PANDEMIC TOURISM

The space where there is no space

I just had a moment where my hometown looked like Scotland to me. This is either a sign that I’m out of my mind or I’m getting around to being OK in the world.

This strange, wonderful chunk of minutes occurred in my mind’s eye as a high crane shot in a film. I felt that I had a view from above the lake on which my hometown sits, and I was able to take this experience in at the same time as I was on the ground in the scene, corralling my daughter’s body down the pier like a wall bumping a Roomba towards its work.

From my actual vantage point on the pier, occasionally turning back towards the buildings along the water, I saw almost snug-looking boxes with careful white trim, one on top of the other in colors and textures that had given variety the old college try. From the water, everything about the place looked compact and harmless, engaging like a chocolate sampler box.

In short, I became a tourist.

I grew up scorning tourists. Their car traffic made downtown impassable, they crossed the road like possums, and they made for long lines at places like Doug’s Fish Fry, where even as a child I felt proprietary, harboring a perhaps confused sense of “the good old days” I’d never personally experienced.

But tourism is at least in part about enjoying the present moment. Whereas once I’d have derided myself for the sidewalk-blocking amble that the appreciative inflict on others who have places to be, I’m currently thrilled that I managed to experience the trundling state of the tourist, even if just for a few moments. The freedom of that feeling—where noticing and enjoying are the primary means and goals—was remarkable.

Another vital part of tourism is the freedom from any particular identity.

I had a rough go of it in junior high and high school. The impressions of myself I developed during that time were lasting and insidious. They revolved around the conviction that I wasn’t good enough. Unfortunately, this delusion never disclosed to me why or how I was offensively lacking, asserting only that I was generally and essentially defective, which made the problem unfixable. Since the condition of cripplingly low self-esteem is a lot like a virus, my inability to locate and eradicate its source pleased it quite well, and it gained strength over time. And because I was painfully high-functioning, even apparently lucidly extroverted, there was no real way for anyone to notice this state of affairs or aid me.

For decades, even the architecture of my town (which is actually quite pretty) called to mind only this terrible sense of failure, and with it the desire to get out. This of course had nothing to do with the architecture itself, but then, one time when I was seven and had the stomach flu, I tried eating Crispy Critters cereal, and for years after that, if I even saw a box of the stuff I got queasy. Associations between unrelated things can be vexing.

Or, they can be a gift.

I once had a viola teacher who said, “let your right had teach your left hand what to do.” This was an interesting idea, and a crazy one because playing a stringed instrument is a strongly asymmetrical activity—the right and left hands are performing extremely disparate actions. (That’s why it’s best to begin learning the art while you’re too young for despair.) But that very asymmetry made the teacher’s suggestion an especially useful one, because it proposed to me that you can use an activity you know and feel comfortable with as a model for a separate but related one that troubles you.

My bow hand was always pretty good—flexible, effective, and at times even elegant; my left hand, whose sorry task it was to TRY to learn to move quickly and easily across the fingerboard, wanted to grip, to tighten, to batten down the hatches. It was preemptively ashamed of its poor performance, and sought to take refuge in strength and fixity, when flexibility and freedom was what it needed. There was no way for my poor, laborious left hand to actually imitate the physical motion of my fluid, unencumbered right hand, since their tasks were so different. But I could pause when I was struggling and call to mind the sense of ease I felt in my right hand, which did help my left to let go, if only a little.

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Scotland is one of my favorite places on earth. To be specific, the small, working-class, whisky-distilling town of Oban (OH-bin) on the west coast is, for reasons both known and unknown to me, one of the places I think of and wish to return to most frequently. I have been there twice, once with my husband and once with my husband and parents, both times in October. The weather was mostly cool, rainy, and windy, and we spent a lot of time being wet and cold. I saw my first puffins and oystercatchers in the wild there, and I imprinted on the clouds and land, land and clouds: gray and gold, brass and bruise. I can’t seem to get enough of it.

That’s the portal that opened for me, on the pier, in my stupid little / lovely little hometown: the weather. A sudden movement of clouds and wind over the lake an otherwise hot and sunny day called up a shift in my perspective. My left hand—Skaneateles, NY, where I quease in the grip of ancient perceived inadequacy—observed the ease of my right hand—traveling freely through Scotland, where I am flooded with delight and gawk at all beauty, unabashed. In the spaciousness of this remove from habitual understanding, my town was… pretty, bustling, charming. Certainly worth a morning’s walk.

What with a global pandemic and me having become a mother of twins, travel opportunities have been in short supply lately. Maybe these constraints are what I have to thank for turning me into a tourist of the heart. After all, one of the greatest generative tools I ever used as a teacher of creative writing was constraint: as soon as I disallowed certain things or placed limits on the students, however arbitrarily (for example “write no more than five words per line,” or “you may not use punctuation,” or “every letter of the alphabet must appear in this paragraph” etc.) student writing often went from predictable and heavy to agile and inventive. The blockages they encountered, the grips I squeezed them in, provided reasons to move in new ways, and find what might not otherwise have been found.

When the stage or the scale on which we’d prefer for things to play out isn’t available, sometimes there’s a practice room, or microcosm, we can enter. Maybe my everyday life is practice for experiencing the glory of Scotland; maybe foreign grandeur is practice for seeing and being able to value the life I have at home. In both cases, I’m practicing for a kind of opening.

I’m almost forty, and the weather’s acting up. I can’t help but notice that my children love the wind.

Isle of Mull, Scotland. Photo credit: Peggy Manring