We were sitting on a bench in a gravel square in a modest neighborhood south of the Thames. It was evening, we had pints of ale from the pub in the far corner of the square and the neighbors were playing boules – bocce without a court. And I was euphoric. The question is, why then?
To answer it, no, to even ask it, I must first confess that traveling makes me anxious. I would never have admitted this when I was younger. One wants to cultivate a self-image as an adventurer, a person who has seen the world. And indeed, I have a traveler’s resume: hitchhiked across the country when I was in college, backpacked across Europe after college, learned my way around Paris, had a love affair in Greece, snorkeled in the Andaman Sea, lived among the Woo people in Central Pennsylvania, etc. Adventures to remember, stories to tell.
I believe in travel in the sense that I believe it freshens our brains to change the visual field, breathe different air, experience other ways of fulfilling human needs. I like few things better than walking down a street or a path I have never been down before and just looking, looking, looking at what is there.
But there is much that I don’t like about travel. The planning, first of all. The packing. The whole airport and flying experience, of course. And then, the lack of cultural competence: staring at the coins in my hand and not knowing the pounds from the pence, not knowing when to tip or how much to tip, not knowing how to get around.
Worst of all, the insistent little anxiety voice gets a little bit louder, a little more insistent than it is when I’m home, where the recitation of things to worry about is so familiar it becomes like the buzz of fluorescent light. Abroad, the anxiety voice asks me over and over if I have my passport and my money. It wants to keep checking the map to make sure we’re not missing our stop. It frets that the hotel will not have a record of our reservation or that our credit card will be denied. It worries that I will commit some faux pas that will expose me as that most ridiculous of all creatures, the tourist.
It’s jarring to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Of course it’s jarring. Bit by bit, though, we make our way and in so doing, rediscover the child’s pleasure in performing adult tasks: the pleasure of exchanging money for goods or services, of getting where we’re trying to go. It’s amazing how satisfying it can be to accomplish a simple errand in a foreign land, even if the land is England, where they speak our language (minus the Rs, that is: Ull’s Caught, Mahble Auch).
Such minor triumphs can turn down the volume on the anxiety voice to home-turf levels, but they don’t induce the euphoria that I experienced among the lawn bowlers in Cleaver Square, or while drinking my morning coffee in my friend’s back garden, or while walking along the rivers and canals in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
So what does? What did? A lot of it, I realize again and again, has to do with the way I respond, physiologically, to the temperature of the air and the quality of the light. My worst moment in London came when we got off the boat from Greenwich at Westminster Pier and joined the throng of ice cream-eating, photo-snapping gawkers on the Westminster Bridge. What a bunch of idlers we are, I thought. What a bunch of sheep. Surely we all have better things to do than this.
The real problem: It was the hottest part of an unusually hot day. I was hot. And therefore, grumpy.
The lovely moments came in the morning and the evening when it was cool and the light softened and the buildings glowed. At those moments I was simply happy to be where I was. In short, I relaxed. The anxiety voice went quiet.
In London we went to the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum and Trafalgar Square, as all tourists must, but seeing the monuments and the great art in the great museums is never the best part of a trip for me. I like, above all, the feeling of having slipped inside the local culture, however briefly.
That’s how I felt with my pint of ale on Cleaver Square, among the bowlers. This is not a place you’ll find in the guidebooks. Everyone there, I had the sense, either lived there or was visiting someone who lived there, as I was. This was a gathering of neighbors and I felt, fleetingly, like I was one of them.
Maybe we leave home in search of other homes.
