7 - travelogues
or: wherever you go, there you are
This week, I have been listening to the eat pray love audiobook and
thinking about where I’ve been. And lemons.
outside of lucerne. june 2014.
We’re staying in a hostel room, four of us girls. The beds look Ikea-made, light wood and straight lines fastened together not with nails but with perfectly-shaped planks. The bedsheets are stark white. Out the window, we see mountains beyond mountains. Below, we know there is a high school soccer football field, we saw it on our walk earlier. I ask Amanda if she’ll walk back there with me in this evening downtime, and all the girls agree. On the walk, I notice there’s a trickling stream running down the length of the village sidewalk, bubbling and blue. I walk beside it quietly, letting the girls go on ahead. I pull out my phone to text Luca and tell him about it. (It’s 2014, and texting someone in another country feels like magic.)
When we reach the field, there are some boys already playing, both Swiss and Canadian. We take to the bleachers and I think it’s Leah I sit beside. In my bag, I find a little pack of lemon juice I swiped at breakfast in France. When the first lightning starts crackling up in the black sky over the mountains, I open it and drink. It is bitter - what else would it be? - and almost sweet. It tastes like lightning, I think. We all run off together back to the hostel as the first rain falls.
normandy. may 2015.
In the pocket of my Forever21 dress, I have a scratched-up map of the Canadian military cemetery, my grandfather’s grave circled in red. It’s hard, though, to orient myself in the moment: I look out upon endless rows and rows of identical tombstones, most bearing death dates of 1944. My grandfather doesn’t actually have a grave. He didn’t die here, in France, but he wanted to be buried here and the government’s compromise was that his ashes would be deposited between the graves of two twenty-somethings who really did die in 1944. So what I’m looking for, actually, is an unmarked bush of thorns.
I find it, I lay the little Canadian dog tag on it. I introduce myself to my grandfather, a virtual stranger to me. The placement of the cemetery is so odd, I think. It’s really just a lot in the middle of fertile farmland. There is no silence, only tractors. The small, dark tree cover on either side of the lot reminds me of the oil painting in our living room. (Later, I ask my mum if that was, indeed, what she had painted. She said no, that her scene was lifted from a trip she’d taken to San Francisco. Hm.)
Driving home to Paris, my aunt and cousins spot the church where his funeral was held in 1985. The sign on the door says it’s closed, but Bénédicte knocks anyway and explains to the priest how far I’ve come to see it. He lets us in, we take our photos, I expect to feel a surge of emotion from my grandfather but all I feel is awe at standing in a 12th-century church. I’ve never been anywhere so ancient in my life.
somewhere between vancouver island and the mainland. october 2021.
It has been a hard year. The dark cloud looms very angrily on the horizon wherever I go and I guess it has followed me here to the edge of the country. Well, it’s ok, I think, because at least it has found a natural home in the cold, wet gloom of the Pacific Northwest. Better it hang out with me here than on a beautiful spring day in Montréal.
Everyday, I wake up at 5 and walk as much of the sea wall as I can. I take the 84 to Kitsilano and buy very expensive coffee. Kira is here, halfway through a master’s at UBC. Her boyfriend works at a fancy liquor store, one of those beautifully unlicensed ones you can only find out west. Together, Kira and I buy a wheel of cheese and a truly terrible baguette and we walk down to Kits beach. It’s very cold, but we grew up on far colder weather so we talk and eat in the shadow of the green sea and blue sky.
I take the ferry to Victoria the next day. I resolve to spend the entire journey outside sitting on the life raft bins. The wet wind and salty spray are absolutely freezing, I’m wearing all my sweaters at once and sipping hot tea but I will not miss a moment of this. Nature is so foreign to me where I live. It is always tamed and beaten and cut down, every trace of green a nuisance to be eradicated. Here, the world exists purely in shades of green. It is so perfect. I listen to Bob Dylan and something feels light and airy in me for the first time in months.
greece. december 2023.
At Delphi, the angry voice in my head is stunned into silence. It has followed me to Athens - sure, why not - but I suppose I left it on the side of the highway somewhere between the city and here. Delphi is an ancient sanctuary built into the side of a sacred mountain, and it pours down the hill towards the deep purple valley below. This late in the year there are no other tourists, just our little group of four. We all go our separate ways and cease to exist, each discovering Delphi for ourselves. I hate crowds and I hate noise, and the presence of either is enough to ruin anything for me. But I am alone, here, and the sun has broken through the rain clouds. It is so warm on my face and I can’t even bring myself to think about the snow back home. What is snow? How could there be anything but warmth in the world?
At Mycenae, I wonder if God exists. He must, I think, or something must. Someone had to be listening to my prayers in order to send me here. Mycenae is a palatial complex, much older than Delphi, and now sits in crumbling cyclopean ruins amid lush green fields and hills rolling out like snakes into the long horizon. Everywhere, there are puppies yapping and running between giant blocks of pale stone. Again, I am very nearly alone. Our small group heads up the hill, to the main palace, but I turn and head down to the tombs. Oh the tombs!! I walk a path of crushed ancient ceramic, bright orange and stark black. My feet crunch and crumble the shards and absently, I wonder how something so precious back home could be so worthless here.
Tholos tombs, they’re called. Or beehives, also accurate. They’re rooms shaped like circles, built deep into the hill. As I approach the entrance, the earth rises around me on both sides, ushering me deeper and deeper into the mountain, into some unnameable sacred space. Once inside, I squint away the darkness and look up: a stone dome, cylindrical, so high I can’t even estimate. I shift my stance and the crunch of the gravel is deafening, so sudden, in all directions. My obligatory “Hello!” is spoken quietly, but the reply rings loud enough to make my teeth hurt:
“HELLO!”
sorrento. may 2024.
The warmth is unending, here in the part of the world where the sun is no stranger. I spent yesterday on a small boat at sea, engulfed on three sides by the towering limestone cliffs of Capri. Every colour bounces back as hyperreal: a blazing turquoise sky reflecting the electric marine of the sea, the neon dots of faraway beach umbrellas, the lush, wild green of the clifftops. The boat skips along, hopping and slicing through waves and currents. We catch the white spray every now and then, the salt coating our lips and hands.
Today, I woke up and walked to Sorrento, the next town over. I sunbathed and swam in the Mediterranean, popping up out of the water every now and then to locate Vesuvius, make sure it hadn’t erupted while I was swimming through schools of anchovy. I brought a book to read but never touched it, too content and quiet in my own mind. The stillness was a delicacy, inexplicable. After bathing in sun and salt, I found a pizzeria. A football match was on but the teams were foreign to me. I ate one pizza over the course of nearly two hours and finished with a glass of wine. At three in the afternoon.
Shopping, I find a small ceramics studio. I buy a little tile, an enamel painting of the Virgin Mary in electric blue. The owner wraps it in bubbles with care, and asks me where I’m from. “Canada”, I say. “Ah!” he shouts. “Lake Louise?” He pulls out his wallet, unfurls a grainy photo of the lake, gestures at it again. “Mi dispiace, non sono di Lake Louise.”
Now, I’m taking the looong way back to my small town where I’ll eat dinner, pick an orange, finish my bottle of prosecco, and fall asleep. I stop for a shaved ice in a cafe - “Avete il gelato al limone?” “Sicuroooo!” - and I am drinking it down like water. (It’s mostly water. Right?). I’ve sampled so much limoncello I find everything funny and beautiful. One of my favourite musicians has released a song today and I listen to it on a loop as I walk by the sea. Even now, the song tastes like lemons and sunshine.
paris. may 2015.
I am seventeen and my French isn’t very good, but it’s ok because my aunt/cousin/? is originally from Detroit and speaks American English with me as we walk through the Musée D’Orsay. She is a painter, mainly watercolour, and she illustrates books for children. She married my uncle/cousin/? in the 1980s and moved her life here to France. She is so elegant, Jeanne - her name is Jeanne - in a way that only French women are, small, with straight brown hair and round eyeglasses. She knows everything about the city, about the museum, about history, about art - about everything, it seems. Jeanne buys me a chocolatine pain au chocolat and sits with me on the steps of the river just outside the museum.
Her birth name really is Jeanne, almost like her American parents were willing her French persona into being. How much power does a name have? Emma means universal. Am I universal? What would that even mean?
I feel something odd here, for the first time in my life. I feel as though I might not really be a girl from Kirkland, introverted and tacky and precocious as I am. No, sitting here, I think I might be like her, like all these other women. I just don’t seem it, or look like it. But maybe I will grow into something, too.
