratifyingly rarely do I land up where I’d meant to go. The wind gets up nastily—or dies altogether—in otherwise perfect weather; a gale warning is broadcast over the radio; I misread the tide tables and on the harbor approach find the entrance to be a scarifying cauldron of boiling milk; idly gazing at the chart, I notice a deep cleft in the woods, well protected by a sheltering headland; a jellyfish blocks the water intake, and the engine overheats; the summer haze suddenly thickens into fog so dense that a swimming seagull is lost to view in it at thirty feet … and so on, ad inf. It’s not at all like flying British Airways 087. It makes getting from, say, Ipswich to Newcastle (over a period of a week, in fair weather) at least as interesting and eventful as riding the turnpike in the age of the highwaymen, and every so often it reminds one of the roots of travel, buried deep in travail and trepalium, the triple-staked torture of the Inquisition.
Bad weather and mishaps have led me to all sorts of curious places, from Port St. Mary on the Isle of Man (where I landed up living for a year) to a strange island village in British Columbia, where all the men spoke in the Falls Road accent and responded to me as if I were the Special Branch in oilskins. In my experience, nowhere in the world is more compellingly beautiful than the cluster of houses around the harbor into which you’ve floundered out of a gale at sea: glorious Grimsby! kindly Pwllheli! merciful Dover! A five-foot swell with a cross-sea breaking over it can make a between-the-wars council house seem a fine piece of architecture, and an open pub a greater wonder than Chartres Cathedral.
The rougher the travel, the more you value the places where you stop and the people you meet there. Most of the glory that has attached itself to legendary destinations like Samarkand, Timbuktu, and Mandalay derives, I suspect, from the dangers and miseries of getting to any of them. By the time the Renaissance traveler at last had the citadel of Samarkand in view, he was in such a state of exhaustion, wonder, and relief that he would have been no less ecstatic to find himself within sight of Potter’s Bar. It’s hard to replicate that sensation now, unless your plane has just made an emergency landing and you’ve helter-skeltered down the inflatable yellow chute, or you’ve sailed to Grimsby in a small boat.
I keep on writing you. I mean tu—the second person insistently singular. For this kind of pure, serendipitous travel is a solitary vice. Going with a companion is cozy, but you might as well be going on a bus excursion. The marital parliament has to sit in order to debate and settle the issue of lunch. You leave unexplored all the turnings that you would have taken on impulse if you were alone. The stranger doesn’t approach you in the dark bar (you’re up on the terrace, drinking cappuccino), you don’t get off at the wrong station, you don’t go netting larks with the retired lieutenant of police. Adapting Clausewitz, traveling in pairs and families is the continuation of staying at home by other means.
Most damagingly of all, in the luck and hap department, you are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions. “I was hemorrhaging with loneliness …” wrote Edward Hoagland in African Calliope. That captures a mood. For spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen. It’s when you haven’t spoken to a soul for days, when your whole being feels possessed by the rage for company, that even the withdrawn social coward feels an invigorating rush of desperate courage. Then you start risking things you wouldn’t dare at home. Steeling yourself, you make that call; you go over to the stranger’s table; you gratefully accept the dubious invitation. This is how adventures begin. This is why people find themselves waking up in strange beds and don’t go home again.
Every journey is a quest of sorts, though few travelers have more than a dim inkling of what it is they’re questing for. Most of us leave the house with, at best, a tangible absence in the heart, a void of indeterminate proportions, that we vaguely hope to fill with—what? Some person as yet unmet? Some life beyond the life we’re leading? How can I know what I’m looking for until I see what I’ve found? But that sense of incompleteness gets us on the move. As the boat slips its moorings, or the familiar city tilts suddenly away, free of the climbing plane, and you remember with a pang the unlocked kitchen window and the unpaid telephone bill, you think, It doesn’t matter, everything will be different when I come back; I will be different when I come back.
