Other states, other lives, other souls

I love serendipity.  A few days ago, at the one-year anniversary of the latest world pandemic, I stopped by the Little Free Library that I got installed when we first moved into our townhouse nine years ago.  It is easy to reach now, because most of the snow has melted. I picked out a book whose title intrigued me: A Book of Migrations, by Rebecca Solnit. On the cover was a quote from a New York Times review: “A brilliant meditation on travel.”  Since I have a travel blog with a similar aspirational mission, I grabbed it. Anything but the tedious Kindle book I was trying to read by George Saunders on writing good short stories. His technique is using detailed explication de texte of six 19^th century Russian short stories.  Not right now, Mr. Saunders—thanks.  I thought I was buying his latest inventive fiction. Amazon Prime encourages me to make impulse buys, like having the candy bars near the line for the grocery store checkout.

Ostensibly A Book of Migrations is about her trip to Ireland, after being granted Irish citizenship in 1986 on the basis of uncovering hitherto unknown Irish great-grandparents. What little ethnic identity she had was more Jewish than anything, being more aware of her Russian Jewish immigrant grandparents.  The first chapter of the book, entitled perhaps allegorically “The Cave”, describes a trip to Twin Falls, Idaho, where she was invited to give a talk.  After the talk she was taken to see a little-visited, but long inhabited, cave on the Shoshone homeland.  This brief visit conjured up in her a meditation on the importance of geographic place for Native Americans in identity formation, and also on the lack of such for her.  She describes her decision to visit Ireland in those terms.

Traveling, I had found in the course of a year of far-reaching excursions, shifted one’s memory and imagination as well as one’s body. The new and unknown places called forth strange, oft-forgotten correspondences and desires in the mind, so that the motion of travel takes place as much in the psyche as anywhere else. Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is, in that collapse of identify into geography I want to trace.” (p.10)

Exactly!–but back to serendipity.  As it turns out, I am just starting the process of planning an identity trip to southern England and maybe Wales, based on very sketchy information on the background of my father’s father who emigrated from England to the U.S. at the age of 18.  I am hoping my sister goes with me. Neither of us has been to the UK since we were in our late teens.  As some research has actually demonstrated about the best part of travel, the planning process makes me very happy, especially as we are still in the pandemic cave, awaiting our release after enough people have agreed to be inoculated with one of the 3 Covid vaccines.

Already I have started to take notice of other references to Cornwall, the region of many English ancestors, that I hadn’t noticed before.  I have found that travel planning focuses perception on things that are usually just part of the fleeting landscape of places, things, and people.  First, Cornwall is the alleged home of King Arthur, at Tintagel, a story every person of European or Disney movie extraction knows well. Previously I wrote a blog post about a road trip through France taken by my husband, my son and myself in 1992.  A small part of that trip was a hike through the Forest of Paimpont , another spot, in Brittany, where aspects of the Arthurian legend are said to have taken place.

Second, my family has taken several weekend trips to the little Wisconsin town of Mineral Point, at the southwest border with Iowa and Minnesota.  There one can visit original stone cabins, row houses and historical downtown buildings and learn the history of lead mining in the mid-1800s.  Cornish miners started arriving by 1840, due to the dire circumstances of mining and miners in Cornwall at the time.  We learned that the average lifespan of lead miners in this village was 28 years; something not to feel that nostalgic about.  Still, it seemed better than starving in Cornwall.  Right now, serendipitously, I am streaming the newer version of Poldark. It takes place in Cornwall in the late 1700s, as mines are being closed, peasants are starving, and peasant uprisings are happening in France, scaring the gentry in England.  Third, my sister has been considering visiting the Isles of Scilly, at the most southwestern edge below Cornwall. Neither of us had heard of it, but one of her piano students has a British father and he sings the praises of Scilly.  There is a furtive trip to Scilly by the main character Poldark.  If we go in early October, this area is the warmest place in all of Britain.  

On the subject of identity travel, in 2015 a Dutch friend and I led a 10-day adventure tour of the Netherlands. My mother came from Dutch immigrants, many of whom settled in the Chicago area.  Therefore, I am half Dutch, but only one quarter British.  My conservative father always referred to his Dutch father-in-law as a “Communist”. The link I included explains why.  Like today, conservatives thought everybody to the left of them was a Communist. I am much more identified with my Dutch heritage and wrote a meditation on it in honor of my 70^th birthday. I attribute to it what I think are my more positive qualities—religious skepticism, political tolerance, love of bicycling and gardening, and quirky aesthetic.  My relationship with my father was much more problematic, so I have not so positively bonded with that cultural influence—especially the no hugging part and the tendency to make silly puns. I am also not much of a tea drinker, but I do love curry.  My father was an avowed atheist, so the religious skepticism comes from both sides. Now I have decided to give my British side more of a fighting chance, so I hope I will be entering the ring next fall.  I continue my happy preparations and will finish reading A Book of Migrations as the frozen lakes and relationships begin to thaw.