Photo by Andie Williams |
Why We Travel
The
New York Times runs an occasional photo feature on the Sunday Travel page,
filled with one-of-a-kind sights which make one’s heart beat faster. Most of us lack the quickness to capture a once-in-a-lifetime photo, so we
try, instead, to capture it in words.
Michael
Paterniti, author of The Telling Room,
describes a particular kind of travel which focuses on the importance of the
place itself and on one’s return to the place, over and over. He describes a friend taking a ferry to an
island off the coast of North Carolina and how he knew – he just knew – he’d
come back to the same place each year, “to relive that feeling of leaving his
old self behind. That annual renewal, the re-acquaintance with the person he
felt himself to be on that island, was something he wanted to organize his life
around.”
Dramatic
words – organizing one’s life around a place.
Troubling words. “Organizing
one’s life” isn’t how I have come to think of travel. Certainly the moment of
discovery is part of why we travel, but once we find the special place, can
return trips still count? Won’t multiple visits lead to the inevitable
collection of real estate guides and searches for a second home? This notion of
return is at odds with my sense that discovery is inherent in the act of
travel.
And
yet. The hectic aspect of finding new destinations year after year; the
inevitable disappointments; the frantic energy spent climbing the logistical learning
curve; all are enough to make one crave a different kind of travel that offers
comfort instead of surprise. A century
ago, people embraced the idea of estivating at resorts in which even the table
at which they dined was unchanged, year after year. That has its appeal.
I
thought I found my place this summer in Maine. Perhaps it happened because I
didn’t know I was looking for it. Like any relationship, it is in its tentative
first weeks. I keep waiting for that sobering Monday morning to hit, forcing
the experience to recede forever into a summer moment and nothing more.
We
vacation as a large family which complicates my personal search somewhat. We are encumbered with every age, from 5 to
nearly 85, and a multiplicity of needs at every hour from all those in between. We rented a house on the coast of Southern
Maine, south of Ogunquit and north of York, where the sea stretched all the way
to Ireland. We stayed in an old house with just enough modcons to avoid being
annoyingly old without being annoyingly new.
The
house had a beguiling charm. The best
way to explore was to take time to enter each room and get its measure before
proceeding. We climbed up and down unexpected staircases and turned through
awkward corridors tracing a layout closer to a children’s fantasy book than a
traditional center hall colonial. The inhabitants had lovingly added on rooms over
the years, with quirky but intriguing results.
The
sense of culture was overwhelming. The furniture and fixtures came from all
over the world. We recognized textiles from Guatemala and marveled at carpets from
the Silk Road. Original artwork hung
everywhere, and sculptures, some frightfully fragile, graced tables. The house took
on new life after dark. Behind closet
doors was an extensive classical music collection, and in every room, including
the kitchen, were libraries.
Outside,
a walk across the lawn led to cliffs overlooking tidal pools and enough rock
formations to satisfy a geologist. No placid Cape Cod, the waves truly did
crash below us, sending up tangles of spray. There were chairs with granite footrests, a
thoughtfully left can of bug spray (not needed with the stiff winds) and long rock
walls which served as a backdrop for a magazine-worthy show of perennials, best
admired from a pergola that ran the length of the house. Those who know the
charm of living alongside the sea need no further description. The sound of the
foghorn, the smell of salt, and misty mornings gave the house an appropriately
mystical setting.
Inside,
the amenities bespoke wealth and elegance. A separate wine refrigerator,
Waterford decanters, a butler’s pantry so well stocked one could find
everything from fish forks to chop sticks, a gorgeous chess set in an octagonal
alcove, a piano, and then, on top of all that -- the books! Each room was shelved with a
lifetime’s worth of books. We inventoried with increasing wonder. One room had walls of books dedicated to
theater, drama, and Italian art. Another room, complete with spiral staircase
and loft apartment, featured English literature, poetry, and history. Still another was filled with children’s
first editions. Kenneth Graham, Philip Pullman, Brian Selznick. We speculated
endlessly about the inhabitants, casting roles for them as retired Broadway
directors, former college presidents, Booker prize winners living under assumed
names.
The
bookd were either ones we had read and treasured, or ones we had always wanted
to read. No banal “summer reading” here.
I began leading two lives. In the daytime, I dealt with the joyful
camaraderie and chaos of a multi-generational family. At night I greedily
devoured a John Banville I had never heard of. Reading in a room with so many
other books lent a heightened sense of literary atmosphere. If you doubt this,
consider unpleasant venues where you have read – an airport lounge, perhaps.
And then imagine your own personal Athenaeum.
I rest my case.
There
were annoying imperfections, of course. A ridiculous step down into the dining room
that everyone tripped on. A raised tile platform for a wood burning stove,
another tripping hazard. A kitchen
wildly over-equipped – restaurant style warming shelf, professional meat slicer,
deep fryer, three fridges, and a wood
burning pizza oven, along with sterling silver spoons. And yes, sometimes there was a sense of it all
being just too much.
But
even the real cheetah, draped over the billiard table like someone’s private
joke, could not spoil the sense of culture. It came from another time, when
piano keys were made of ivory and fireplaces were topped with antlers. I found
the five-year-old gently patting its head, whispering to it as though it were a
stuffed tiger, which it more or less is.
The
place cast a spell. I would have been content to spend the week reading, but we
had visitors, stimulating and insightful. I watched our 17-year-old draw with a skill I
never knew she had. We took field trips and did all those things that make a
sojourn a vacation. At night we had a
full moon and seabirds shrieking above the fish. One evening was so magical that
as we sat on the widow’s walk terrace, three storeys high, I fully expected to see
a gryphon loping along the stone wall below.
Alas,
we do not own the house and I doubt the experience can be repeated. I can find other houses along the same
coastline. I can spend a lifetime filling them with near-identical
contents. But I can never duplicate the
personalities of the owners who created something extraordinary from an overgrown
Maine coastal house.
Even
as my heart sings that I have found my place, my brain knows that this
is most likely a love affair that cannot last the winter. Or can it? Some
experiences are too intense to easily relinquish. And I saw enough whimsy in one
week to make me wonder about what I can’t control. Who knows? Even if I say it can
never be my place, it may say, oh yes it can.