Travelers, Tourists, and the Friends We Make Along the Way
Also
, ayahuasca, Anthony Bourdain and Paul Theroux, Portland, roses, books
0n the long plane ride home from Elizabeth’s daughter’s wedding in Portland, Oregon, I read “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” Sarah Miller’s excellent essay about her trip to a shaman’s compound in Peru in hopes that ayahuasca would help her overcome climate despair. I was supposed to be reading the book I was reviewing, but first I had to sleep for two hours because spending 48 hours dangling between Eastern and Pacific time is exhausting. Then I had to read something that was not the book I was reviewing, because before I do anything I’m supposed to do, I have to do something I don’t have to do. That’s a fancy way of describing procrastination.
Sarah Miller writes,
My boss was in Peru at the same time, eating and sightseeing. I do not want to draw a moral distinction between us. Anthony Bourdain, Paul Theroux, and others have made much of the difference between the tourist and the traveler. But from what I have observed, an American may be many things to himself, but to everyone else, he will never be anything but an American.
She doesn’t want to draw the moral distinction, but she nevertheless evokes it - and its appeal - even as she overwrites both tourist and traveler with a universal American, even as she builds the tiniest barrier between herself and that universal American by making him male like Bourdain and Theroux.
If you spend 48 hours dangling between time zones, are you a tourist or a traveler?
If you go to a place you’ve never been for a wedding, are you a tourist or a traveler?
If you go to Peru to do ayahuasca, are you a tourist or a traveler?
In Portland, I took a photo of Ann in front of a wall of roses clearly designed for Instagram photos. She posed as her daughter - an Instagram pro like all our daughters - and we laughed at ourselves. A sullenly earnest dad with a trailing small boy was walking by. He offered to take a picture of the two of us in front of the rose wall, his disdain seeping through the seemingly kind offer. “Thanks, but we are just being silly,” I said. I’m not sure he believed me.
He walked into Voodoo Doughnut three minutes after we did. Everything takes longer with a trailing small boy.
If you are buying doughnuts at 7 in the morning in Portland, are you a tourist or a traveler or a dad who needs an early morning activity with a small boy or a person who is hungry and knows that Voodoo Doughnuts opens at 6 a.m.? Most of all, does it make any difference?
As I flew into Portland, I realized I knew nothing about it. There were mountains in the near distance and I wondered if one was Mount St. Helens, but I wasn’t sure if Mount St. Helens was in Portland or Seattle - or if you could see it when you flew in to wherever it was. I realized that in my heart I felt Portland and Seattle were the same thing, even though I knew Seattle was Microsoft and Amazon and The Boys in the Boat and where my aunt grew up, and Portland was great environmental zoning that turned out to be terrible affordable housing zoning.
We were essence of Portland tourist in our short time in Portland. We kept saying “this is so Portland,” despite knowing so little about Portland. We walked across Portland bridges. We bought books at Powell’s, and it is true that Powell’s is the best bookstore in the world. We walked by coffee shops and breweries and beer gardens and exclaimed at how much coffee and beer there was in Portland. We thought we saw Fred Armisen at a restaurant - seriously, he either was Fred Armisen or he gets nonstop side eye from people who think he is Fred Armisen. Only after we thought we saw Fred Armisen did I remember that Portland is Portlandia.
We did not go to the Rose Festival, but we did go to the Rose Garden and the Japanese Garden. There were definitely many tourists in the gardens and there were definitely also many Portlandians.
If you can’t tell the difference between the tourists and the locals, are you a tourist or a traveler?
At the shaman’s compound in Peru, Miller hated a bunch of the people she met, liked a few, and found a soulmate, Denise. Except Denise worked for a defense contractor and didn’t see anything wrong with that which made things complicated, but they were still soulmates, at least while they were still at the compound.
We made our first new friends in Portland the night before the wedding, on the sidewalk outside the bar whose hubbub we all had fled. They were Elizabeth’s Portland mom posse, and they met at temple. I also have a mom posse, most of whom I met at temple, but my family calls us the moms not the mom posse. We were so excited when the mom posse told us how much they liked us. We told them we liked them so much too. At the wedding, we took over our own little corner of the dance floor.
I made another new friend at the wedding and now we are best friends and planning to hike in Scotland in 2027. She told me a secret, and I haven’t told it to anyone. We talked about how old our children have become and how correspondingly old we have become, and I told her my oldest friend died last spring when we were 59, and our birthdays were three days apart, so I turned 60 and she didn’t, which I had been dreading but then I realized I was glad to be 60 rather than dead.1 When my new best friend put her number in my phone, she wrote “great earrings” after her name because the first thing I said to her was “those are great earrings.” When I put my number in her phone, I wrote “lost her mother’s group” after my name because she is still good friends with three women (including Elizabeth) from the mother’s group she was in when her first baby was born, but I moved 2500 miles away when my first baby was 14 months old and sadly lost touch with my mother’s group.
If you’re a Boston temple mom hanging out with Portland temple moms in Portland, are you a tourist or a traveler?
If you lovingly roll your eyes at Portland but know that if you’d landed in Portland round about the 90s you would now be a Portland mom, are you a tourist or a traveler?
If you find your soulmate or your new best friend, are you a tourist or a traveler?
I don’t call myself a tourist when I’m traveling for work. I don’t call myself a tourist when I go to New York, where I went first as a baby and have since been at least 200 times. I don’t call myself a tourist when I visit my grown children.
I religiously call myself a tourist when I’m going to other people’s places for no reason except that I want to, because the tourist/traveler distinction is tired to the point of cliché.
Tourists are sheep and lemmings. They follow a guidebook, Instagram influencer, or tour guide on well-trodden trails to the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment. They eat in restaurants with English menus, complain about bathrooms, and wield selfie sticks with abandon.
Travelers are brave, bold, and off the beaten trail. They scorn the tourist traps, seek out the hidden and unknown, learn the language (or at least a few words), and eat where they see lots of locals. They emphasize their respect for the places they go, but I wonder how the people who live in those places feel about that.
Aren’t tourists and travelers motivated by the same desire to go to other people’s places for no reason except that they want to?
Don’t the self-described and self-righteous travelers pave the way for the disdained and destructive tourists?
Anthony Bourdain said more people should go to Colombia. Now everyone goes to Colombia. Except there were always people in Colombia.
Wasn’t the tourist/traveler distinction created by (mostly) white (mostly) men - aka Bourdain, Theroux, et al, but also a whole bunch of colonialist and Romantic self-styled renegades in the centuries before them? Didn’t they create the distinction to justify their desires to get out of Dodge and go somewhere different, somewhere exciting, somewhere far from the constraints of home and civilization, those eternally feminizing forces?
Today, with the world fully explored and accessible by cell phone, doesn’t that distinction serve mainly the traveler’s determination to distinguish their desires from the desires of the masses?
But don’t we all just want to see new places, have new experiences, and maybe make some new friends, whether they end up being friends for an evening, a month, or a lifetime?
I would say yes, but I’m just a self-righteous tourist.
The Way We Live Now
I told you Elon Musk would go down.
Because we still deserve nice things…
Reading outside.
Of course the weather has to be good. And it’s preferable to have a comfortable place to sit - though perching on a wall next to the bus stop can serve in a pinch. I like a real book myself, to forestall distraction and glare, but I’m just as agnostic about how people read as I am ecumenical about what they read. Some good places include a porch, a deck, a patio, a beach, a riverbank, a picnic, a cafe, the bleachers at a boring sports event, walking down the street (so long as you’re good at making sure you don’t bump into anyone, which you probably are if you text while you walk down the street, though you’re probably not as good as you think), and of course a bus stop. I’m sure you can think of more. Anyway, it’s a good season for reading outside. Highly recommended.
I tried so hard not to footnote this post. I also had no intention of writing about my dead friends. But then I realized that the Sarah Miller who wrote “Pirates of the Ayahuasca” is the same Sarah Miller who wrote “No Shit, I’d Kill a Man for Ya” (unfortunately now paywalled), which is about her friendship with my high school friend Joshua Clover, who died several weeks ago. I was barely in touch with Joshua for the last couple of decades, and when he died I desperately googled for days, trying to understand how he could be dead. This led me to Sarah Miller, who was with him the day before he died and helped me understand what happened a little better and also get another glimpse of his life in the ensuing decades. One of the things about stalking Joshua’s death across the internet was seeing what a cherished and good friend he was. Maybe I should rename this newsletter Footnotes and (Dead) Friends, as they seem to be the consistent threads.
I just said to David yesterday -- we can't go in there (a restaurant) or do that (?) because it's too touristy and he rightly said but we are tourists. (We were in Salida or Taos) and of course we were (tourists.) And we drove our teenage kids crazy one evening in Rome when we (probably I) refused to eat at a restaurant with flags which meant we were searching for hours and everyone was getting really hungry. And of course it was another effort to deny being tourists when we clearly were! And now that's a meme in our family when we are talking about a restaurant-- does it have flags?
And great piece of course!
I will always be a tourist in New York, Boston, and DC, but I don’t feel like one in San Francisco (though I am also clearly not a local). Relatedly, is an American in an American city ever a traveler, or only ever either a local or a tourist? Somehow I lean towards the latter but can’t justify it. Maybe you can be a traveler on business (in a US city; I really think the vocabulary is different for foreign excursions) but not for pleasure?