Getting Back to Nature – A Visit to Glacier National Park

The drive was the part that made me nervous. I was in a rental car somewhere in Flathead Valley in the western portion of Montana, and just my luck, had chosen a bad day to make the journey from Whitefish to my ultimate destination, Glacier National Park. It was around 30 miles, and while it’s not that great a distance – I had literally made longer drives from Snohomish County to Kent for Christmas parties – I was still driving through unfamiliar territory in a relatively rural area. Fortunately for me, though, the freeway was free of traffic to a point that was shocking. The speed limit was a breezy 70 MPH, and the route from Whitefish to the closest entry point of Glacier Park was “make a left onto the freeway and drive straight until you’re there.” When I made my first visit to California in 2016 to get to my sister’s wedding, I got lost three times on the way from Oakland-Alameda Airport to the village in Sonoma County where the festival was taking place. That drive had been around 50 miles, and I never forgot that it had taken me about six hours after I plucked the overly complicated directions from Mapquest. By comparison, despite the distance, I was on the road from Whitefish to Glacier Park for under a half hour.

If I had known beforehand that a visit to Glacier was 35 dollars for a pass that ran for a whole week, I would have planned my trip there differently. Especially since I decided to make this visit during the offseason and the park was relatively free of tourists. I was able to walk around very easily, and while the roads were a bit more of a hassle, the traffic never proved to be even remotely a problem either. The people I encountered at Glacier had more of a small-town rapport with me – we were able to greet each other and talk to each other and advise each other on the roads and trails with minimal awkwardness. Being there during the offseason also treated me to some interesting sights I otherwise never would have thought about, like the number of small piles of forest debris being burned in controlled fires in the name of park maintenance. Walking to and from the village at the shore of Lake McDonald, I had a quick conversation with one of the rangers there and asked him about it. He told me that if a real forest fire started, having too much debris on the ground meant it could burn out of control quickly.

Visiting during the off months also meant that it was going to be hard to find professional help if I needed it. The first place I dropped into was a visitor center on account of wanting to double-check my tracks. The place was closed. So I hit one of the paved trails and walked to the end and into Apgar Village, one of the park camping villages. While the village wasn’t entirely closed, it also wasn’t up in full swing – the places that were open offered the important supplies, snacks, and souvenirs, but that was it. And unless I was willing to pay more for some trail mix than I really wanted to, I was definitely going to be skipping lunch that day. Strolling through the village, though, put me at the edge of Lake McDonald, one of the most incredible natural sites I’ve ever seen in my life. Lake McDonald is one of the lakes left from the old glaciers which were formed in midwestern Canada and the northern mountain states during the last Ice Age; it was created by the same ice that formed the Great Lakes. Although Apgar Village was sunny at the edge where I was standing, the far end of the lake was drenched in a cloud cover which made the mountains glow a mysterious shade of blue.

After seeing all I could see in Apgar Village, I walked back down the paved trail, through the forest and maintenance fires back to my rental car. Not satisfied yet, I turned onto the park’s famous Going-Into-the-Sun Road. And just my luck, the park had chosen to renovate the road right when I happened to be visiting. The renovation area also happened to be the part along the edge of Lake McDonald, which spanned nine miles and went for a significant stretch of where I had to drive. For the first few miles of the drive, everything was normal, save the occasional shower. Unfortunately, the construction crew soon showed up, and it slowed everyone down. When the park posted its notice about road work going on, what it didn’t mention was that the work in question was removing the asphalt, leaving me with a five-mile stretch of dirt to drive on. Even after the dirt road ended and I was back on asphalt, most of the observation and photography points were filled with construction vehicles and equipment. That also meant they had yellow tape, and I was deprived of some nice picture opportunities for a couple more miles.

Since the road was over 50 miles long, I knew I wouldn’t be driving the full length of it. But after the road work section finally stopped and I managed to stop at a few picture points for photos, I realized I was going to have to find a good point to turn back. I also realized I would need to find a decent place to stop, get out, and touch grass for an extended period of time. So when I saw a sign marking something called an Avalanche Lake campground, I put two and two together and figured that if there’s a campground in the area, it can’t be far from a decent hiking trail. After driving for another mile or two, I found a small parking lot lining the road, found a spot, and hopped out of the car. My logic proved to be right – there was a trail right at the edge of the parking lot, The Trail of the Cedars, and I set off on the small wooden walkway that took me through the forest.

The Trail of the Cedars wasn’t exactly the most challenging hike I’ve ever been on. I’m not an experienced hiker, but my sister and brother-in-law take me on Thanksgiving hikes whenever I’m in their town for the holiday, so I wasn’t going into it completely blind. But The Trail of the Cedars was pretty rudimentary even by my own low standards. It was something my sis and law-bro would laugh at if they were in the know. It was there partly as a trail and partly as a gateway to other, better trails – one of which was the Avalanche Lake Trail. When I saw a sign saying the trail to Avalanche Lake Trail was along THIS route, I took the detour in the hopes of finding something a bit longer and more complex. What I got was a trail with a complex topography, a brutal terrain, and a scenic route along a creek leading to Avalanche Lake which took me over a lot of slippery rocks. THIS was a trail that kicked the everloving shit out of me. It was supposed to be a little over two miles long, but it felt a lot longer. After a couple of miles (or what definitely FELT like miles; I had been on the trail for around an hour) I started to question whether it was the smartest thing to keep going. While the physicality made it more difficult than I had anticipated, it wasn’t the difficulty that started getting to me. I was sweating bullets on a chilly day. I had already removed my outdoor hat, and my back was doing that thing where it was alternating between being too hot to keep my fleece on and too cold when the wind got under me. The weather was also alternating between warm sun and cold rain, complete with dangerous-looking clouds constantly hanging over me. It had been raining on and off, and when it rained, I wasn’t buried in rain gear. It hit me somewhere along the line that if the torrential downpour that was threatening ever actually started, I was nowhere near the car and, not being prepared for such a weather event, probably risked freezing. So at some point, I accepted my loss and turned back.

All things considered, I had seen a sizable chunk of the park, despite not getting to any areas with actual glaciers. I didn’t feel like I was cheated or gypped. It did suck that my choice of season left me out of a lot of the major services, but it’s a national park. National parks are about seeing nature in its most pristine form, breathing the freshest air, and seeing land protected to stay in its natural condition. The rest of my visit to Montana was also very nice – Whitefish was a small and very walker-friendly village, Whitefish Lake was lovely, and the food and beer were excellent all around. But it was Glacier National Park that was the jewel, the centerpiece of the journey, and the piece that left the biggest impression.

Renouncement

Readers of this blog may have caught a post I wrote back in May or June of this last year. In it, I explored the idea of what it meant to be invested in the fortunes of a sports team and said that I couldn’t bring myself to follow my childhood team anymore. I argued that dropping or even switching teams is okay if they’re robbing you of your hard-earned money and non-returnable free time. Sports are an escape, after all – they shouldn’t be anyone’s be-all-and-end-all. Once I realized that my childhood team wasn’t returning any of the emotion I was investing in them and that following them was far too much of a pain than I should be going through, I had to give them the axe. Especially since they represent a place with which I had a rocky relationship at the best of times and an outright poisonous relationship at the worst.

My mother died in 2016 and my father moved to California a year later in order to move on. When those happened, they severed almost all of my remaining emotional connections to The Nickel City. With my family out of Buffalo and my childhood hockey team not mattering to me anymore, I started coming to a rather stark thought: What was it, exactly, that I was so hell-bent on glamorizing about my birth town? What kinds of roots did I REALLY have there, aside from it being the place that I was born and raised? How strong are the values that the place tried to instill in me? They say you can leave the city, but the city never leaves you. In Buffalo, they say Buffalo is a state of mind. If there’s any truth to that, then Buffalo is a state of mind I’ve had to reject in order to function right. We’re talking about a city I moved away from two different times. The first time left me a little bit nostalgic for the few values that Buffalo got right, especially the cost of living there. After my poverty got out of control in Chicago, I returned to Buffalo in the hopes that I might be able to use the lessons I had learned and the ways I had grown to stake out a life of my own in my native city. The ensuing four years drained me of that delusion, and I bolted again. I went faster, I went further, and even upon my rough and unsure first few months in Seattle, I kept myself free of almost all the nostalgia.

We tend to romanticize the idea of holding on to our roots, but I’m not sure anyone sits down and thinks about what it means to do that. For me, very little remains of any sort of relationship I had with Buffalo at all. It recently occurred to me that the idea of trying to hold on to my roots from The Nickel City means trying to hold a firm emotional connection with a place that did everything in its power to remind me that I was subhuman and deny me the right to eke out even a basic existence. A typical Buffalo life is set in a specific pattern of being born, going to school, leaving school, taking up a job in whatever call center (the call center is the new factory) will have you, getting married, and having kids who will do the same. Any deviation from or questioning of that pattern is a mortal sin. And there was me, the curious kid, looking to know why society worked the way it did or why we had specific rules and traditions that popped out of nowhere some time immemorial ago. I was always after more from the surrounding world – things which Buffalo was frequently both unable and unwilling to provide. I wanted knowledge; truths and adventures to talk about with people who could share their own back to me.

I don’t want to come down too hard on Buffalo because there are a few worthwhile values I learned there that have served me well. I know what a good, proper work ethic should be and how to be a good neighbor. I know good pizza and good chicken wings, and I have continued to stay in touch with a few old friends who still live in Buffalo. But there are a lot of other, less salient values the city inflicted onto me: The community owns the rights over every single aspect of my life. Drinking away a mental problem is okay – in fact, it’s the only real method of dealing with it. Tradition is an irrefutable god. Anyone who falls outside our prescribed life patterns is abnormal and hostile and must be excluded from everything. Sit down and shut the fuck up and never question anything you get taught. The world outside the city here is inconsequential. Needless to say, I took on an outcast status in Buffalo. Yeah, I shared a handful of qualities with the people there, but I liked reading and being a geek as much as I enjoyed a good hockey or football game. What happened was that I became something of a member of the city’s hidden population. People there knew me, but they didn’t know me very well, and they sure as hell didn’t understand me. Most of them didn’t have the inclination to try; they superimposed upon presumptions that I was just another one of them.

My move to Chicago was like an ongoing acid trip. Everything was shiny and new, and my brain was in a constant state of sensory overload. Whatever I wanted, Chicago had a way to offer it to me. What’s more was the fact that no one criticized me for my interests or told me I was unacceptable because of a couple of interests which didn’t jibe with the ethos of the city. While I was marked by severe poverty for my time in The Windy City, I also saw my own potential as a human start to awaken. I started making friends and was accepted and respected as a real member of a community. It was in Chicago that I was able to start trying things that would make a small impact on the world around me. My crowning achievement was creating and watching over an urban garden, but I was a part of fundraisers and protests too. I was, in fact, one of the people acting behind the scenes of the October 2006 protest day. More to the point was the fact that I was among people who questioned everything as loudly and boldly as I had been trying to do for my entire life.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t some freak. I was just a regular person around town, and I reveled in my newfound intellectual and individual freedom. No one in my neighborhood judged me for any offbeat interests I had. I was allowed to do what I pleased and follow whatever made me curious or happy, and if I had a question about the way things were done, it was taken seriously rather than brushed aside. To say the realization that I would have to move back to Buffalo was devastating would be an understatement. On my list of my life’s biggest heartbreakers, my move back to Buffalo is in a respectable second, under the day my mother died. I tried to put an optimistic spin on it, but I had mentioned to a friend of mine that I was counting on a frictional relationship with my folks and not being able to go anywhere or do anything. Which happened.

Buffalo is the city of some of my biggest failures and pains. It’s a symbol of the many ways I’ve been rejected as a full human being. I learned to hate myself and hide my deformity as if it were some sort of terrible secret shame. So years later I came to the realization that I’ve never been much of a Buffalo man at all. When that happened, I slowly started to tear myself away from the destructive civic habits of the place I was born and raised, and then start freeing myself of the wannabe-thug exterior and toxic form of masculinity that kept holding me back after I had left the city for the first time. After all, why would I want to retain an emotional connection with a place that treated me in such a way? It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make sense at any time I’ve ever lived outside of Buffalo, and it doesn’t make any sense in this day and age, when most of my emotional ties there are gone and I’m not making any plans to even visit, let alone to move back.

Yes, I’ve spent most of my life in Buffalo. But Buffalo is the asshole jock from all those movies in the 80’s having grown up and turned into a loser without realizing it. So when it comes to identifying the city that really created me, I’m in and of Chicago.

The Allure of London

“Only those elements time cannot wear were created before me, and beyond time I stand.”

-The Divine Comedy

No matter where you are, there are some things which just remain constant between cities. After two and a half hours of sitting on a Northern Rail train, I happened to spot one of those constants: An abandoned building, covered up from top to bottom in graffiti. It was at that moment that I knew I had reached my destination: London. Upon the train’s entry into the city, I performed that routine as the eager puppy hanging its head out the window. Before much longer, we reached the docking point at King’s Cross Station where I jumped from the train, navigated the labyrithine station, and stepped into the city proper.

In that moment, the London I had created in my imagination disappeared. 37 years of piecing together a place built of books, TV shows, movies, songs, nursery rhymes, and video games crumbled and vanished. Erected in its place was a tangible and physical place which lived, breathed, and moved about with its own distinct identity and vibe. The thing about places you’ve never been is that we build illusions of them. Yes, we know they’re THERE. We can do all the reading and research on them that we like. We can look at the road layout on a map, know the history, and follow it on Facebook and Twitter. But all of that knowledge is still coming with mental photographs – if someone asks you something particular, you sound foolish to those in the know because you actually DON’T know. Now, though, the city of London – a place which had held my imagination in a tight vice grip for almost my entire life – had a face that I could attach to it. London was finally real.

My first order of business was to get to my friends’ apartment near Hyde Park and let them know I was there. Along the way, of course, I lapped everything up like I had been in the desert without water for 10 years. I got on the Underground and took it to Hyde Park, making the frequent wry observation along the way. I knew about the Tube, but for the first time, I was able to take note of the rather flashy ways people who rode it were apt to dress. After getting off the subway and leaving my bag with the porter at my friends’ place, I took a walk around Hyde Park, where I continued to spot little details a travel guide never tells readers: The population of the general area was mainly people of Middle Eastern descent, so colorful thobes and hijabs added flair to a sunny walk in the park. I noticed the incredible diversity in Hyde Park’s avian populace. I also noticed that, despite there being 11 professional football teams in London – including six in the Premier League – the big athletic hero in this part of the city was Liverpool striker Mohamed Salah. My friend later informed me that this part of London was nicknamed Little Lebanon.

London has that typical British city layout – trying to walk to the next street over via a side street doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll reach the next street over. Between that, its 2000-year history, and the sheer size of the place, there’s always something new to explore and discover. William Shakespeare and Francis Drake lived a century away from each other, but in what other city could you walk along the waterfront and encounter Drake’s ship and Shakespeare’s theater by walking for 10 minutes? And then visit a modern glass and steel skyscraper? My friends told me they like to hop on one of the city’s famous double decker busses and ride it just to sightsee, advice which I took them up on.

That may be a perfect summation of London. Having spent five years of my life in an alpha-class world city – Chicago – which I still consider my true hometown, I thought I had some idea of what a place of such stature would be like. London, though, was more different than I could have ever imagined. Whereas Chicago is a dynamic city that is constantly moving forward and pressing itself to live up to its title as a major world city, London is self-confident. It exists on its own plateau, stoic and smiling, knowing that its place in the world and its status are secure. Why should London be worried about staying up to anyone? Reminders of the city’s 2000 years on this planet are everywhere. The Tower of London was built over a period of hundreds of years. Buckingham Palace was sanctioned in 1703 and remodeled and rebuilt constantly for a century and a half longer than Chicago was ever a thought. Westminster Abbey’s foundation was laid in 1245. London been through the black plague, a civil war, a massive fire, and an aerial bombardment. Yet, here it remains.

This is a city that has been seemingly everything at some point. It was the command center of the largest empire in history; home to both monarchs and prime ministers; inspiration for stories that were both factual and fictional. It has led ideological and cultural revolutions and yet tried to suppress similar revolutions in other places. It revels in its history as it moves forward; celebrates its myths as it looks for greater truths; is mindful of tradition but accepting of progress; expensive but offering a bounty of outstanding free things to do; overwhelms visitors while making them feel relaxed and welcomed. I didn’t get to explore anywhere close to as much as I would have liked during my visit, but I did spend one wonderfully serene afternoon in a coffee shop, online, watching the suits and the eccentrics alike weave around each other without a care in the world. It was a scene and a sense that was never possible in my birth city.

London is a place I’ve held dear in my imagination since my age was in single digits. Now, after being able to visit… That hasn’t changed. Not one tiny iota.

 

A Certain Point of View

There are fewer cities on the planet more steeped in history than York. During my visit to York, I got to do a number of things I never even thought of doing. I walked along the top of ancient Roman fortifications built at York’s founding in 71. (And yes, those are the only two numbers representing the year York was founded.) I climbed to the top of an ancient castle tower. I walked down a real, well-preserved medieval street with curvy, lopsided buildings, a gutter in the center of the street, and roofs which were only about two feet apart across the street. I drank a brew of pure dark chocolate.

There was a ton of things to be learned in York, but much of my learning experience ended up coming in an unexpected way. I spent a lot of my time there chatting with a very friendly and intelligent young woman from Austria. We talked a lot about America and the perceptions of America against what America and Americans were like. We talked about history from the American point of view and the Austrian point of view. I was surprised at some of the things that had made the news in her country (Colin Kaepernick taking a knee for the national anthem made the news there), disappointed at some of the other things that happened (Austria has Holocaust deniers), and bemused at the American pop culture seen in Austria (she said she wanted to visit Seattle because her favorite show was Grey’s Anatomy). At one point, the subject of battle recreations came up. Battle recreations are something unique to the United States. She told me that the USA was the only country she ever heard of that did something like that. Now, I’ve seen several battle recreations in my life ranging in eras from the French and Indian War to the Civil War.

I vouched for them based on the fact that so much of the history forced down our throats in the States is colorless. Yes, we read about these battles, but the American Revolution is something our schoolbooks cover in ten pages. They don’t cover the real battles from the ground. Recreations can give us the full battle experience, adding sight and sound to events that get covered in one sentence. A sentence or two in a history book from a terrible public school simply says it happened. A reenactment can make you appreciate it.

My newfound friend from Austria had some different ideas. Austria was a major player in the most devastating war the world has ever been through; in fact, it was the country the man responsible for the war was born and raised in. One of the things she mentioned to me was visiting various concentration camps – including Auschwitz – and getting to see firsthand the sorts of carnage a war could wreak. She talked about seeing places where humans went to die, some of which still have visible, touchable damage from the war. It gave me pause for thought.

When Americans talk about war, we do it with a sense of reckless abandon. At best, we’re given the fact that a war occurred. Most of the time, though, everything comes along with a unique Amerocentric worldview. We think of the American Revolution as a glorious struggle for liberty from oppressors; and that the War of 1812 was something that established the United States as a great military force to be reckoned with; and that we saved the world in both World Wars. So this country has a very cavalier attitude toward wars. We believe they’re things that happen, and that we’re the ultimate good guy when they do happen. And in true Hollywood fashion, the good guys always win. Thus, we have no real fear of wars or any sense of our place in a much larger world. We don’t like hearing about how our country’s founders were complete dicks. Or that we started the War of 1812 ourselves and that it was so unimportant that European countries don’t bother to teach it in their school texts. (Europe was busy trying to ward off Napoleon at the time.) Or that our role in World War I wasn’t all that big, or that World War II only went our way because Stalin was fighting for the Allies.

More to the point, she told me individual stories about regular people that we don’t hear in the United States. Her grandfather bolted before he was conscripted and forced to fight for the Nazis. The Jewish community in her hometown, which had once been a real community, was now down to a single Jew who is pretty high up in years and won’t be around much longer. World War II isn’t simply something that happened in the past in Austria. It cast a shadow which still looms over the country to this day, and there are still people who lived through it, resentful of the result. It’s pretty easy for us in the United States to think of ourselves as the big country that can handle anything, but that’s because we haven’t really handled a whole lot. We went back to our ordinary, everyday lives at the conclusion of World War II. Austria has to endure the ghosts of that war sitting over it.

Honestly, 9-11 was a pretty telling day for the way we would react in the face of an actual war. I’m in Great Britain. The popular “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme was something that popped out of Great Britain during World War II. Despite the battle of Britain raging in the skies above and the Royal British Air Force being outnumbered by the Luftwaffe 2-1, the British people did their best to go about their daily lives as if everything was normal and okay. They slept in subway tunnels for safety. The United States suffered a terrible terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. 15 years later, there were legions of people still using that attack as a reason to vote for Donald Trump.

Commercialism Meets The Beatles

Mathew Street in Liverpool is hallowed ground if you’re a music fan. It’s the home of The Cavern Club, where a certain little band known as The Beatles played almost 300 shows in a couple of years as a local house band. Being a bit of a music-head, I fully intended to make a personal visit during my time in Liverpool. I’m currently living in a city – Seattle – which has almost as powerful a musical legacy as Liverpool. And hell, The Beatles and Seattle’s main band, Nirvana, aren’t quite as far from each other as their sounds might make them seem. Both bands came out of angry working class circumstances and were formed as primal screams from near-hopeless lives. Both were led by socially conscious, tragic frontmen who were killed by gunshots long before their times. Both were voices of distraught generations and highly influential but given credit for more than they actually did.

Naturally, I thought I knew something about being from one of the world’s great musical cities. But that didn’t prepare me for what I saw as I turned around the corner on Stanley and took my first glance of Mathew Street. The street announced its presence right off the bat with a large banner hanging between buildings which proudly announced its legacy as the place that John, Paul, George, and Ringo… – well, actually it was Pete Best at that time – got their start. Mathew Street is walker-only and short, but I took in the sights as I walked on through it. There was a Beatles bar called Rubber Soul, which is something I was able to figure out because it had a large neon sign fit for Las Vegas which screamed “RUBBER SOUL: A BEATLES BAR.” There was an overpriced Beatles museum, which was one of about three in Liverpool. (I didn’t go in.) One of the city’s shopping malls had been built over the original stage, but The Cavern was still sitting there, intact, underground, brick pillars and acoustics. It still had performers at all hours of the day, except now you could buy T-shirts.

The sporadic placements of the merchandise stores was no surprise, but what WAS disappointing was the merchandise itself. Everything there was run-of-the-mill junk which can be found at any pop culture retailer in the United States. I think I got to three different shops before I found a T-shirt which was unique to The Beatles during their Liverpool years. You can’t blame a city for trying to play up its musical heritage when its musical heritage is the most important band in music history. I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that the band which is allowing this is the same band that sang “Revolution.”

One of the things Seattle is known for is its very prominent music scene. Ray Charles got his career started when he suggested moving to the city furthest away from his native Florida, which happened to be Seattle. Jimi Hendrix is native to Seattle. Heart came out of Seattle. And, of course, the city birthed the grunge movement and a long list of influential bands that made careers out of it: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and those are just the big ones. They don’t even begin to cover everything. To honor the contributions of Seattle to music, there’s the Museum of Pop Culture. At least, it honors them somewhat. The museum has prominent displays dedicated to Hendrix and Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain. But an actual visit to the place reveals more of a dedication to that: Popular culture, which Seattle’s music scene figures into. There’s not a whole lot of standalone memorabilia for Mudhoney. Any Seattle display about pop culture will almost definitely feature Nirvana, but it will also mention Frasier, Grey’s Anatomy, Cameron Crowe, Joel McHale, and Sleepless in Seattle as well.

I was recently dating a woman who had taken the trouble to make make the 100-mile drive to Aberdeen, where Cobain was born and raised. Aberdeen has an entry sign bearing the phrase “come as you are” to welcome visitors. “Come as You Are” is one of Nirvana’s signature tunes, but the small lumber town is otherwise pretty bereft of mementos to Kurt Cobain or Krist Novoselic. She said she had gone there in search of the Cobain house, but nobody knew where it was. The best information she came up with was that it had been sold.

This was not the case in Liverpool. I should write an addendum about the fact that I’m not sure how much overall popular culture in Great Britain involves Liverpool. I didn’t make a 7000-mile journey to sit on my ass watching television, and any Liverpool-related pop culture has had limited exposure in the States. (Mostly they’re references to The Beatles. Also, Adonis Creed’s opponent in the latest Rocky movie was a fan of Everton Football Club.) Liverpool had entire small sections of the city dressed up to honor its greatest native band. Now, I’m not arguing that the city of Liverpool has every right to do this. Hell, with the sorts of ups and downs the local scousers have faced, it would be stupid to NOT take advantage of Beatlemaniac tourism. But when you see something like this, well, I can’t help but think much of the ambience gets removed. It gets a lot harder to create a visual of Paul McCartney navigating the ruined streets of post-World War II Liverpool on the way to see a show himself.

When I look at a site where something significant happened, I like to have a feel of mystery and authenticity. I want to run my fingers along the same bricks and smell the same smells as the people there for the event experienced. I want to picture myself in a moment decades or even centuries ago, trying to get a sense of my character and the way I might have felt living in that same moment. I want to figure out if I would have understood the magnitude of what was going on had I been there to see it.

That being said, The Cavern Club itself still has some of that authenticity to it, even though it’s now a crowded tourist venue rather than a seedy club for outcasts. But I think the most emotional I got during my visit to Liverpool was in the Museum of Liverpool, which had half of its top floor dedicated to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There was one of those little walls where the museum let visitors leave self-written messages on post-its. After a five-minute deliberation, I did the only thing I could have done there: I wrote my mother’s name, birth year, and death year on a post-it, barely avoiding a choke-up as I left it to hang under a large photograph of John Lennon.

“Let me take you there…”

America and the World

If you’ve ever traveled internationally, you may wonder about the moment when it hits you that you’re not in Kansas anymore. That moment will be different from traveler to traveler, but I do know when mine started to really occur: When I stepped aboard my IcelandAir flight at Seatac Airport. Suddenly, there were two prices on everything, and neither one was the American dollar sign. They were Icelandic dollars and Euros. The food selection was largely Icelandic, and the entertainment included informative documentaries about Iceland.

Being in another country makes you keenly aware of something: John Travolta’s character from Pulp Fiction was right when he exclaimed that it was the little differences that stand out the most. Looking through selections at book stores, for instance, I was struck to be holding the British versions of a lot of books I’ve been seeing in the States. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in this country. The covers themselves are a lot more animated, as opposed to the statuesque or photographic covers we see at home.

A bunch of other small differences stood out too: Frosted Flakes were simply called Frosteds, because the name of the cereal was usurped by a whole different cereal which was also called Frosted Flakes. The sales taxes are included on the written prices. Street names are written on the sides of buildings, not on signs, and not always reliably. There are other things which just don’t change between countries, either: There are bad morning shows, and fast food places seem to be constant. One of the more bemusing surprises I happened upon in Glasgow was turning the corner on Jamaica Street and Argyle Street and running into a Tim Horton’s, of all things. McDonald’s and Starbucks were both everywhere. I can’t describe how often I found myself doing something that would have been considered straight out American-in-America. One morning, I had to walk three blocks to the nearest ATM.

But one of the things I was obsessed with doing was finding a diner that served American-style food and eating there. I had one particular place in mind, but it was out of my range, so I randomly looked around for another one and stumbled into a joint on Hope Street. First thing, I have to commend the place on its selection of American microbrews. It had a few, including Samuel Adams and Brooklyn. It didn’t take much deliberating on my part to settle on the Brooklyn Lager and order a burger with three onion rings and some barbecue sauce. When the bartender took my order, he asked me if there was anything else I might want with the burger. I didn’t, but I couldn’t help but notice how out of American character that was. In America, after all, no one asks if you want fries with your bar burger; they’re automatically presumed upon, and you never have to pay extra for them. Also, the place clearly thought chicken wings were a New York City dish.

As I ate on the overly salty burger, I was accosted by a younger Scotsman who was wondering about my beer. Since my hard midwestern accent gives me away, he quickly figured out that I was an American, and I ended up giving him a quick lesson on American microbrews. The Scottish accent was sometimes difficult for me to understand, and more than a few times, I had to politely ask someone I was talking to to repeat themselves.

That was enough to make me wonder: What are people placing their impressions of America on? Were they coming from general ideas heard through the word of god, were hey coming from movies and television, or were they coming from actual American experience? Some of the things I saw looked like they were out of Hollywood. You would think these people believed all the old west stereotypes about big hats and six-shooters and drinks at the saloon.

The statement that place made, though, was a pretty powerful one: The United States has a huge influence on the world. It may not necessarily be by politics, but it has the imaginations of many people in the regular everyday populace. I saw clothes with New York written on them. I think I saw more American sports logos than logos from any other country. I had a nice, long discussion about American sports merchandise with the owner of an American sports memorabilia store. He likened peoples’ purchases to the sectarian sports loyalties in Glasgow – the rivalry between Celtic FC and Rangers FC is one of the most brutal on the planet because it has its roots in Unionist/Republican sectarian violence – and explained that Celtic fans bought Green Bay Packers gear while Rangers supporters favored the New England Patriots. I made notes of people I saw running around in New York Yankees, New York Giants, and Atlanta Braves stuff as well. I didn’t see nearly as many folks in Rangers gear, although I did see Celtic merchandise.

It was another thing that helped the message about how we’re all connected sink in. As I looked around and soaked up the unique scenery and unfamiliar everyday quirks of the United Kingdom, my mind couldn’t help but drift back to my native country and my awakening of how many people there don’t realize that.  One of my more alarming travel memories before now was just up in Victoria, where a couple of fellow travelers from the States told me they were amazed at how many people there never manage to make it outside of their home state. And those who, if they do, only get as far as Disney World, or perhaps Las Vegas if they’re feeling particularly exotic. I think it was Mark Twain who once quipped that travel was the best cure for ignorance. I’ve long lamented that international travel needs to be easier, and I speak that from the experience of having to wait and fight for 37 years for my first taste of the Old World. Now I know the truth of that more so than ever.

The Ambassador

Well, here was a slate of weather which barely made it feel like I left home. Thick bushel of clouds, gray, nice amount of rain… Yeah, it didn’t look like anything unfamiliar, I thought. I was on an IcelandAir flight, and after nearly two hours of the cabin pressure wreaking havoc on my sinus cavity (my body picked the WORST possible time to catch a cold) and the accompaniment of the Supreme Clientele record from rapper Ghostface Killah, my plane was almost finished with its descent. The clouds were finally broken, and a web of tangled street formations and village-style cottages appeared on the ground below.

Glasgow.

I’m not sure what happened in the next few minutes, but just as my plane touched down, the captain had to pull us back into the air, and we spent the next ten minutes flying a circle around the largest city in Scotland for a second approach. Upon its success, I exhaled the most audible sigh of relief of my life, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to get away from any transit fast enough. After running through the labyrinth that was Glasgow Airport through customs and getting my passport stamped, I was out. After my 37 years of life dreaming of this very moment, I finally took my first breath of air in the Old World.

It was probably then that something started to really click. Now, whenever I travel, I like to stay in hostels because I love talking to the foreigners. I love learning where they’re from, what brought them to the United States, what they think of the United States, and the little differences between the United States and where they’re from. I always liked to consider myself an ambassador of sorts for my home country because I could have extended conversations with visitors, and I wanted them to feel welcome. One of my more pleasant hostel stays involved watching an MLB playoff game with a young man from Australia who happened to be into American football. Ultimately, though, I was still an American on American soil, so that made my presentation rather limited. After all, real America was literally right outside the door, and any visitors’ opinions were going to be based on their thoughts about what happened to them outside.

Now that I’m sitting here in the Old World, that safety net has been removed. I’m the oddball in the United Kingdom, walking around with the funny accent and strange, messy words. I don’t have some sort of big, official title but that doesn’t make the truth of the matter any less obvious: For the next two weeks, I’m going to be a representative of my country. Most people in other countries will never meet a politician from the US. They might catch me walking around on their streets and have a short conversation with me, though, so it’s imperative that I be on my best behavior and show them the best of the world across the pond. The importance of being a proper gentleman took a long time to sink in with me. My father did everything he could to hammer it into my head, but I’m sure he kept getting frustrated to see me pushing back. (Dad, you can blame the pushback on that sorry excuse of a social code pressed on me by everything else in Buffalo’s environment.) It didn’t really sink in until I moved back to Buffalo and saw myself starting to blend in with everything I hated. It sank in a little more during the uncivilized 2016 Presidential election. Now, as the only American for miles,I can’t afford to screw this up.

The irony is that while I’ve frequently had a contentious relationship with the United States, I’m actually up to bearing this burden. After all, I don’t want the general populace in any countries I travel to to think one person represents me. The United States is not the people running it. It’s not the pundits who are on television screaming themselves into frothing rages. It’s not the backwoods militia bozos talking big about how they’re going to overthrow the government. I’m not sure there any one thing which CAN define the United States, but I don’t want someone to pick up a bad impression of us through what might be the only encounter with an American they ever have.

Victoria

For a place that’s so close to Seattle, the city of Victoria, British Columbia is a real pain in the ass to get to. That was one of my thoughts as I prepared a trip to visit British Columbia’s provincial capital. Another was, why didn’t I just plan to visit Vancouver? It would be so much easier – just a straight shot to the north on a bus! If you want to talk about travel distance, in fact, Victoria is actually closer than Vancouver. Vancouver is just north of the Canadian border. Victoria is at the southern mouth of the Strait of St. George, right on the Salish Sea. It overlaps a little bit with the northernmost point of the border. And yet, despite being just 60 miles from Seattle, getting there wasn’t easy.

It wasn’t like there was a giant suspension bridge connecting Victoria direct to the Canadian mainland. The city is on an island off the west coast of Canada which is called Vancouver Island. It’s possible to drive there, but all the points narrow enough to build bridges between the island and the mainland are so far north that doing so is a massive inconvenience. A drive with no stops would be five hours one way. A bus ride would take half a day. So that left me with two options: Take the local ferry or the seaplane. The seaplane had better flight times and speed, but a one-way ticket on the seaplane cost as much as the round trip on the ferry. Wanting to save money for an August trip to Europe and a car repair, I opted for the ferry. That presented the question of how to get from my home in Edmonds to the pier by 7 AM. That got sorted out when my friend decided she was willing to massively inconvenience herself to deposit me there, although she made sure I knew I owed her.

Three hours after arriving at the pier and promising a safe arrival message when I got to Victoria, I was there. I had been presented with a new experience along the way: I had to fill out a customs form. Although I had been to Canada many times in the past, my last visit was about 16 years ago, before passports were a requirement. Back then, if we wanted to cross the border, we did. But now I had to answer to a customs agent, and after that, I was finally unleashed in British Columbia. My first order of business was to make my way to my hostel, which turned out to be just a 15-minute walk away from the Clipper dock. What happened then was typical me: I was still an hour and a half from my official check-in time, so I decided to go out and get some grub. At the hostel, the receptionist mentioned sending someone to a soccer bar to watch a game. Being a soccer fan myself, I knew exactly what game he was talking about. The Champions League Final was that day, and I knew that my favorite club, Liverpool FC of the English League, was playing in it. I hadn’t counted on being able to actually watch it, and I just wanted some damned food. But in my search for something light, I happened to stumble into a nearby Irish bar flooded with other Liverpool supporters… Who were very vocal. I forgot I was hungry as I watched an exciting, dramatic, and very physical soccer game which the Reds lost, but made their opponents really work for their victory.

After making my hostel check-in official, I set out and soaked everything in. I’ve never hidden my affection for Portland, but Victoria was a smaller, more walkable version of Portland. And despite seeing a handful of Starbucks, Victoria didn’t have the corporate saturation that affects Portland. It’s clear that the colloquial small city where you can sit in the coffee shop and watch the world go by was a perfect way of describing Victoria. And during the early hours of the two mornings I spent in Victoria, I did just that, with my computer, writing away at a piece for my other blog. Of course, I didn’t have much of a choice; my computer didn’t seem compatible with the hostel internet after my first day there. Apparently, that’s a fairly common problem at that hostel.

As I walked around and observed, I saw that the Canadian accent seems to vary in its thickness. From one person to the next, it always sounded differently pronounced. And when that teemed with the sheer number of foreign accents I heard around Victoria, I had trouble deciphering the locals from the visitors. And my hostel even had two or three workers who were clearly from other countries. One had a thick, brogue Scottish accent. But the common stereotype of Canadian politeness abounded, and when I made excursions out of tourist Victoria and into real Victoria, I was treated like an everyday neighbor, even though I was constantly carrying around a camera which plainly gave away the fact that I was a traveler. I received a lot of friendly hellos. At one point, I was trying to buy my lunch in a grocery store, and my card was having trouble being read. It took ten minutes before the machine processed me. In the United States, the customer behind me would have started complaining, and the clerk would have kicked me out of the line.

A city which is small but has a lot to do can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you can walk everywhere. On the other, none of the things worth seeing are that small. Trying to cover serious ground meant not being able to wander aimlessly and take in anything I was looking at, but I like to have my mind occupied, so it was easy to come up with a few things to do. I managed to visit the Royal British Columbia Museum, which had a very cool exhibit on ancient Egypt; Craigdarroch Castle; and the Parliament building. Craigdarroch Castle was the one I was most looking forward to, the one I liked the most, and yet, the biggest letdown. Calling the place a castle was a bit of a misnomer. It’s a mansion that just happens to be very big and be designed with a few turrets. It’s distinction was that a very rich family had built it and lived in it. There were no murder stories worthy of old royalty, and the place lacked any hauntings. I loved learning about the history of it, though, but it was simply the history of a family. The Parliament building had an exhibit dedicated to the women in British Columbia’s Parliament, and the place had the same screening process as any capitol building in the United States.

I never forgot that I was a stranger in a strange land. It was impossible to forget that this was a different part of Canada as well. My experiences in Canada were all relegated to the east until now – I had been in and out of Ontario a thousand times. Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, Hamilton, and Toronto had been semi-regular and regular stops to such an extent that it was difficult to remember I was in a different country. While I never got that different planet vibe in Victoria, the signs that I wasn’t in Washington State anymore were all around. Canadian symbols were everywhere, and little reminders of the province’s British past were common. Fish and chips were a popular menu item in bars, the Union Jack was a popular symbol – it flew independently, and appeared on both the official flag and royal crest of British Columbia – and there were references to the British monarchy in the names of government buildings. And in many other places were little tokens that helped establish Victoria as its own little place: Orcas and totem poles were present nearly everywhere. City symbols, both of them, as if they had popped right out of the ground.

I managed to do a lot during my weekend, but as I left, I couldn’t help but think of the various things I wanted to do but, for one reason or another, couldn’t. I wanted to ride a rental bicycle, visit Butchart Gardens, visit the miniatures museum, and there were several places to eat on my list that I wasn’t able to get to. I tried to get to a place called Red Fish Blue Fish, but the line was always far too long. I also wished I could have walked around the local neighborhoods a bit more. That’s another big curse of placing everything in walking distance – you don’t get challenged to go out into the neighborhood to meet any of the locals.

Victoria is a small city, but it has a lot to do and see. I have a lot of other places I’d like to see in my life, but when I want a rest, it will be comforting to know that a relaxing place like Victoria is right there.

 

Birth of a Traveler

While I’m wasting the rest of my life in Seattle, I recently decided that it’s time for me to begin truly pursuing one of my lifelong dreams: International travel. And I decided that I’m finally in a good enough position to be able to do it.

The first step to overseas travel, of course, is figuring out just what the hell it is I’m going to be doing. But everyone I ever knew who’s been overseas tells me that’s more of a learn-as-you-do-it experience, so with that now out of the way, it’s now time to begin work on the second step: Paperwork!

Yes, paperwork. One day, a long long time ago, some government officials sat down and asked themselves how they could make money off potential travelers while also discouraging the poorer people who propped them up from leaving their homes for three days. The thing they came up with was to make everyone pay a fee for a piece of paper with your information on it. You know, something that wasn’t your birth certificate, voter registration, tax record, or horse license.

I’ve never applied for a passport before, but I did learn one important thing so far about doing it: There’s no shortcutting a way around it. If you’re an aspiring traveler who frequents travel websites, you’re probably familiar with all the online ads you see about how you can get your passport rushed to you for $100 with a next-day delivery. No fuss, no muss, a deal that looks suspiciously great. I’m a natural skeptic, so this was another point where I again turned to my globetrotting friends. They confirmed my skepticism.

Getting my hands on a proper passport means doing it the hard way. Get the paperwork, get the birth certificate, get the old New York driver’s license, and fill everything out by hand. Pay the damned fee. So here I’m finally off to the post office now to grab the forms and ask every question that I can think of.

I haven’t figured out where I want to go first yet, but it damn well better be worth it.

A Response to Seattle Met: Why I am Buying a Car

The Seattle Met recently wrote an article about how more and more Seattleites are forgoing the follies of the local public transit to move themselves around in their own cars. It was a whine that didn’t feel like a whine, but they weren’t totally off. Traffic here is a capillary jam. They did, however, choose to conveniently ignore a few things about the Seattle area public transit which might help them understand what’s going on.

Seattle’s transit goes through about nine agencies in some three or four counties, and the Met decided to focus strictly on the King County transit. It makes you wonder if the Met thinks Seattle exists in some sort of little capsule. What, is everyone in the general area a vampire, they can’t get into Seattle proper without invitation? Because last time I checked, there were a lot of people living in various places outside Seattle who venture in and out of the city for work. Back when I was working my night shift, I made friends with a co-worker who made a nightly commute from Olympia. That means Tacoma wasn’t out of the question.

Seattleites voted to expand their public transit system. I give them all the credit in the world for that – its been at my attention for some time that Nashville recently voted down a railway expansion for its MTA because it would bring “the wrong sorts of people.” (Read: Minorities would be able to, you know, go places.) But I’ve also made the recent decision to end years of being a holdout radical to go out and buy a car of my own. Why? Because I have an hours-long commute in both directions which the I-5 is only partially responsible for.

Okay, it’s only the second-longest commute I’ve had to get to a job since I moved to Seattle, but the longest and most difficult commute I had took me into Bellevue for my night shift. But that one can be easily hand-waved; I live in Everett, and no one would expect a half-hour drive from Everett to Bellevue no matter how they’re going about it. My current commute, however, only goes into the U-District. Not only is that a lot closer, but the way there is just a straight shot down the I-5… Yet it gets drawn out to over two hours – not much quicker than my old transport to Bellevue – because two transit systems in the area have randomly decided to emasculate themselves!

What’s more is that there is a perfectly normal bus run that makes a dash right across the part of the U-District I need to be in. The problem is that the bus line that takes me straight the way there only starts up at 9 AM. Think about that – I don’t work weekends, and the easiest, smartest bus route in the King County/Snohomish County transit plays dummy. It goes straight to Downtown Seattle, hitting a handful of the big hot stops on the way in, including the place I need, and it starts making the runs well after workers need it. You would think the problem would be solved when I leave work and make my way back to Everett, but it actually gets worse. That great route I just told you about only runs until about 2:30 PM, when it just stops… And starts back up again an hour and a half after my shift ends!

Going in and out of Seattle requires navigation of a transit labyrinth. In the morning, I have to make jumps from Everett to Ash Way before hitting the bus that gets me to 45th. You would think going back would be a run of that same route in the other direction, but here’s the thing: My transit source for the main leg of the journey, Community Transit, runs about half of their intercounty busses in the morning. The other half only runs in the evening, and none of the evening routes put me anywhere near my station n Everett. So I have to get on the first bus to Lynnwood, hop a second bus for a five-minute ride to 99, then catch the Swift to get to my cross-street. The way back is made even more of a pain by the fact that my bus options for the short stretch along 200th don’t synch up with the Swift times and there not being a stop right on 99. I get to 99 just in time to miss the Swift, and since the Swift chooses THAT time to switch to its non-business schedule, I get left with 20 minutes to kill while I get soaked.

Review that ride home: The Swift switches to its non-business schedule a half hour to an hour later, I get home at a more reasonable time. Community Transit places a stop on 99, I get home at a more reasonable time. The bus I take on 200th leaves three minutes earlier, I get home at a more reasonable time! Got all that? I didn’t even have to bring Everett Transit into it, because – despite its circulator runs being sore spots – they don’t really have anything to do with this.

The tipping point came on one of our “esteemed folks” bank holidays earlier this year. Now, on normal holidays, damn near every system running around Puget Sound switches to a Sunday schedule. But Martin Luther King Day and Presidents’ Day are, for whatever bullshit reason, not normal holidays. And Sunday schedules usually offer all-day service. But here, we can’t have that, because it would only make sense. Therefore, the transit gets to avoid switching to a Sunday schedule and just make service cutbacks. And by “cutbacks,” I mean they just plump STOP a handful of the routes I need. The morning proved to not be much of a problem; I was able to find an alternate way through Lynnwood. The evening run, though, forced me to stand for the full 90 minutes waiting for the Soundtransit bus to finally arrive and take me straight to Everett.

That sound like fun?

Yes, I’m glad to see that while a lot of cities are cutting transit, Seattle and the areas surrounding it are willingly voting to add to it. But those Link extensions will be years in the making, the Sounder is the most useless train on the planet, and the Swift is only working on one extra route at the moment. In the meantime, I can go crazy or get a set of wheels so I can roll out of bed at a reasonable hour.