The other day, a friend visiting town sent me a text:

What was the name of that bar you took me to, the one with the incredible view?

As soon as I read it, I knew the exact place she was referring to. We had gone several Decembers ago. At 4:30 in the evening, too early for a cocktail but right on time to glimpse the spectrum of blues and grays of the Bosphorus as it sank into a winter’s night. As darkness fell, the bridge lit up on our left and the Hagia Sophia glowed to our right, bringing my mind back a few more years, to the very first time I had swiveled up to that bar, taken in that view.

My first time had been with a cosmopolitan Istanbulite, a woman who knew how to speak to everyone in the city. She had once told me: “I could never live or work elsewhere! Look how deftly I weave through the fiber of the city. Could you imagine me negotiating with a contractor in a different language? The art of it, my savviness would disappear.”

Later, while sipping drinks infused with jalapeno (hers), and soaked through with mastica liqueur (mine), she said she had fallen in love and was moving to the American suburbs. I looked out beyond my friend toward the water, mesmerized by the breadth of the city. The modern bridge that spanned continents, the minarets that reached their ancient, pointed fingers to the sky. For a moment, I understood what it meant to start over. The transformation, throughout the years, of a nation’s identity. The triggers—like love, like loss—that can suddenly shift your own.

When I left the bar, the sensation stayed with me, but lost its severity. It returns, in full, each time I slide back up to that bar and turn toward that view. It’s not enlightenment, but it’s also not an exaggeration to say it might be a hard, shining piece of it. Every significant moment of my life was rendered significant because of its backdrop. A sentiment can arrive, but it won’t stay unless it has a place to settle. A place that’s reflective of its own quality.

Like most writers, I’ve been told that the intensity of my emotions generally falls on the extreme end of the scale. This was annoying information! There had to be a way to get others—at the very least, my close friends—to understand my emotions. Very slowly, then all at once, it became the most important work of my life: curating an experience so that others could feel exactly as I felt. I knew of only two ways to do this. Or at least, two ways that I might be able to pull off: writing novels, and planning travel.

Some novelists like to pick apart the lives and emotions of others. This is a noble endeavor, just not mine. Mine is to make you feel—through an imagined setting and persona that makes for a good narrative, tight plot—the exact emotions that I have both suffered through and enjoyed. “A lie that tells a truth,” because the truth itself can’t get the reader quite where the writer wants her.

Or, you could move the entire journey into the real world.

My travel recommendations are long and detailed. They’re built out into days, often split into hours. I check sunset times to plan dinner, and call the restaurant to ask if they can reserve the specific table I have in mind. My recommendations for transport vary based on time and traffic. Do I want you frantic, gasping for clean air in a crowded metro, or safe and cocooned as you watch the city lights in the back of a cab? What sort of a breakfast on a rainy autumn day would have you feeling what I felt, seeing what I saw? If the city in question is my city, I send along a short note with my tips: If you’d like, you can cancel the hotel and stay with me. That way, you wouldn’t have to think about it. That way, I have even greater control over your experience.

Sure, this might be an obsessive level of control. But if I curate your experience I can possibly curate your mindset. At the right angle, in the right light, the place itself can feed you the emotion. And maybe then, you can step inside a feeling that I once had. 

I texted my friend back with a Google Maps link of the bar. I wondered if she had experienced the same sense of temporality and transformation when I had taken her, and whether this weekend, her American husband would, too.

What I’m trying to do here is clearly unachievable. A million people could read the same book, then set it down with a million different takeaways. We’re too complex to be manipulated by a single novel, one trip abroad. Even if I reserve the perfect table by the water half an hour before sunset, at a restaurant at an ideal distance from the neighborhood mosque (so the call to prayer sounds distant and spiritual instead of loud and alarming), even if the white wine is at the right temperature, even if the lazy boats are out again this evening, even if this meal punctuates the end of a long day in chaotic bazaars and damp underground cisterns, you may not end up feeling the sense of mysticism and harmony that I had in mind for you. You may not end up feeling anything at all. Maybe just a bit of relief, that you’ve finally worked your way through my exhausting schedule.

But for me, the joy is in the journey. When a place kindles a specific emotion in me, I’ll always wonder how to bring a future traveler—or a future reader—to that state of mind. Somehow, I’m completely unhindered by thoughts of futility. The effort itself satisfies the urge, the work itself is the reward.

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Holiday Country by İnci Atrek is available from Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.

Featured image: Sam Dunes near Jaisalmer, camel in Rajasthan by Coolgama under Creative Commons 4.0 International

I was twenty-seven when I walked across Australia, with a dog for company, and camels to carry my gear. It was a deeply private act, which I assumed would hold no interest for others. I had no intention of writing about it afterwards, nor of recording the journey as it was happening. It was the doing of something just for itself.

Yet so personal a gesture—a wish to disappear beneath any radar—would beget its opposite. Before the journey was even over, I was front-page news, and later the story was repeated on the covers of hundreds of magazines around the world. Rick Smolan’s gorgeous photographs lent a glamour to what I had done, to which I had been oblivious while doing it.

Of course that doing changed me. It gave me what I had known, inchoately, I needed—a kind of integration. Proof to myself that “useless ugly stupid” was not all there was. But it did much more than that. It rerouted my fate and recast my prospects, an upheaval all the more disorienting for being unexpected. And it would affect others, intimates as well as strangers, in ways that were baffling to me at the time.

Here were different kinds of danger, requiring a different kind of prudence. Fame, that grand deluder, puts you at risk of ceasing to be yourself. It distorts not just how you appear to others, which doesn’t matter much, but how you might appear to yourself, which does. I knew this instinctively, and my response was to retreat from it. I feared the loss of anonymity and privacy, and with it a particular kind of freedom: to observe rather than be observed. When retreat was not possible, I made a facsimile Robyn, a public identity to protect the private one.

All of which isn’t to say that I eschewed the benefits suddenly bestowed—an enormous opening of opportunity. I had lost something but, at the same time, was being offered so very much. Negotiating those assets and liabilities, while protecting an internal space free from distorting influence—that was the task. I certainly had no sophistication to guide me, only an innate discernment that had directed my course so far.

The most important asset was that at last I had what I once feared would be forever beyond my reach: money for plane fares out of Australia. (Can anyone today understand how urgent that desire was for my generation, and how difficult to assuage?) There were even possibilities waiting on the far side. Jonathan Cape Publishers in London had offered to pay me an advance to write a book.

But did I want to write a book? Who said I could write a book? I enjoyed writing for myself, and the article I had to produce for National Geographic was easy, because it was facile. I wrote a longer one for the London Sunday Times, and that had given me satisfaction. But a book? On the pro side, I reasoned that, if I did write it, the limelight would shift to the book, and I would be left alone. The way you might distract a pack of dogs with a thrown bone.

I was reading Doris Lessing at that time and, like so many others, had been bowled over by what she had attempted in her novels. Until then I had more or less avoided female authors. I already knew how women thought, how they saw and experienced the world. What I needed to know was how men thought. They were the inheritors of the enlightenment project to which I aspired. They ran everything, they were the powerful, and to understand them was to understand the world, the better to negotiate a place in it. Doris’s writing spoke directly to the complexities of finding that place. Again it must be understood that at that time there were very few models for unconventional women to be inspired by. There was the sense that we had to make it up as we went along, out there on the front lines, without much to guide or encourage us.

I wrote to her and said how “useful” her work had been to me. She replied. We corresponded. In response to my hesitation in committing myself to Jonathan Cape, she said, “If you can write a good letter you can write a good book. Why don’t you come to England, since your publishers are here?”

So I did.

Via a stop-off in India, courtesy of dear Rick, who took me along as a sidekick on a photographic assignment.

There were many countries I wanted to explore, but India had never been one of them. The patchouli and incense; the hepatitis and credulous spiritualism coming back along the hippie trail only confirmed my bias against it. India was not for me.

Rick had to cover the Pushkar camel fair, in Rajasthan. The festival is now famous, and many Europeans go there. But at that time, 1978 (or perhaps it was 1979), I think he and I were the only non-Indians present.

Another profound effect of the desert journey was that it informed a new way of looking at human history. Because I had begun to know a little about Australian Aboriginal culture, through an association with Eddie, an old Pitjantjatjara man who had decided to accompany me part of the way, I was able to compare hunter-gatherer ways of being with the cultural assumptions inherited from millennia of agriculture. I had been struck by how profoundly at home, existentially at home, he was. His ancestors had solved so many of the problems inherent in human existence. Goods were shared out pretty much equally, no one was left out. They were environmental scientists par excellence. And the philosophy of the Dreaming, in so far as I could penetrate it, seemed to me one of the greatest ever brought forth from human imagination: a theory of everything rendered into poetry.

Nomads, generally speaking, tread lightly upon the earth. Because they are constantly moving, they cannot accumulate a lot of stuff. They have to know their environments well, valuing and accumulating knowledge systems rather than goods. Agriculture, on the other hand, in its battle with nature, has created problems for us that have escalated until our species threatens its own existence. These were nascent ideas at the time, and they were certainly not free of romanticism (the desire to escape reality rather than apprehend it better). Even so, they were working away at the back of my mind, and I knew I would need to explore other kinds of mobile cultures to see if my hunches had any value at all.

India was about the last place I imagined stumbling across that opportunity.

The Raika Rabaris were Rajasthani camel herders, and they had come to Pushkar to buy and sell their animals. Never could I have imagined, in my most starry-eyed fantasies, that nomads could look like this. The women wore bright pink chiffon veils bordered and embroidered with silver. Voluminously gathered skirts like mid-length tutus. Huge silver bangles on their ankles. Stack upon stack of bracelets up their muscular arms. The men were all in white, with huge scarlet turbans. In the dusk, they camped on the pink sandhills surrounding Pushkar, with their tethered camels, sitting around tiny fires, the women’s silver reflecting spangles into the smoky air.

What if I could travel with them?

So it was that, after Rick had returned to the States, I found myself standing alone on an empty airport runway, in the middle, from my point of view, of nowhere, wondering how I might go about locating a gentleman called Gomal Khotari. Someone in Delhi had told me he knew all there was to know about the Rabari.

I seem to have had an unusually fateful life, not in the supernatural sense, but more mundanely, in this way: odd and unlikely events, coincidences, have produced enormous effects, fanning out into future time, and seemingly outside my control. Perhaps a strong fate is nothing more than a reckless disregard for consequences, which can look like courage, but is really something else—a curiosity greater, even, than fear. Or even more banal, a difficulty in saying no. In any case, this was one of those moments when I stepped into the unknown, unburdened by nous or knowledge, and stumbled across my future.

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From Unfinished Woman: A Memoir by Robyn Davidson. Available from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Robyn Davidson, 2023. All rights reserved.

I have so many photos of it. Bougainvillea draping over walls next to cobbled streets, bougainvillea in pots running wild over the iron grills of restaurants, bougainvillea bonsai in a rock garden. They are hardy, flowering even in near-droughts. They come in an array of lollipop colors, from golden yellow to magenta. They fit into any context, somehow managing to look as if they have always belonged here. Cobbled street in Rome? Sure. Beachside balcony in Miami? Why not. Riverfront in Lisbon? No problem.

I remember my mental muscles twitching the first time I learned that the papery petals of the bougainvillea are actually not flowers; they are leaves. We lived then in a small house, rented from a family friend. The neighbors on both sides were wealthy and their houses had gardens, and the households had stay-at-home mothers and servants to water the plants. As a result, a luxuriant bough of bougainvillea clambered over one tall wall and spilled over into the thin mud corridor between our house and their wall. I thought of it as our bougainvillea and felt even then the grace of this plant, climbing over walls, bridging social chasms, bringing its beauty to people who had done nothing to deserve it.

It was my aunt, an agricultural scientist, who told me that the bougainvillea flowers as I thought of them were not flowers, that they were leaves. The scientific term is bract—a modified leaf that often hides the real flower in its axil. Bougainvillea bracts come in extraordinary colors, from shades of pink that go from the lightest of blushes to extravagant fuchsias. There are crinkly yellows that remind me of crumpled first drafts and oranges and saffrons and whites, often brilliant against the lush green leafery that surrounds them. “These bracts are actually protecting the real flowers, by pretending to be flowers,” my aunt told me, teasing out the tiny white flower hiding inside a cluster of bougainvillea bracts.

My parents eventually built a house of their own. By the time they finished the house, we children had left home. After years of living in a house that was too small, my parents now live alone in a house that is too big for them. My mother, whose bank-clerk salary was the only source of income for most of our childhood, started gardening, turning her practical maternal attention to green peppers and curry leaves and aloe vera. “I am not interested in flowers,” she would say, frugally choosing “useful plants” to make the most of her small yard. But then the bougainvillea bug bit her.

One year when I came home from Brooklyn, there was a row of pots on the wall, with bougainvilleas in different colors spilling out of them. It was my job that summer to water them carefully. Bougainvillea roots are famously weak—they are climbers, so they do not have to support their own weight. What they have instead is a strong grip—using their thorns, they wind their way up or down, making a home for themselves on hedges, walls, other trees, making themselves both ordinary and spectacular at the same time. They reminded me of the way I, too, was clawing my way up the walls of another country, while my roots shallowed in the ground.

And so I started reading about them. Bougainvilleas are named after the eighteenth-century French admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who led a voyage of circumnavigation around the world. His expedition was part of the race between the British and the French to make new discoveries in the South Pacific. Bougainville’s expedition was the first one to include a government-sponsored naturalist on board, Philibert Commerçon.

The expedition arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1767, where Commerçon noticed trees with bright mauve and magenta bracts. He named this new genus Bougainvillea, in honor of the expedition leader. Commerçon is said to have collected at least five specimens of this then-unusual plant in Rio de Janeiro—today these specimens can be seen in various herbariums in France.

But was it really Commerçon who noticed these plants first? Commerçon was not a man in robust health; he would go on to die in Madagascar during the same expedition. On board, he was accompanied by an assistant who also happened to be an expert botanist. There is some speculation that this assistant was his lover, a woman who had disguised herself as a man to fit into the masculine atmosphere of the ship.

According to Glynis Ridley’s The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, it was Baret who first noticed and described this plant—and perhaps most of the six thousand-odd natural specimens that the expedition collected—many of these named for Commerçon or Bougainville. In Ridley’s telling, Baret went looking for medicinal plants in the forest of Rio de Janeiro because Commerçon was sick, and she was drawn to the red bracts of the bougainvillea because of the doctrine of signatures, according to which the shapes and colors of plants can reveal their uses.

The very next year, Captain Cook and his Endeavour expedition would arrive in Rio de Janeiro, where the Portuguese rulers had grown even more suspicious. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on board, and his team were not allowed to disembark, but according to their diaries, they managed to outwit the sentinels and sneak out at night by boat. The Endeavour returned to London with various plant specimens and the first recorded sketch of a bougainvillea—a finished watercolor that is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum of London.

And thus the bougainvillea was discovered and described and identified. But of course, it was neither Commerçon nor Baret who discovered the bougainvillea. The flower is native to the countries we now know as Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. It is interesting that even though Glynis Ridley is alive to the unfairness by which Jeanne Baret is sidelined from bougainvillea history, she does not inquire into the lopsidedness of colonial explorers getting to name plants after themselves without seeking to find their local names or understand their local contexts. The words discovered or described or identified suggest a foreign audience for these actions—the locals did not need to perform any of these elaborate epistemological tasks.

People of color often use air quotes when we talk of explorers who “discovered” the Americas or India. Alas, it is hard to translate air quotes to text. My fingers ache often to somehow include the eye-rolling with which we accompany air quotes. I propose instead a new word: pseudiscovery. The silent p, I hope, will convey the silence of our air quotes, the people and places who were rendered invisible when Europeans pseudiscovered them.

Today the bougainvillea is the cliché flower you expect to see in cute colonial towns. It is known as Santa Rita in Uruguay, trinitaria in Mexico, jahanamiya in Arabic, bunga kertas in Indonesia. I love also all the vernacular variations of bougainvillea, the pronunciations catching the local accents—from bowgainvilla in my own Malayalam to bumbagilia in Spanish.

But before the bougainvillea was pseudiscovered and grown in the herbariums of France and propagated in the gardens of England, before it was transplanted into tropical colonies around the world by the British, French, and Portuguese, before it acquired all these different names, it must have had a name. What is the bougainvillea called in the Tupian languages, many of them now extinct, spoken in the Andean region when Commerçon and Cook arrived? It must have been called something else. Or rather, it was something else. In other words, the bougainvillea is not a bougainvillea just as its flower is not a flower.

*

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about coming across the word puhpowee, the Anishinabe word for the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. “As a biologist I was stunned that such a word existed,” Kimmerer writes, adding that Western natural science has no such term, no words to hold the mystery of invisible energies. While she admires botany for its “intimate vocabulary that names each little part” of a plant, she is conscious that something is missing when you reduce a creature to its working parts. Kimmerer calls this a “a grave loss in translation from the native languages.”

When those seafaring French naturalists aboard the Étoile decided to call this delicate pink flower a bougainvillea and when the “Buginvillea spectabilis” was finally entered into the second volume of the fourth edition of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum in 1799, what was lost was not just the local name of a bract. It was one of countless missed opportunities to counterpoint the Enlightenment view of the world, which European explorers carried around the world as the foundation of knowledge. Perhaps there was a brief moment there when we could have chartered a different relationship to nature that might have saved our planet from the environmental blunders that were set in motion with the Industrial Revolution.

It is also worth remembering that the male European dominance over natural history in this particular moment also represented a break in another tradition: herbalism. Traditionally, across many cultures, women were the mistresses of the world of herbs and plants. Natural history was mostly a domestic science, used in medicine and cooking.

But with botany emerging as a science in the eighteenth century, men of science began claiming for themselves the role of taxonomers and natural history experts, especially after Carl Linnaeus’s system of classifying plants according to their sexual and reproductive qualities threw the shadow of immodesty over the study of botany. Jeanne Baret’s biographer, Glynis Ridely, speculates that Baret was an herb woman who came into contact with the naturalist Commerçon because she was a source of information for him.

In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt traces the history of modern travel writing to this particular moment. “The South Sea expeditions of Cook and Bougainville, first organized around the transit of Venus in 1768, inaugurated the era of scientific travel and scientific travel writing,” she says. With Cook mapping the shores of Australia, those voyages marked the end of the era of European navigational exploration.

Now that there were no more new shores to plant the flag on, exploration shifted inland, aided and abetted by the naturalists and botanists and illustrators who found it easier to get sponsored by their governments and monarchs to accompany such expeditions. Much like the U.S. journalists who were embedded with U.S. soldiers during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, these supposedly neutral scholars and scientists would also disguise their sympathies under the cloak of seeking and classifying and disseminating information.

Pratt breaks down how scientific and later sentimental travel writing comes out of a European knowledge-building project that in turn was both tool and disguise for colonial expansion. Natural history asserted the European male authority over the planet and his rationalist, extractive understanding of people and places as opposed to experiential, community-oriented understanding. It anointed the white male authority figure as an obvious choice for the narrator of travel writing. This authority was a more utopian, innocent version of the colonial explorer’s authority. It was concerned more with science and natural history, but it managed to reinforce the expansionist systems of European surveillance and appropriation of resources.

The insidiousness by which natural history explorations continued the colonial project while setting themselves apart from it reminds me of how in our own times, tourists will often set themselves apart from other tourists by calling themselves travelers. While tourists are derided for their all-too-obvious desires, their kitschy souvenirs and their group travels, travelers are somehow deeper and seeking profound experiences. They may take the shape of voluntourists, who are convinced they are making the Third World a better place, or spiritual seekers looking to discover who they are amid the squalor. Increasingly plain old tourism is being whitewashed and greenwashed into “travel” in the same way that mercantile exploring was reframed as natural history explorations. But these reinventions are still operating within the same voyeuristic paradigms that their predecessors set in place.

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From Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib. Copyright © 2023. Available from Catapult Books.

There is an old joke about a confession. “Father, I must confess that I’ve sinned,” a man tells the priest, “I’m guilty of stealing.”

The priest asks, “What did you steal?”

“Well, a ham,” says the man.

“What did you do with it?”

Confusedly, the man responds, “I hid it under the bridge outside town.”

“Well, just leave it there and say three Our Fathers for your penance.”

He left the ham and said three Our Fathers for his penance. But he wondered why the ham should go to waste. The man went back to the bridge but found that the ham was stolen. The priest took it. The next time the man sinned, he went to confession, but with reservations. “Father, I must confess that I’ve sinned. I’m guilty of adultery.” The priest asks, “Who did you sin with?” Remembering the ham, he refused to tell.

This joke, rumored to be told by Polish immigrants in the Midwest, begins from a position of vulnerability, honesty, and submission to the big other (the priest)—the man has committed a small crime of dietary theft, but is forthcoming with the information and shows his willingness to repent for his nutritional indulgences. But as it happens, it is not solely the sinning man, a representation of the toiling masses, who betrays his confession, but also the priest, who, representing God and all that is otherworldly, commits a graver crime of nutritional betrayal. He forsakes both man and God for the ham.

I like to imagine the joke as a metaphor, maybe even a justification, for something more detached from the specificity of the joke and its fetishization of smoked hog: gatekeeping. Specifically the gatekeeping of one’s local spots from tourists or untrusted acquaintances. How hard it is to visit a new city and find the caliber of places it’s taken you years to find in your own city. And how wonderful it is when you just so happen to stumble across the perfect park or bookstore in a new city.

When the Columbus-born writer James Thurber went to Paris, he did not search for sites through the obvious means—tourist maps, advice from locals, advice from tourists who took advice from locals—but instead, the locations inside his favorite novel (Henry James’ The Ambassadors). When I visited the Midwestern city of Indianapolis, I relied not on the more obvious means of Top 10 Lists online, advice from locals, or Top 10 Lists online based on the advice from locals, but instead, on the online blackhole of Reddit. Despite what some might say of the website, it is the perfect location for must-see destinations in Indianapolis. One of these Indianapolis spots, or cherished hams, is a more obvious establishment, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum.

The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and library are housed in a modest three story structure on a corner past the city’s canals. It boasts items like Vonnegut’s typewriter, original drawings, and a complete selection of his re-published novels for purchase. I didn’t purchase any of his works, although I did like the cover of Fates Worse Than Death, which displays a portrait of Vonnegut standing in a field as if it were for his senior pictures. I did, however, buy a beanie with the museum logo and no price tag. It cost $30, a steep price for a head sock (but not so steep that I canceled the transaction).

Indianapolis, a city with its interior location and small population (under 900,000), has an unassuming reputation. The city is landlocked. Their squirrels are fearless, their street dwellers are numerous, and their reputation is hopelessly plain. It is a place where residents will walk by a dying butterfly—dead to the world and really dead—on the sidewalk without a second glance, a city where the population finds little inspiration in their professional football team called the Colts—which sounds indistinguishable from the Cults, a far more interesting team name.  But Indianapolis has also housed two of America’s most read authors—Vonnegut and the YA author and vlogger, Hank Green, who moved to the city in 2007. Many flock to visit the city because they believe it is the resting place for Kurt Vonnegut.

When I traveled to Dayton, Ohio over the summer, I made a pilgrimage to the grave of the famous poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, which happens to be next to the famous kings of aviation, the Wright Brothers. An excerpt of one of his Dunbar’s poems goes: “So long as the streams run down, / And as long as the robins trill, / Let us taunt old Care with a merry air, / And sing in the face of ill.”

When I visited Paris in the winter, I sat uncomfortably behind a flight of stairs where Richard Wright’s ashes are snugly kept in the corner next to a Gerard Renier. I left a terribly sketched portrait of him to show that at least some Americans put in the work to find his grave (he’s not listed on any of the silly tourist maps). It is common to visit the graves of figures in cities one visits and it is even common to visit one’s local cemetery as some do at the Greenlawn Cemetery to pay respects to the beloved James Thurber and his dog, Muggs. But to visit Vonnegut’s grave in Indianapolis is far harder than it is to visit Thurber’s in Columbus for one simple reason: he’s not there.

If you visit the Crown Hill Cemetery on the northside of Indianapolis, you will find the name Kurt Vonnegut on a gravestone and packs of Pall Mall cigarettes placed around it—Vonnegut’s only addiction, a nonlethal one as it turns out (he died by falling down the stairs). But the occupant resting underground is not the author. The tenant is an architect, his father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., who designed some of the city’s most admirable structures like the 1907 Central Union Telephone Company building, which was, at risk of being demolished, instead picked up and rotated 90 degrees. It was later demolished in 1963. Vonnegut Sr. might disapprove of the cigarettes placed on his grave as he died from emphysema. Vonnegut Jr.’s remains are rumored to be in a crematory state, scattered elsewhere, perhaps in the wind.

His being from Indianapolis is a common theme throughout Vonnegut’s novels and interviews. The first time I read Vonnegut was in his introduction to Anne Sexton’s twisted fable collection called Transformations. “Indianapolis,” he wrote in one of the first paragraphs, “is the world’s largest city not on a navigable waterway.” As an apologist for the Midwest myself, I respect a man who can, in the introduction to a fable collection of all places, find space to sell the reader on Indianapolis.

Vonnegut’s novels constantly talk about the Midwest—in the first three pages of Slaughterhouse-Five, he mentions Dayton, Ohio and Wisconsin—and there is rarely a piece written by him that doesn’t touch on the city of his origin. This is what he had to say about the Great Lakes region:

I am one of America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

And I must confess that I’ve been sold on the city of Indianapolis and their fresh water. Despite its unimpressive reputation and fearless squirrels, there are many admirable qualities to Indianapolis. It is a city with a bus rapid transit line that puts it a decade ahead of Columbus. It’s a city that boasts a number of bookstores (though none were open during my visit). There are also canals that put the city on a footing with London’s borough of Hackney. And of course, Indianapolis has a thriving immigrant population, including a strong Turkish community as represented by the famous Bosphorus Cafe located inside what looks like a repurposed 19th century home. “Indianapolis,” as my girlfriend put it, “is my Paris.” (She also told me, “I’ve been to every state except some.”)

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, becomes unstuck in time. Vonnegut describes his first experience like so:

His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn’t anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light and a hum.

We first noticed a pulsing hum in our Airbnb. After turning off the AC, we realized the hum was not from any one source, but from a general core, the core of the city. There is a hum that permeates Indianapolis, a pulsing sound that is not quite industrial, but technological or mystic. It continued through the night and followed us outside. We became adapted to the core and feared what kind of effect long-term exposure would have on our minds. The hum was real, or so we think, but there was something about the ominous noise that was otherworldly and distinctly Vonnegut-esque. It’s as though he, surpassing the confinement of fiction, funded a project to make the city itself unstuck in time.

Vonnegut’s imprint on the city is witnessed not just through the hum, but in the many businesses that reference his novels. The restaurant Bluebeard, named after his 1987 novel of the same name, restaurants like Milktooth offer Vonnegut-inspired cocktails like Player Piano, a drink mixed with brown sugar cranberry caramel, and cafes like Bovaconti Coffee boast a logo that seems to be inspired by the iconic Vonnegut illustration in Breakfast of Champions of a modestly lined butthole.

The two most important voices produced by Indiana, both of whom identified as socialists and produced a high output of written work, are the great Socialist presidential candidate, Victor Eugene Debs, and our beloved writer, Kurt Vonnegut. The notoriety of the former is echoed by Vonnegut who, at one point, inspired by Debs, wanted to become a labor organizer himself.

Like Twain before him, Vonnegut became more explicitly politicized in his later years. Twain’s most polemic work is not a humor piece, but an anti-war story called The War Prayer. A fictional prayer to protect the troops is interrupted by an angel who translates their coded prayer with an honest depiction about the reality of wishing brutal death on young men. He was afraid to publish it while alive, claiming that “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.”

Vonnegut, too, was hesitant to release his book of very political writings in his final years. His book A Man Without A Country, a collection of articles written for the Chicago-based left-wing magazine In These Times, calls attention to other Midwestern progressives like Carl Sandburg, Eugene Debs, and Abraham Lincoln. “Like me, many American socialists were freshwater people,” he wrote.

Just as Thurber had to leave his Midwestern city to write about it, so too did Vonnegut. Despite his long tenure in New York City, Vonnegut never abandoned the core Indianapolis. In a letter to the former head of Visit Indy, which is on display at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum, Vonnegut wrote: “Although I live in the East, I remain an aggressively and sometimes abrasively Indianapolis person, and remain such until I die.”

Featured image by Lucas Hilderbrand, 2017

In January 2017 I embarked on a three-month research road trip for this project, starting from Los Angeles and driving through Texas, New Orleans, dipping down to Florida, up through Atlanta and the mid-Atlantic coast, then looping back through the rust belt and across the plains, the Rockies, and the Southwest. I covered thousands of miles and visited gay bars and archives in dozens of cities.

My trip, scheduled to align with a sabbatical, also took me through a newly charged political map; I started driving the week that Trump was inaugurated, and most of my route took me through red states. In those places and in that moment, I not only found that queer people were indeed everywhere but also that we needed the sanctuary of gay bars more than ever.

Mable Peabody’s Beauty Parlor and Chainsaw Repair logo mural on one of its front windows. Photo by Lucas Hilderbrand, 2017.

Five days into the trip, I had the most sublime gay bar night of my journey at Mable Peabody’s Beauty Parlor and Chainsaw in Denton, Texas,  the only gay bar in Denton, home of both UNT and Texas Women’s University. (The bar closed in September 2017 after thirty-eight years.) It was located in a 1960s-style strip mall, and a sign announced its name in large block letters; the front windows featured murals of Divine in Pink Flamingos and Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as a smaller but more elaborate logo for the bar.

The joint had me before I even walked in the door. Inside to the right, a sign announced a room flanked with red fringe as the Rouge Parlour; to the left, a chainsaw hung over the pool table and near a pair of disco balls. Mid-century hospital signage identified the dance floor/stage area as Gynecology & Obstetrics. Both restrooms were gender neutral. It was quiet when I stopped in during my first night in town, but I noticed a flyer for an event called Glitterbomb two nights later and decided to check it out. That may have been the best decision of my life.

On Thursday the bar was much busier, and before the show it was difficult to distinguish performers from audience members. The clientele was gender mixed and gender fluid. A table near the entrance collected tampons and sanitary pads for the local food bank. One patron presented—in archaic terms—as a bearded lady as they circulated with glowing Christmas lights draped around their neck and shoulders. The crowd cheered for a birthday girl when she arrived. It felt more like a community than any bar I’d ever visited. The line for the bar—just one bartender was working—was long but single file and very orderly. I had arranged to meet up with a nice guy I had chatted with on the apps and his fun gal pal, and we settled at a back corner table to watch the show.

Glitterbomb unveiled itself to be a variety show featuring genderqueer burlesque and drag. The theme for each act in that week’s installment was junk food, and it was amazing. If I used Twitter, I would have live-tweeted it; instead, I posted a series of tipsy Facebook updates to document the proceedings. The boi emcee went by Milo Cox, and most of the performers appeared to present as female, although most also toyed with gender. The stage manager performed the opening number: a lesbian Oompa Loompa burlesque routine in which she stripped down to golden-ticket pasties.

Next, first-time audience members were ritually devirginized as at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and then baptized in glitter. To counteract the terror and depression of Trump’s new presidency, the emcee made a practice of announcing good news between acts; these dispatches ranged from global progress (like a species making it off the endangered species list) to very local breakthroughs (Lucy finally got her ex off the lease; someone heard from his parents for the first time in twenty years; another person got a new job). The crowd was here to witness and support people getting through life.

Photo by Lucas Hilderbrand, 2017.

Performers with such pop-culture double-entendre stage names as Justin Beaver and Strawberry Squirtcake took their turns on the stage, as did drag king Oliver Clothesoff, who offered an Oreo-themed act to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “The White Stuff.” A genderqueer performer with a beard and amazing dance moves pulled Twinkies out of their underwear, crammed one whole in their maw, and then deep-kissed it into the mouth of someone standing in the front row. A femme dancer displayed her body strength and control, and a chaotic duo drizzled each other with Easy Cheese followed by bowls of queso.

A woman in Ronald McDonald drag—a long red wig and terrifying clown makeup—pulled off her pants while eating French fries. Like the processed foods that inspired it, the show was delicious. I have seen my share of questionable queer performance art and after-midnight nightclub genderfuck drag acts on the coasts, but this show managed to feel cathartic yet be in on its own joke. Queerness has been famously difficult for theorists to pin down and define, but here it was in its fabulous, playful, transgressive, messy, and world-making essence.

After the last act, the emcee announced that the following week’s show would be themed for Galentine’s Day—referencing the alternative holiday celebrating female friendships invented by the sitcom Parks and Recreation—and said, “Come see some Leslie Knope action you never thought you’d see.” As soon as the show was over, the audience spontaneously rushed the stage to line dance for two songs. Everyone seemed to know every gesture and step. This was still Texas, after all. But seemingly the queer heart of it.

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From The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After by Lucas Hilderbrand. Copyright © 2023. Available from Duke University Press.

Lingering elegiac evenings of the summer solstice, when the parted day slips behind the mountains to the north like a child hiding behind a sofa, are the best for exploring the valley of Ballynakill Lake. Elements of this little world apart that might not be noticed at other times become quietly insistent on presenting themselves, and those prominent by daylight sink back into obscurity. The roofless gables of the medieval chapel of St Ceannanach (from which the parish is called Baile na Cille, the settlement of the church) are less distinguishable from the dark profiles of trees in the graveyard behind it, whereas by day the ruin, one corner of which touches the roadside wall, seems to rest an elbow on it and lean out like an old farmer eyeing the approaching passer-by; you know you will not get past without having to listen to some inconsequential local history. ‘Did you ever hear of Strong Ned?’ he might say. ‘That’s Éamonn Láidir in Irish. He was an O’Flaherty; his grandfather had the land round here until Cromwell hanged him and gave it to the Martins. Nimble Dick Martin used to come round for the rent with his servants, all armed, and Ned would drive them off all by himself. He was seven feet tall. When he died he was buried just where I’m standing now. People used to come and see his great big bones; they were on show in a sort of shelf in the church wall . . .’

But in the evenings the stories that make themselves heard are less easily understood and of much older origins. At the far end of Ballynakill Lake, which lies at the foot of the meadowed slope south of the chapel and stretches for over a mile to the west, the attention of the belated walker might be caught by two white shapes on a low hillock; at first glance they could be swans asleep. Two stones, in fact, strangely luminous in the gloaming, one of a pyramidal shape and about a yard high, the other a stubby block of the same size but fallen on its side. A little further on a lane leads to the south, climbing around some curious little hills, a moraine left by the glacier that once pushed through the Ballynakill valley to Cleggan Bay. It is because of these hills that the area is called Sheeauns, or Na Siáin, the fairy mounds; they are Sián Fada, the long fairy mound, Sián Mór and Sián Beag, the big and small fairy mounds, Conroy’s Sián, topped by a circular cattle shelter which the long-departed Conroy built up out of the ruins of an ancient ringfort, and Sián na Cuaiche, the fairy mound of the cuckoo. When the crooked thorn trees in the hollows between these hills rake darkness out of the twilight, I have never seen a place more conducive to the fairy faith. The lane continues past a few cottages, then the sound of a stream hidden in an overgrown gully begins to accompany the way, and after a little bridge and a bend to the west, one sees another stone gleaming dimly, a stout pillar about five feet high, among gorse- bushes on a corner of rough land overlooking the stream. What are these ghostly stones that seem to come out at night?

Of course the archaeologists have noted them in all the daylight science can cast on them, and determined that they are Bronze Age monuments, dating from between 2500 and 1000 BC. I will approach the questions of their concentration in the Ballynakill area, their significance to our age, and the less answer- able one of their significance to those who erected them, through an account of my first sight of one of their sort, in the townland of Garraunbawn, another maze of lanes and fields and little hills a mile or so to the east of the old chapel of Ballynakill. At the time of my visit I had already gathered into my mind a number of bits of information about this place, fragmentary but intriguing, like shards of some antique decorated vessel. According to the experts I had consulted at the Ordnance Survey, ‘Garraunbawn,’ the official townland name, is an anglicization of the Irish ‘An Garrán Bán,’ the white or fallow thicket, garrán, a shrubbery or thicket, being a common element in placenames. However, I had also dug out of the OS archives the ‘field name books’ kept by the surveyors who first mapped this area in 1839, and in one of these was a note saying that the Irish name of this place was ‘An Gearrán Bán,’ the white horse. Gearrán, a gelding or small horse, is close in sound to garrán, a shrubbery, and the difference between them—that subtle deflection of the g towards a gy—is lost, like so much else, in anglicization. Further, the old notebook stated that the townland took its name from that of a rock, although it did not record where this rock was. There was also a story I’d heard from a nonagenarian gentleman, formerly of Garraunbawn House, about a white horse that came up out of Garraunbawn Lake; a man caught it and saddled and rode it, and then took the saddle off and hung it over a rock, while the horse galloped away and plunged into the lake again. The mark of the saddle, my informant had heard, was still to be seen on the rock, but unfortunately he didn’t know exactly where this rock was. Another hint had come from an archaeologist who told me that there was a Bronze Age standing stone on the top of a small glacial hill or drumlin in Garraunbawn; in fact such a hill occupies most of the area of the townland.

I remember that it was on a particularly beautiful evening that the thread of my explorations led me through Garraunbawn. I pushed my bike up the lane, sunk between banks rich with wildflowers, that crosses the hill, and just at the top of the slope I glanced through a gap in the hedge. There, in a meadow that fell away towards Ballynakill Bay and the vista of mountains beyond, was the standing stone. It was a stumpy boulder set on end, about five feet high, of milk-white quartz dappled with grey lichen, and in the half-light it looked exactly like the rump of an old white horse, peacefully grazing. I had previously noted a quartz vein exposed on the shore of an island in the bay below, from which big lumps of quartz had rolled out as the coast was cut back by the waves; perhaps some Bronze Age people rafted such a boulder across and lugged it up half a mile of hill to install it here. No doubt until the building of Garraunbawn House in about 1850 it was the most prominent object in the neighbourhood.

In fact I am sure that the stone is the mythical white horse itself, that the surviving version of its story, in which the man hangs the saddle over the stone, is an impoverished one, an attempt to mitigate the magic of an older tale, and that in the eclipsed version the horse was metamorphosed into the stone. So, at that moment, looking through the hedge at the old stone horse cropping the grass on the hilltop, I could tie together a geological and an archaeological strand of Connemara’s prehistory, and follow the efforts of later generations to make sense of that mysterious stone, first by means of a legend of an otherworldly horse, and then by tidying up that story already half forgotten and fossilized in a placename, which itself was later to be misunderstood and gelded by officialdom. For this place is not An Garrán Bán, the fallow thicket, but An Gearrán Bán, named from its ancient, perhaps totemic, white horse of stone, which has been ridden over the millennia by various meanings we can only guess at. The stone itself is as it always was and as a physical object needs no restoration; the restoration of its meaning as a contemporary monument, an icon of the locality’s specificity, is the task of the topographer and a touch in the restoration of our eroded modern consciousness of place. But what of its original significance in the life-world of those who set it up? If anything can be recovered of that, it is only in the context of a wider enquiry into the prehistoric remains of Connemara. At the time of my beginning to map the region the prevailing opinion among archaeologists was that, compared to the riches of the Burren and the limestone plains east of the Corrib, not much was to be expected from these unwelcoming boglands beyond the half-dozen megalithic tombs and a similar number of standing stones recorded by nineteenth-century antiquarians, mainly in the area of Ballynakill. This view was soon to be confounded by the work of the Galway Archaeological Survey team, emanating from the National University in Galway, and in particular the discoveries made by one team member, the indefatigably enthusiastic Clifden archaeologist Michael Gibbons. The synchrony of the Survey’s and my own campaigns in Connemara was productive; all the Survey finds went onto my own map, and the sites that I stumbled across myself or was directed to by local farmers or by placename evidence were all promptly visited, verified and recorded by the specialists. It was an exciting time for me, mentally and physically stretching. One day in the village street of Letterfrack I saw Mike Gibbons sitting in his car wrestling with the big sheets of the 1898 six-inch OS map; he told me that he had heard that turf-cutting had begun in an area of previously untouched bog, and he was off to see if any archaeology had been unearthed. I immediately abandoned the rather tedious sketch-mapping of houses and shops I’d been engaged upon and joined him. We took the main road south- westward for about four miles and left the car in a turf-cutters’ track leading off to the east, in the townland of Crocknaraw (Cnoc na Rátha, the hill of the rath—and we had already checked out the dilapidated little cashel-like enclosure from which it presumably derives its name). After a few hundred yards the track ended in a welter of mud and we turned to climb the small bog-covered hill ahead; I soon diverted to go and talk to some turf-cutters at work nearby, while Mike raced for the summit. Soon he came striding down to tell me that there were white stones up there. We went up together. A fresh turf bank had recently been opened, a trench running across the rounded top of the hill, some six feet wide and a few feet deep, cutting down through the bog-stuff to bedrock—and there, gleaming in its blackish depths, were two massive chunks of white quartz. One stood on end, to a height of about four feet, and the other, a little larger, was prostrate and still partly embedded in the peat. Evidently they had been set up before the bog began to form, and had probably been lost to sight for thousands of years.

Elated by the discovery we looked around us, seeing the countryside as it were through the stones’ eyes. Two miles to the north-east at the head of Ballynakill Bay was Rosleague (in Irish, Ros Liag, standing-stone headland), where we already knew of a standing stone now hidden in recent forestry and a stone pair in a gorse-grown field. In Roscrea a little nearer in the same direction was a well-known standing stone, a thin slab of schist set on edge, while just over a mile to the north was Garraunbawn and its stone. How many such monuments would be visible from the one we were standing by were it not for trees and hedges?

About a mile to our south-west, out in the bog on the further side of the road, was a small drumlin; we ran across and panted up to its summit—and there, just showing through the well-grazed heather and grass, was what looked like the top of a block of white quartz, still entombed in peat. Later on that summer I went up to the top of yet another drumlin three-quarters of a mile to the south of this last, and found the edge of a horizontal slab of rock showing in the side of a new turf bank there, a yard or so below the bog surface, which could well have been a thin standing stone like that of Roscrea, fallen or overthrown during the period of bog growth.

The current reckoning is that, west of the Corrib, there are about eighteen single standing stones like that of Garraunbawn, ten stone pairs like that of Crocnaraw, and five rows of four or more stones, including the prominent ‘Finn Macool’s Fingers’ on a drumlin summit near Tully Cross, and the six-stone row I found on the crest of a moraine in Gleninagh, a valley of the Twelve Pins. A large majority of these single and multiple standing stones are in the north-west of Connemara, roughly between Clifden and Renvyle, and it is now recognized that they amount to one of the richest concentrations of such monuments in Ireland. This area is deeply penetrated by narrow bays reaching to the foothills of the Twelve Pins, cut by the sea into the lowland of soft schists and marbles. These lime-rich rocks, together with the drifts of till raked out of the mountains by the glaciers of the last Ice Age and deposited here, make this the most inviting part of Connemara to settlers; it was so in the late Stone Age and is so today. None of these sites have been excavated or accurately dated, and it is only because of their similarity to datable monuments elsewhere that they are assigned to the Bronze Age; however, studies of the pollen grains preserved in lake sediments in the area point to an increase in clearance, cattle-raising and crop farming in the later Bronze Age, and so it is not unlikely that most of these stones were set up in that period.

As to their purpose, both of the stone rows mentioned above are aligned with dips in the horizon into which the sun appears to set on the shortest day of the year, and no doubt some ceremony was involved in the observation of this phenomenon, which would have been of great practical and spiritual significance. While the standing stones perched on hilltops and glacial ridges, like the two mountain-top cairns also known in this vicinity, may have marked important burials, indicated boundaries or been the focus of religious rituals, their siting primarily suggests the outward gaze from a lofty centre, the eye of dominance—first cousin, I am forced to admit, to the eye of acquisitive enquiry and competitive discovery with which Mike and I swept the landscape that day from the top of Crocnaraw. To me it looks as if the Bronze Age people or peoples took mental command of territory through their highly visible monuments, triangulating their claims as tightly as the ordnance surveyors of the imperialist nineteenth century. If so, there is a sorry connection between the will to power these monuments hint at and the exploitation and depletion of the soil that contributed to the beginning of the formation of bog in about 1200 BC—the slow black tide that would swallow up their sacred stones, not to be revealed again until our own exploitative, turf-cutting times.

But if the world was already old in worldliness in those ancient days, it was as provoked by mysteries as it is still. What did the Bronze Age farmer make of the numerous structures like chambers or tables made of massive slabs of rock, which stood in his fields or by his paths just as one finds them in people’s gardens or behind roadside walls in today’s Ballynakill? In the nineteenth century antiquarians regarded them as druids’ altars, and one or two are marked so, in the evocative Gothic print reserved for ancient monuments, on old Ordnance Survey maps. For country folk such a structure was Leaba Dhiarmada is Gráinne, Diarmaid and Gráinne’s Bed, and everyone knew how Diarmaid ran off with Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s betrothed, Gráinne, and how the tragic couple were hunted all around Ireland by Fionn and his warrior band the Fianna, so that they never slept in the same place twice and built a new bed for themselves every night. That was a legend from Celtic times, the pre-Christian Iron Age, and what theories or stories the Bronze Age, a thousand or more years earlier, had to explain those monuments is of course unknown and unknowable. Unlike the Bronze Age monuments, they occur mainly in valley bottoms and by the seashore, and we now understand them to be Neolithic tombs dating from the earliest days of settled, agricultural society, around 4000 BC.

No fewer than thirty-two such tombs have been found in north- west Connemara, nineteen of them recent discoveries of Michael Gibbons. I visited most of them with the Galway Archaeological Survey team, who were sometimes accompanied by more senior visiting archaeologists such as the late Seán Ó Nualláin of the Ordnance Survey. I became fond of Seán, a plain-spoken, practical- looking and unacademic man, though my first contact with him had not been auspicious. When I was mapping the Burren in 1976, and lugging with me the weighty County Clare volume of the Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland co-authored by Seán and Professor Ruaidhrí de Valera, I found I had wasted two days crashing around in dense hazel and bramble scrub looking for tombs which according to the map references in this magisterial tome were in certain overgrown fields, whereas in fact they were in certain other overgrown fields nearby. I wrote to the OS about this, and received a polite acknowledgement from Seán, regretting the mistakes and thanking me for my contribution to the pursuit of truth. During the Connemara campaign, Seán told me that he had been a humble clerk in the Ordnance Survey and archaeology had not entered his head until one day he had been detailed to assist ‘this professor fellow’ Dr de Valera with his Megalithic Survey, and found himself travelling round the country visiting every known megalithic tomb in most eminent intellectual company. By degrees he became a collaborator in the work and, after the death of the professor, standard-bearer for the Megalithic Survey and the theoretical classification of tomb types it had developed.

This theory recognized four types of tomb, which in those days were known as court cairns, portal dolmens, wedge-shaped gallery graves and passage graves, and nowadays are more crisply referred to respectively as court tombs, portal tombs, wedge tombs and passage tombs. Newgrange is the supreme example of the last type, with its long passage leading into a burial vault deep within a huge cairn; so far nothing like it has been identified in Connemara, though one or two hilltop cairns might conceal smaller versions. The other sorts of tombs were also originally covered in mounds of clay and small stones, but have largely lost this covering through the centuries of weather, and their now exposed vaults look like more or less collapsed chambers made of boulders and slabs of rock. Court tombs are so called because at one end, usually to the east, of the cairn was a semicircular open area defined by upright set stones, giving access to a vault of one or more chambers. Portal tombs have two tall stones flanking the entrance to the vault, which is usually of one chamber and roofed by a sometimes enormous slanting stone propped on the portal stones and a lower backstone. Wedge tombs have a vault that is wider and higher at the front, invariably western, end. According to de Valera each type is associated with a characteristic range of grave goods and has a particular distribution within Ireland. Court, passage and portal tombs are largely confined to the northern half of Ireland and may represent successive cultural influences or population movements from northern Britain, while wedge tombs are found particularly in the south-west and were considered to have been introduced from Brittany, late in the Neolithic period. Connemara was peripheral to this overview of megalithic culture, the few known wedge tombs there being seen as conforming to ‘rather small and poor types’ constituting ‘a poor coastal diffusion of no great significance.’

This fourfold theory did not suit the Young Turks of Connemara excited by the discovery of a number of tombs that the de Valera scheme would relegate to the mongrel or anomalous classes, but that included some impressive and fairly well-preserved monuments. Their own emerging opinion was that the Connemara tombs, in their simplicity, variety and apparently ecumenical intermingling, represented indigenous and early variations of the Neolithic burial-cult, rather than the work of various cultures at various times. The finds of monuments were being paralleled by those of the Galway palaeoecologists, whose studies of the fossil pollen record in the Ballynakill area had revealed the onset and flourishing of settlement and farming during a 200-year period centring on 4000 BC; Michael Gibbons and his colleagues held that the wedges and some small ‘unclassified’ tombs, as well as the court and portal tombs, were built during that early and vigorous phase of the Neolithic. So it was an argumentative occasion when Seán Ó Nualláin was conducted on a tour of the recent discoveries by the Galway team. In the absence of radiocarbon dates or of funds for proper archaeological digs, all depended on visual inspection, mental reconstruction and stylistic categorization of the tombs; in each case the present position of every stone had to be accounted for in terms of the original form of the tomb and its mode of collapse. Seán was particularly physical in this exercise of the imagination; to see him miming the manhandling of a leaning pillar of stone back into what he thought should be its rightful place was to see the tomb builders themselves at work. Whether he succeeded in propping up the fourfold theory, I am not so sure. The final out- come of the Survey, the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, employs the standard categories, listing twelve court tombs, four portal tombs and six wedge tombs for Connemara, sharing out eleven question marks among these determinations and noting that in a number of instances ‘the classification lines are blurred’ and that others ‘cannot be considered as classic examples of their category’; another nine tombs, most of them robbed beyond recall of their stones, are left unclassified. Connemara has shaken but not yet overthrown the fourfold dogma, I think.

But however vague their theoretical status, the cumulative psychic presence of the tombs in Ballynakill is massive. Some, like the court tomb near the shore west of Cleggan House, with its thick tortoise-backed roof stone, on stubby stone legs, or the unclassified tomb on the opposite shore of Cleggan Bay in Knockbrack, which has a rather narrow roof stone eight feet long delicately poised, as if about to take flight, on the points of its few remaining uprights, stand in open land but seem to disassociate themselves from their surroundings and yearn towards the western sea horizon. Others have to be sought out in fields and thickets; one probable portal tomb in Ballynew, by the road that leads towards the chapel of Ballynakill, crouches as if it were seeking shelter under a gorse- bush behind the roadside wall, and the casual passer-by would not know it is there—but step over the wall and down into the hollow of the field, and the dozy weight and resigned slant of its displaced roof stone leaning against the darkly cavernous chamber will make you remember its presence next time you go by. Those who brought these great stones together thought much about death; they perhaps debated as to whether entrance to the house of death should be from the east or the west, that is, how the cycle of life and death interlinks with those of the sun, stars and moon. These were collective burial places; none of the Ballynakill tombs have been excavated, but else- where similar tombs have been found to hold the cremated remains, or in some cases the disarticulated bones, of a number of persons. The grave goods interred with them—pottery, tools, ornaments— indicate a belief in an afterlife in which such things would continue to be goods. Only the great would be accommodated so grandly and at such expense of communal effort. What of the common people? Their traceless burial places must be all around us, in every ditch and field and the foundations of our houses. Thousands of years of impious robbery and mindless weather have undone the forethought for survival of even the rich and famous. The dark hollowness of the tomb under the roadside gorsebush says, ‘There is nobody here, and you shall be nowhere too.’

Perhaps the Bronze-Agers saw things differently from their Stone Age ancestors and placed their trust in monuments to life rather than death. They practised unobtrusive single burials; a Ballynakill farmer has shown me a box made of stone slabs, big enough to hold a crouched body, which had been torn open by a JCB in the side bank of a newly dug roadway—a Bronze Age ‘short cist.’ In general their standing stones are not known to be associated with death. At least some of the alignments of several boulders, and perhaps of the stone pairs, point out the midwinter sunset, but this event marks the winning-through to the halfway mark in the survival of the season of shortage, a cause of celebration. The quartz stones, which seem to radiate light and call attention to themselves from afar, may have been as territorial as birdsong: ‘We are triumphantly here; this hilltop and this lowland it oversees are ours.’ And sometimes in the hush of midsummer half-light the glimmering stones of Ballynakill whisper to the imagination, ‘You cannot see us, but we are still here.’ Ghosts and fairies are moods and modes of one’s feeling for the Earth; they wax and wane with our desires and delusions. The glimmer of white quartz, dim afterlife of its daytime brilliance, may persist throughout a long summer evening, but will succumb to the black rainy nights after Hallowe’en.

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Excerpted from The Last Pool of Darkness. Used with the permission of the publisher, Milkweed Editions. Copyright © 2023 Tim Robinson .

I am good at many things. I can grow vegetables, bake from scratch, cook for a family or a dinner party without embarrassing myself. I can read maps and navigate foreign cities and make minor household repairs.  I can do a headstand and paint a room and tile a backsplash and operate a jackhammer. I’m an excellent driver, a fine teacher and a compelling public speaker. I can carry a tune and not embarrass myself on the dance floor.  I can take direction, decipher texts and get out splinters. I’m a competent writer; I know how to get my point across.

I am good at many things, but, of course, it is possible I overestimate my abilities, à la the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s possible I think myself more capable than I am precisely because I lack the skills to accurately self-evaluate.

But I think it is more likely that I am objectively competent at the limited number of activities in which I engage not only because I’ve been doing them so long, but also because being competent is the reason I do them in the first place. Maybe even things I’ve learned later in life— like how to tile a backsplash or teach an online class or supervise other human beings —simply built upon what were already baseline competencies. Maybe I’ve kept learning and being successful at learning mostly because the growth has come in areas that already played to my strengths. Maybe everything new I’ve learned since I was young has played straight to my strengths.

For the first part of our lives, we learn unconsciously, at a breathtaking pace. By the age of ten I had learned at least a thousand things I did know at birth: how to walk and talk and eat with utensils, how to dress myself and tie my shoes and brush my teeth, how to read and write and listen, how to obey and also how to resist.

But at some point, learning becomes conscious. When that happens, to continue learning we must believe we need to learn, must feel ourselves lacking in some area, absent some skill or piece of knowledge which holds the potential to improve our life. This comes easily to children, who are told in constant word and deed that their primary job is to acquire the accumulated knowledge presumably held by members of the adult world. But the older we get the more difficult it is to see, and to acknowledge, our inadequacies.

When my son was contemplating a year abroad in high school, we went to an information meeting for the program he would attend. An alumnus of the program, a sweet-faced young man, was asked how hard it was to immerse oneself in a language you did not understand. “Not hard at all,” the young man said, “you just have to be willing to constantly look like an idiot.”

Learning is hard on the ego. Despite teaching for decades—or perhaps because of teaching for decades—I’d forgotten that.

It would certainly explain why I hated the motorcycle class.

The basic rider course, approved by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, requires four hours of classroom learning and 10 hours of on-cycle training over two days. There are twelve of us in the class, including myself and my husband, who takes the class as moral support and also because he loves motorcycles. See above.

Leading us on this adventure are Sam the Scolder and another instructor named Zeke.  Sam we suspect, from his authoritarian posturing and doughy body, of being a cop, but Zeke is shorter, more muscled and also far more chill. Less CHIPS, more Zen.

The course is scheduled to run eight hours Saturday and eight hours Sunday and conclude with written and skills tests. If I pass both, I’ll be allowed to stop in the motorcycle store on the way out and legally drive home a machine capable of reaching 200 miles per hour and 37 times more likely than an automobile to result in my death. Like many things in America, this is insane, but never mind.

Because it is raining, the class begins indoors, inside a massive warehouse stocked with Harleys and Ducatis and Indians (ugh on the name, ugh on the bike) and ATVs and snowmobiles and other expensive toys. We choose our bikes — everyone else has already chosen theirs, the instructor points out — and spend the first thirty or minutes getting familiar with the controls: here’s the throttle, here’s the clutch, here’s the brake. I make special note of the brake. We spend an eternity discussing when to use the choke. The answer, my husband will tell me later, is never, since most modern bikes don’t have one.

My Honda Nighthawk 250s is a good thirty years old and bears the scars of many a drop. Besides injury, dropping the bike is my biggest worry, one which intensifies when I realize I’m the only woman in the class. Dropping the bike gets you serious demerits. I am not going to be the Girl Who Dropped the Bike.

I am also the only Black person, though the class is otherwise diverse, surprisingly so. One guy’s from Russia, another from Italy; both are college students, which makes sense. There’s a man from India and another from somewhere in Central America. He is, he tells us, recently married. (“When I told my wife I wanted a motorcycle, she burst into tears.”)

The remaining students are, like my husband, white. One, a tall, neat, good-looking young man in his early thirties, listens to the introductions then says, in a voice straight out of The Departed, “Lotta accents in this class.”

“Yep,” I say. “Including yours.”

He stares at me a moment, then laughs. His name is Riley. Unlike Sam, he turns out to be a cop.

The youngest student is seventeen. Only three of us, including me and my husband, are old enough to remember a time before the internet or ovens that microwave. Being an elder or whatever we’re called and learning to ride a motorcycle is strange and not a little embarrassing, like showing up, dressed and grinning, at a BTKS concert, or crashing a prom.

Outside in the drizzle we start the bikes, fiddle around some more with the controls and then, astonishingly, begin to ride. The routine for the class is quickly established: Sam outlines a drill, Zeke demonstrates, we line up and try it ourselves, failing or succeeding in plain view. We practice basic skills — starting and stopping, shifting and stopping, using the clutch and finding the friction zone. Though I’ve driven a standard shift car for years, the friction zone on the bike eludes me, raising my frustration, which, in turn, makes my performance worse. Every drill I feel more like Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford (you have to be a certain age to get the reference.) I drive too slow, stop too soon, go the wrong way around the marker. Finding neutral feels impossible; over and over I shift through and stall. Part of the problem is that the bike is too small and my boots, dug out of the closet and borrowed from one of my kids, too clunky and big, but in the moment I don’t make this connection. In the moment I feel incompetent.

The afternoon is easier. Sam departs, off to scold jaywalkers and people who leave leaves on their lawns. We retreat inside, to a cluttered classroom that smells faintly of stale fast food but at least is warm and dry. It’s Zeke’s turn to lead; his instruction method involves having us read portions of the textbook aloud then pausing to discuss. This is not innovative teaching but it gets the job done, the job being cramming enough information into our heads for us to pass the written test. When it’s my turn I read fluidly and answer questions with a snap. In a classroom I am hyper-competent. In a classroom, I am home.

The motorcycle textbook focuses mostly on ways to stay safe while riding: dress appropriately, remain visible, anticipate rather than react to the actions of others. Always have an escape path, or two. Know your risk offset and operate within it. Risk offset, explains Zeke, is the difference between the risks you take and the skills you possess. Low risk, high skills is the gold standard. High risk, high skills, okay. Low risk, low skills is reasonable, especially to begin. The person most likely to get into trouble riding a motorcycle is the person who takes high risks with a low skill set, risking their life on abilities insufficient to the task at hand.

Risk offset. The concept almost makes the entire grumpy day worthwhile.

Zeke is a gentle teacher, gentle in the way of men who have nothing to prove. He’s a veteran (“I got back on the bike when I came back from Afghanistan. My wife couldn’t say no,”) loving father (his daughter keeps calling because their guinea pig had died) and country boy who’s taken his share of spills and learned that what mattered on the road was not speed or noise or badassery or any other kind of macho cosplay. What matters is enjoying the ride and coming home.

“You may be right: that guy who cut you off may be an asshole,” Zeke says. “The question is: do you want to be right, or do you want to be alive?”

This reminds me of a question a therapist once asked me, one that changed my life.  Do you want to be right, or do you want to be loved?

In class, everyone nods their heads as Zeke raises his eyebrows. The right answer to his question is obvious. But the honest answer, the answer I gave the therapist, the answer no one speaks aloud, is: Both.

Day Two we arrive twenty minutes early, bearing boxes of donuts and hot coffee to ward off the morning chill. The donuts are my husband’s idea: there is no quicker way to win friends and influence people than to offer deep-fried food. Later, as we drive the college students back to their train, they will tell us how Sam, who picked them up from the station that morning, spent the commute trashing us and wondering if we’d be late again. Instead, we stand and watch Sam hustle to finish setting up the course as the arriving students gleefully stuff their faces. When Sam sheepishly asks for a donut, my husband winks.

Day Two focuses on control of the bike: S-turns and U-turns and maneuvering. Also on tap are ways to get out of trouble on the road. As in life, Zeke tells us, the question is not whether trouble will come, but when. On a motorcycle, trouble comes often in the form of sudden obstacles. You’re riding down the road and a deer leaps from the bushes, or the school bus in front of you suddenly breaks or a board falls from the back of a truck. The choice, when faced with a sudden obstacle, is to either swerve, ride over or try to stop, and this is a choice best made ahead of time. Zeke gives us a scenario: you’re riding down a beautiful country lane when suddenly a ball rolls out of a driveway, followed, for all you know, by a child. What do you?

“Stop,” I say.

“That’s a lot of people’s instinct,” Zeke says. “But that instinct is usually wrong.”

When trouble comes in the form of a sudden obstacle you probably won’t have time to stop. Even if you do, the guy right behind you may not. The right choice, in this case, Zeke says, is probably to swerve into your escape lane, the one you’ve previously identified. The one you’ve kept at the back of your mind. Always have an escape lane.

We practice racing across the parking lot (racing being a relative term) and then swerving around a barrier, first to the right, then to the left, then to whichever side Zeke points at the last minute. We practice riding over boards and cutting tight corners. We practice riding fast down a long strip and coming to a hard stop on a line without losing the bike. The young men love it. They chatter happily as they wait their turn to perform, revving their motors to hear the sound. The one other older man smiles quietly, keeping mostly to himself. My husband, the star of the class, leads each exercise at the request of the instructors, too tall for his tiny bike but enjoying himself. Everybody but me is having a good time.

“Does she ever smile?” Sam asks my husband, though not in my hearing. Sam is an asshole but not an idiot.

After two hours of maneuvers, it’s time for the road test. My heart thumps and my palms, beneath the thin leather gloves I am wearing, sweat. Even in the moment I know this is ridiculous. I have no plans to actually get a motorcycle, no plans to take long rides on a summer day the way my husband does. If I fail the test, if I don’t get the license, my life will not change. Moreover, my husband told me the last time he took the course (at another school,) everyone in the class passed, including a woman who crashed her bike. These guys are in the business of putting people on the road, not keeping them off. I’m not even the worst person in the class; that would be a young, lanky guy wearing dress shoes and drugstore knit gloves who comes oh-so-close to dropping his bike. If I don’t pass the test it doesn’t matter one whit. Still, I want to do well. I want to appear competent, not for the people who I will never see again, not even for my husband, but for myself. Learning may slow as we age but the ego never relents.

I don’t do well. My turns go outside the lines and my swerves take me right into the back of the imaginary bus. I accelerate too slowly and brake far too soon and my feet touch the ground while I’m turning a slow figure eight. Even as I’m still testing I know that my performance is inadequate. There are only a certain number of points you can lose and it is certain that I have lost those points. I know that I have failed.

“Pass,” says Zeke. To everyone. The college students grin.

But I pull Zeke aside as the others hustle towards the classroom to take the written test. I don’t yet know I will not only achieve a perfect score on that assessment but will find myself racing to finish first, to leap up mere minutes after the test begins and hand the paper to Zeke with a flourish of victory—but I know , as if that  know I will perform well on that assessment and I do, not only scoring 100 but finishing first, heart pounding, As the others hustle inside for the written test, I pull him aside. I didn’t pass, I insist. It doesn’t matter if I wasn’t the worst one in the class. It doesn’t matter if I was close enough. I don’t want a mercy D, I want the F I earned. I didn’t pass and I want him to say as much. I am not, it turns out, the kind of person who is good at everything she does. Only a person fairly good at acknowledging reality.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Everday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed by Kim McLarin. Used with permission of the publisher, IG Publishing. Copyright 2023 by Kim McLarin.

Onions remained predominantly a wild plant in the Americas much longer than in Europe and Asia.

The French explorer Jacques Marquette, traveling the shore of what is now Lake Michigan in 1674, relied for nourishment on an onion that the Indigenous locals called cigaga-wunj, which means “onion place” and is the origin of the name Chicago. In more recent times it has come to be known as the Canada onion, Allium canadense, and it grows wild in much of North America from New Brunswick to Florida and west to the Rocky Mountains. It is fairly easy to spot because it has a very strong onion scent and it flowers spectacularly in great globes of little pink or white blossoms. Today it is favored as an ornamental plant.

But some historians and naturalists insist that the wild onion that gave Chicago its name was actually the nodding wild onion, Allium cernuum. It is called nodding because it does not stand erect and, unusual for onions, is bent over even when flowering. It announces itself with white or deep pink or rose flowers with a strong scent of onion. According to a description from the 1890s, these onions look “bright on the whole since the reddish hues prevail. They are often in such quantities and grow so thickly that little else is noticeable where they stand.”

Such bright wild patches are a very rare sight today, even in their native habitat such as the Chicago area, though they are also found in Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

*

There are seventy species of wild onion native to North America. Native American Indians harvested them and sometimes ate them raw, but also used them to flavor cooked dishes or would eat them as a cooked vegetable. Onions were also used in syrups and in dyeing. Roasted wild onions and honey were used by Native Americans to treat snakebites.

There does not appear to have been much cultivation of alliums by Native North Americans, with the notable exception of the Aztecs. But Europeans could not imagine life without cultivated onions and so brought them with them.

Christopher Columbus, apparently finding no onions on his first voyage to the Caribbean, which was a voyage of exploration, brought along onion seeds, cattle, horses, and sheep on his second voyage, which was a voyage of colonization. In 1494 his crew planted onions in what is now the Dominican Republic.

But Mexicans may have already cultivated alliums. Hernán Cortés, in his march of conquest from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, found that the local people cooked onions, leeks, and garlic. According to Cortés, they ate an onion called xonacatl. This is a word in Nahuatl, the original Aztec language that is still in use. Today it means “onion,” but what kind of onion the original xonacatl was is not certain. In Mayan the word is kukut. Francisco Hernández, a physician to Philip II of Spain, was sent to Mexico from 1570 to 1577 to report on the flora. According to Hernández, xonacatl was an onion with a “split roof,” which probably meant a split bulb, more like a shallot.

Pre-Spanish cooking, much of which is still in practice, does not use a great deal of alliums. The rich sauces called moles involved dozens of ground-up ingredients but rarely an onion. The famous mole from Puebla, mole poblana, uses some five different chili peppers, chocolate, ground tortilla, seeds, and a dozen other ingredients including garlic, but no onions. Mole manchamanteles does include both boiled onions and garlic on its long ingredient list. Mole de olla also uses both onions and garlic.

It is far easier to trace pre-Spanish Mexican cooking than Sumerian, because the Spanish recorded what they found and the Indigenous people still have their culture and are continuing to cook the dishes they made before the Spanish arrived. Some modern inventions have crept in. City tortillas now are made by machine, but the people in Indigenous villages think this is a disgrace and tortillas there are still made by hand, exclusively by women. Recipes still call for xonacatl, but today cooks usually use the onion the Spanish brought. This is historian Heriberto García Rivas’s recipe for xonacatl in his cookbook Cocina prehispánica mexicana:

In a little hot chia oil, fry three onions finely chopped. Add three ripe zucchini squash, peeled and  quartered, a tablespoon of yucca or sweet potato flour, stir with a wooden spoon, mix in six large peeled and seeded tomatoes, maguey or corn syrup, salt, pepper, herbs, cook slowly.

*

It is not certain that the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest ate the bulbs of wild onions, but it is known that, like ancient Europeans, they ate other bulbs. They were particularly fond of camas, Camassia quamash, which, like onions, used to be thought of as a lily variety. More recent botanists have decided it is in the family of the agave.

White pioneers learned to eat camas in desperate times, noting that it was similar to but sweeter than an onion. But there is another camas that is deadly poisonous, known as “the death camas,” which grows among the edible camas and creates understandable reluctance among newcomers to harvest these bulbs. After the Nez Perce gave some good camas to Lewis and Clark, Lewis described it as “a tunicated bulb, much the consistence, shape and appearance of the onion; glutinous or somewhat slymy when chewed.” He thought lilies and hyacinths tasted better.

As in Europe, Native Americans were extremely fond of the wild onion called ramps, or ramson, a strong-smelling species. They cooked ramps as a vegetable sautéed in acorn oil. These alliums are among the first green vegetables to come up in the spring when little else is available and so were greatly valued, even used in religious rites by some tribes, including Chippewa, Cherokee, Ojibwa, Menominee, and Iroquois.

Early European colonists considered eating ramps to be a desperate move, and their smell was associated with extreme poverty, but they learned from Native Americans and these wild vegetables became an important resource for starving settlers. Native Americans continue to value these wild plants, but because of overharvesting and destruction of wild lands, they are becoming hard to find. They often grow undisturbed on the lands of national parks, but the reason they are undisturbed is that picking wild plants from national parks is illegal.

Native groups have tried to be granted an exception, but that is a difficult fight. Cherokee were charged in 2009 with illegally harvesting ramps from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, despite the park being situated on their traditional plantgathering lands. This is an ongoing fight for a number of Native American groups.

Europeans preferred cultivated onions because that was what they were used to. One hundred and fifty years after Columbus, there were still few onions cultivated in the Caribbean or North America. When Richard Ligon, escaping the English Civil War, moved to Barbados in 1647, he carried with him not only seeds for sage, tarragon, parsley, and marjoram, but also onion seeds, and thus began Barbados’s onion cultivation.

The first Pilgrims brought onions with them on the Mayflower. Onions were planted in Massachusetts in 1629 and in Virginia in 1648. The founding father known to be a great onion eater, George Washington, seemed passionate about them, and ordered onions to be planted at Mount Vernon, according to a 1798 report. Thomas Jefferson left detailed accounts that show that onions were a staple crop on his Virginia estate, Monticello, before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, and even on land he owned before construction began on the estate in 1769. He seemed to have favored white Spanish onions, but Madeira and tree onions were also planted. Amelia Simmons, author of the first cookbook published in independent America, in Hartford in 1796, recommended Madeira white onions if you prefer a “softer” flavor and “not too fiery.” But, like Pliny, she also recommended red onions.

By 1806 the new Americans were raising six varieties of onions, and by the time of the Civil War, there were fourteen popular varieties.

*

The Easterners who went west in the mid-nineteenth century found few onions under cultivation. They greatly missed them, even though they liked to call them “skunk eggs” because of their strong smell. Because of their ability to store well, onions later became a basic provision for migrating pioneers on the wagons that went west. An 1860 issue of Hutchings’ California Magazine listed onions as one of the “necessities” for an eight-day journey into the mountains.

Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the widow of the infamous George Armstrong Custer, did not write of his racism and genocide, but she did write about onions while camping in the west with Custer, saying that they were “as rare out there, and more appreciated than pomegranates are in New York.”

Custer and his younger brother Tom, who also died on the Little Bighorn, were zealous cepaphiles. But apparently, in a rare criticism, Elizabeth was not fond of her husband’s onion breath. In an 1873 letter to his wife while on an expedition to the Yellowstone River, Custer wrote that he was filling up on onions now that he was away from her. “I supped on RAW ONIONS; I will probably breakfast, lunch and dine on them tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after ad libitum ad infinitum . . . Go it old fellow! Make the most of your liberties! . . . If you intend to eat raw onions now is your only time for ‘missus is comin.’ ”

Custer seems to have taken onions as he found them, but some Americans wanted more—they wanted them bigger, smaller, stronger, milder, sweeter. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries onions were to become big business.

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From The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food – Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes by Mark Kurlansky, on sale November 7th from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 2023. All rights reserved.

Late one night in 1951, two Englishmen were wandering downtown Athens after an evening drinking in its tavernas. Passing beneath the Acropolis, they decided to scale its rocky north side and sneak inside the Parthenon. They were caught as they left the ancient temple by the guard on duty, but they had a stroke of luck. The sentry was from Crete, and one of the Englishmen was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had fought alongside the Cretans during the resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II. On Crete, Fermor had mastered the local dialect and memorized a vast trove of folk songs and oral poetry.

The night suddenly took a festive turn. The men drank to Fermor. They drank to the nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, who had traveled to fight in the Greek War of Independence in the early 1820s. They drank to the eternal friendship between Britain and Greece.

Three years ago, when my wife and I moved to Athens so she could finish archaeological research for her PhD, I found myself thinking of Fermor’s escapade. I spoke much worse modern Greek—and drank far less—than Fermor. But I saw in him an archetype of a certain style of traveler, one defined by a deep curiosity about history and culture and a desire to gain lasting friendships and a broadened view of life. I’d outgrown the assumption of my younger self that it was normal to expect everyone to speak English while living abroad. To approximate some version of the Fermor ideal, it would be essential to learn modern Greek.

Fermor mastered modern Greek by living in remote caves with Cretan shepherds, speaking and hearing the language constantly. It helped that he also knew ancient Greek. He and other undercover agents were picked to work in Greece in part for this reason. The stakes for mastering the language were high. If Fermor’s fluency failed to convince when he posed as a local, he risked being imprisoned or shot.

Like Fermor, I knew ancient Greek; I’d spent years learning the language and reading ancient Greek philosophy in graduate school. Unlike his linguistic immersion in mountain caves, my modern Greek lessons happened in our Athens apartment over Zoom, lasting barely an hour a week. And the stakes were quite low. If I stumbled over grammar at our local fruit shop, the cashier would just laugh and switch into excellent English, a language now ubiquitous in much of the country after sixty years of globalization and the enormous growth of Greece’s tourism industry.

We arrived in Athens in the summer of 2020. The strict pandemic lockdown meant there were almost no tourists in the country. Then again, it wasn’t a great time to strike up conversations with anyone. Cafés, restaurants, archaeological sites, museums—almost everything was closed. For a while, you had to text a government number to leave your apartment. Luckily, long walks were still allowed.

As I wandered Athens during the first year of the pandemic, knowing the ancient language sometimes gave me a disorienting sense of compressed time, with the lofty and ancient suffusing the mundane and modern. On the glass door of the mini-market near our apartment, the sign that told you to “push” used the same verb as Homer does in the Iliad when warriors “thrust” their spears.

At a carpet cleaners, the word for “cleaning” was essentially the same term Aristotle used in his theory of tragedy as catharsis—a “cleansing” of the soul. On cargo trucks and moving vans I saw the word that became the English “metaphor.” The ancient roots mean “to carry with.” Movers carry things, metaphors carry meanings from one domain to a new one.

Convenience stores and ancient songs of war, carpet cleaners and tragedy, moving trucks and metaphors: these millennia-spanning links somehow both enchanted the present and demythologized the past.

*

That first winter, a rare heavy snow fell on Athens, snapping branches, cloaking monuments, piling on cars and awnings. We took the day off and went for a walk around the city. Everyone else had the same idea. On the small hills near the Acropolis, people were sledding and skiing down the miniature slopes. Snowball battles raged between teenagers in the winding streets of the Plaka neighborhood, a zone of pastel-hued neoclassical architecture below the Acropolis. The whole downtown, usually jammed with traffic and tourists, now had neither.

It was a good day for Greek practice: everyone wanted to talk about the blizzard, as if to confirm it had really happened. The mood was a rare combination of elements: the joy of the snow, the release after pandemic confinement, but also the feeling that the downtown was not an overcrowded amusement park.

It was a feeling Fermor understood. He died in 2007, but by the 1960s he already saw the effects of globalization on Athens, where mass tourism threatened to replace the uniqueness of Greece with a generic nowhere aesthetic bleached of tradition. He found “many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine”; after a remodel, one of his favorite haunts had “the vast and aseptic impersonality of an airport lounge.” It’s hard to immerse yourself in a new culture or language in an airport terminal.

The explosion of tourism is not just a problem for the language-learning goals of foreigners. Even many locals who make a living from tourism are disturbed by its growth. “We just want them to go home now,” a worker at a downtown store told The Guardian last year. As AirBnbs and multinationals spike rents and unsettle neighborhoods, life has become more precarious for many. “The city center is being transformed into an amusement park for tourists, like Las Vegas,” one small business owner told the newspaper Ekathimerini.

I recently met a Greek friend in Kypseli, a neighborhood near the center of the city that hasn’t yet been overrun by tourism. A painter who has had shows around Europe, he can still afford both an apartment and a nearby studio for his work. He doubted this would last much longer.

As we sat at an outdoor cafe in a square, I asked what he thought of tourism. “It’s a plague,” he said, calmly. He gestured at the charming, eclectic architecture all around us, “They’re going to want all this, too.”

*

Many travelers to Greece split into two broad types: the intellectual and the sensual. The poet Lord Byron and his traveling companion John Cam Hobhouse are good examples. Hobhouse was a seeker of knowledge, always eager to decipher inscriptions, trace references, and visit monuments. Byron was inclined to toss the guidebook, scrap the itinerary, and soak in the atmosphere. A friend recalled Byron saying: “John Cam’s dogged perseverance in pursuit of his hobby is to be envied; I have no hobby and no perseverance. I gazed at the stars and ruminated; took no notes, asked no questions.”

When I studied abroad in Athens as a twenty-year-old in 2005, there were still Byrons and Hobhouses. The former leapt from cliffs into perfect pockets of blue sea; they zipped around island coastlines on rented motorcycles; they drank heroic quantities of ouzo by driftwood bonfires on the beach. They took no notes, asked no questions. The latter lingered among vase paintings in the galleries of the National Archaeological Museum; they thrilled to distinguish different orders of capitals on temple columns; they crouched to decipher faded inscriptions chiseled into marble.

I floated between these groups. I liked the sensual spontaneity of the first, but saw how easily it became an empty hedonism. I admired the knowledge of the second, but resisted its drift toward pedantry. Years later, reading Fermor’s two classic travelogues about modern Greece, I realized what makes him so compelling: he embodied a hyperbolic form of both approaches. He somehow managed to combine sensual abandon—wine, feasting, swimming—with deep knowledge of the language, history, and culture of Greece.

For many early travelers to Greece, learning modern Greek would have seemed like a bizarre goal. They wanted only to commune with traces of the glorious ancients. European travelers sought vestiges of antiquity in the people, language, and cities of modern Greece; the 18th century poet Richard Polwhele, for instance, believed he saw “Homer’s head” in the face of “many an aged peasant.”

The modern country rarely matched their ideals. “The Greek tongue is very much decayed,” the scholar Edward Brerewood wrote in the seventeenth century.  The nineteenth century English traveler Frederick Sylvester North Douglas felt that Corinth, “the seat of all that was splendid, beautiful, and happy,” was now “degraded to a wretched straggling village of two thousand Greeks.”

This mix of reverence for Ancient Greece and condescension to its modern inhabitants had a paradoxical result: some classically educated Europeans felt “more” Greek than the actual modern Greeks and made this known by taking artifacts or leaving their mark on them. Wealthy visitors like Lord Elgin employed agents to hack the marble frieze from the Parthenon and ship the sculptures back to England between 1801 and 1812. An English magazine article from 1814 endorsed vandalism, declaring that “it was an introduction to the best company….To be a member of the ‘Athenian club,’ and to have scratched one’s name upon a fragment of the Parthenon.”

By the mid-twentieth century, writers like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller shifted from reverence for antiquity to a sensual evocation of the Greek landscape and a romanticized vision of modern Greeks.  The prose is better, but Miller’s 1941 travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi, resembles the countless blogs and websites that now present the Greeks as masters of the carefree art of Mediterranean living, in which clocks are a nuisance, the sea sparkles nearby, and there’s always another glass of wine to be savored with a smiling friend.

This vision has become the bedrock of the modern tourism industry. One Greek travel website gushes that a cooking class on the island of Santorini is hosted “in a traditional local’s home.” Another offers the chance to become “Mykonian For A Day.” Beside a blog post called “Live like a Greek: The Art of Slow Living,” praising relaxed Greek attitudes toward time, a pop-up window promises that any email queries will be answered within twenty-four hours. It’s the art of slow living—just not for the person who answers your email.

*

In my modern Greek lessons over Zoom, when my desire for expression outstripped my vocabulary, I would reach for an ancient Greek word and hope for the best. The result was something like an English speaker interspersing bursts of Shakespearean diction with the general level of a toddler (“Do you like coffee?” “Coffee yes, banisher of the slumberous.”) My teacher found this amusing, and sometimes comprehensible, but many people were confused by the strange contours of my knowledge. I’d stumble over a simple bit of grammar, only to rally with fantastically grand vocabulary.

Sometimes this created an instant rapport. After one taxi ride, my driver parked outside our apartment, shut off the meter, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to sit and keep talking. I’d mentioned that I studied ancient Greek, and he spent the drive developing a theory of the internet as a version of the cave in which a Cyclops imprisons Odysseus and his men in Homer’s Odyssey. The details were murky, and not only because of my imperfect Greek. But I got his gist: the internet was a realm of darkness in which we were locked by the cannibalistic giant of big tech, and we should escape. He cracked the window and exhaled a luxurious stream of smoke.

“What’s the ancient word for bread?”

I told him: ἄρτος.

“Exactly,” he nodded. “Like we have on bakeries.”

He directed a stream of smoke out the window.

“Homer knew lots of things,” he added, with a significant glance in the rearview mirror, and I began to suspect he believed Homer knew about the Internet.

My Greek teacher and I sometimes played a game in which she listened to me speak for a few minutes and then decided how she would identify me if we were strangers. For most of the first year, I sounded like what I was: an American. By the second year, on good days, she upgraded me to a Greek-American who heard the language a bit growing up, but maybe just from grandparents on summer visits. By our third year, I was a more plausible Greek-American, as if I’d actually heard the language more as a kid, though I was still short of being truly bilingual.

As I was struggling to gain the language skills of a linguistically neglected Greek-American, my teacher enjoyed highlighting the distance between cultures that language can expose. When she taught me the verb χαριζω, which has a dense cluster of meanings related to giving to others and is connected to an ancient word for joy, she smiled. “This must be strange for Americans—you don’t connect these things very often,” she said.

*

Each summer we traveled to a small village in the mountains of Crete, where my wife was on a team of archaeologists excavating an Iron Age settlement roughly 2800 years old. The modern village sits midway up the steep slope of a mountain, its small whitewashed houses rising in tiers above a valley of olive groves. The population swells slightly in the summer, but there are only a few hundred permanent residents.  Many houses have been abandoned for decades, with green vines twisting over the crumbling stone walls.

The archaeologists stay in old houses throughout the village. Ours had a single area as kitchen and living room on the ground floo. In the basement, reached by descending a ladder, was a bedroom and a bathroom. The ceiling was a mesh of branches bisected by great gnarled beams from tree trunks.

We woke each morning marked by small red bites from fleas. To cook, we cranked open a canister of gas beneath the stove.  One afternoon we met a woman who had grown up in the house, and she started recollecting her childhood, roughly half a century ago. Six children, the parents, and their livestock animals all shared the two rooms.

By last summer my modern Greek was finally good enough for more complex conversations. Most mornings, while my wife was excavating the ancient settlement, I sat with a coffee among old shepherds and farmers at a taverna in the village’s central square, chatting and listening. The world my Greek illuminated was often dark. The dogs chained on short metal leashes at the top of the village were guarding drug houses. The kids roaming the streets were avoiding their house because their father was drinking again and often violent. This was not the Greece sold with the “Live Like a Greek” mantra.

The second taverna in the square was locked in a feud with the first: the staff squabbled over parking spots and the boundary lines between tables and competed for customers. By midday, groups of tourists appeared on ATVs rented in the resort towns on the coast six miles away. I was speaking with a waiter at the first taverna one day when the growl of engines signaled the arrival of a batch of sunburned tourists. He walked a few steps toward them, but as they parked, the daughters of the second taverna’s owner encircled them, menus in hand, steering them toward open tables.

“Beer, wine, traditional food, everything you want,” the owner of the second taverna said in English, walking up behind the girls.

He walked back toward me and shook his head.

“You see how it is?” He asked me in Greek, tossing the menus on a table and lighting a cigarette.

Late one night, we heard frantic pounding on our door.  On the street outside, the air was acrid. The sky was an eerie orange, with huge plumes of smoke banking and twisting. We grabbed our passports, dog, and shoes, and tried for several minutes to rouse our 90-something neighbor by banging on her door. We shouted a host of words for fire and flame, then headed for the edge of the village, away from the smoke.

We learned a few hours later that a fire had started just below the village on a grassy hillside. Firefighters and villagers had barely managed to extinguish the blaze just a few feet from town.

A few days later, a young man with a history of drug problems confessed to the police that he had started the fire. Various theories swirled through the village, but most people thought the owner of one taverna had paid the man to start the fire to intimidate the owner of the other. The hillside below the square was now charred and blackened, and the smell of smoke lingered for weeks.

The threat of real violence in the square, always implicit, now felt sharper. For the next few days the tourists, after parking their ATVs, would wander over to look at the burned slope. They had no idea they were lunching at the site of an arson attempt that nearly destroyed the village. As an undergraduate abroad in Greece, or even when I knew only ancient Greek, I would have been equally oblivious.

By last summer, my wife had finished her PhD and accepted an academic job back in America. We were leaving just as I was becoming a more persuasive modern Greek speaker. My ancient Greek, meanwhile, had morphed far from the standard Erasmian pronunciations taught in western universities; it had the pointy vowels and conversational cadence of an Athens cafe, not a seminar room.

When I arrived, my ancient Greek would come to the rescue, however haphazard, of my modern Greek. Now it was just as common that I’d decipher a word in an ancient text by knowing its modern descendants. After three years in Greece, I occupied a murky intermediate zone, somewhere between Byron and Hobhouse, ancient and modern, outsider and local.

The night before we left the village this summer, our neighbor in her 90s stopped to talk outside our front door. She was alive when Fermor joined her parents’ generation in the resistance to the Nazi occupation. She told us about her family, and how life in the village used to be. It was early evening, the sun staining the steep hills of the valley above us, the heat of the day finally broken. At this hour, she said, the street used to be thronged with people.

Now it was all different. So many had moved away or died. It seemed quieter every year. I felt a sudden twinge: we too would be leaving soon. Most of the people who lived in the village were old, she said, and only one still came to check on her. Then she smiled and patted my wife’s arm. We were good neighbors, she said, because we spoke to her.