Benjamin LeRoy
Hello from 30,000 feet.
Today’s post is one near and dear to my heart about the importance of travel. I’m on my way from Madison to Boston with a brief layover in Washington D.C. Once I land in Boston I’ll hop in a rental car and I’ll go…well, I’m not sure exactly. I don’t always plan things out.
Therein lies some of my friendly travel advice that also doubles up as writing advice. If you’re able to, because you’re traveling by yourself or with a group of like-minded folks, I encourage you to find your adventure by ditching the guidebook.
Sure, there are many wonderful things you can do in the Boston area—walk Paul Revere’s famous ride, visit Fenway, eat really good pizza at Pizzeria Regina in the North End—there are a million things to do, but most of those things have already been done by lots of somebody elses and if your ears and brain are tuned to the frequency, you’ve already vicariously done some of those things. It’s our shared travel experience.
You know when you crack open a book and you meet the protagonist and two pages later some lady shows up and the next three paragraphs are all about her emerald eyes or her fiery red hair and you immediately know that this is all just a set up for the sex scene that’s going to happen somewhere around page 200? And then, when that scene shows up you’re non-plused because it doesn’t live up to the hype and because you already had a feel for it because of every other sex scene you’ve read in your life it’s just kinda meh.
Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you hit the tourist spot. The magic that you expect and hope to find is often replaced by a “oh, wait, so there aren’t laser beams and pots of gold at the feet of the Statue of Liberty?”
A few years ago when I was hanging out with Peff Dog, he told me a story about a piece he’d written for National Georgraphic featuring America’s most famous witch, Lori Cabot. He met up with her in Dogtown—an an abandoned settlement from the 1600s on the north coast of Massachusetts outside of Gloucester—for an interview and to watch her perform ceremonies. There were other people there from Cabot’s group and a photographer from National Geographic. A unique experience to be sure and when the photographs were developed there were streaks of weird light running through many of them that the photographer was unable to explain and that Kodak said was not a result of defective film.
Oh yeah, and the place is reputed to be haunted because, as the story goes, when the residents of Dogtown decided that their proximity to the water made them susceptible to a naval attack they moved to Gloucester, except for the crazy and the infirmed who stayed behind with their dogs that howled in the night and could be heard from miles away.
Well of course I wanted to go to Dogtown immediately. And since Peff hadn’t been there in decades, he was game to go again.
A lot of that legend could be bullshit, but that doesn’t much matter to me. When I went there, I wasn’t sure what to expect, so instead of coasting in tourist mode, all of my senses were heightened because it was new. I heard barking in the wind. I saw things that weren’t there. I felt alive and in control of my own course instead of one 3-d participant in a welcome center brochure.
I’m not a scientist, so I can’t offer you any facts or empirical evidence for this next assertion, but I’m quite convinced that when we, as writers, or musicians, or filmmakers, or any other chronicler of the human condition are in foreign territory and one that may trigger survival instincts—we really see things fresh. Cliches disappear because we lose our reference points. And that’s not a bad thing.
Anyway, the captain of this here plane is giving the shut ‘er down signal, so I’m going to finish this piece right here. After I’ve landed at Logan I’ll go somewhere.
I just don’t know where.
(if there are typos, incomplete thoughts, poor grammar, I'll try to address the next time I get to an internet hotspot)
