TRAVEL COMPANIONS
A third thing I learned in London is the disquieting effect that the tensions of travel can have on travelers. I learned some of this from Lili. When she questioned my attitude toward bathing or felt that my inviting my brother was cavalier and an imposition on her I was dealing with both of our sensitivities. Travel, when we don’t know quite what we are doing is stimulating but it also makes us vulnerable and a little on edge. We want to do the right thing but have no idea what the right thing is and are afraid we will do the wrong thing and offend someone, which it turns out was just what I did, unknowingly and innocently. But this made me much harder to brush it off when Lili castigated me for inviting my brother with what she felt, I didn’t know, the right protocols. It soured my trip for several days and I didn’t want to come back to the Airbnb or to have anything to do with her. If I had been on my home territory I would have been sure of myself and dismissed her as being nuts, which is probably what she did with me.
Another example of this was something I caused without at first realizing it and then had trouble abandoning when I realized that I was being irritating. This was my delight in things digital which I have mentioned several times in these posts.
In this case it was my constant photographing and reliance on Apple Maps to get me around through finding things on the Internet and through following blindly GPS to get around. My brother Richard, like a great many of my friends, is easily provoked by all things digital. He prefers to use a map or to ask or to work from memory to find his way around London where he has been a number of times before. My insistence on being guided by Apple Maps was not comfortable for him and Apple Maps several times was itself blinded by the lack of a cellular connection and at other times appeared to dance around so much that we had to walk a ways before we saw that we were going wrong. This justified his sense that it was unreliable. Finally I abandoned Apple Maps completely and let him guide me even when I thought I could easily show the way through Apple Maps. So this was the first tension.
The second was more serious: photographing things that touched me in one way or another. This both slowed us down (he would look back and there I was down an alley firing away) but it also could be embarrassing to him. I’ve felt this embarrassment with a number of family members and others when I photographed. I understand it completely. I don’t ask every person I want to photograph whether I can because that doesn’t work for two reasons. One is I lose the photograph or it will take too much time or I guess that they would probably say no in any case. So I’ve developed a way of clicking away without appearing to be taking photographs at all. I do this by not holding the iPhone out from my body at stiff arm’s length to frame the person I am photographing, pausing to make sure everything is right or directing them to smile, as all iPhone camera users do. I hold the iPhone loosely in my hand at waist level, often tilted, and use a wide angle that lets me get the person somewhere in the frame which I will later crop. This is not a satisfactory way to take photographs because I often miss completely or only get half a person and because the smaller the person is in the frame the more I have to crop and the more I crop the worse the resolution becomes and the grainier the person is.
But there are two great advantages of photographing this way. One is that since almost everyone has a phone in their hand and is constantly looking at the phone itself, the phone hardly draws attention and in any case people can’t know if I am taking a photograph or not particularly if I am looking off to the side at something else. I am not disturbing the person I am shooting or anyone else. If it is a child I photograph, anonymously, whom I’ll never see again but who is adorable, then I won’t disturb the parents. In Europe there is much greater fear of pedophiles than here so there is no point in asking. The second great advantage is that I am always ready with my finger on the trigger. Most of my photographs are candid photos of people on the street as I meet them. I often have only a second or two before I decide and then take the photograph. This also means that I have taken the photo and am gone before the subject can even register what I am doing, if they even can. It is painless all the way around.
But very often the person I am with, often a family member, who knows what I am doing is afraid that I will cause trouble in addition to having to wait for me to show up around the corner. Someone may punch me in the nose or chase me down the street as a Sadhu once did in India with a burning log in his hand in front of my laughing students. When I have been by myself on this trip there are no issues and Susie has come to accept my obsession with photography, often 500 or more photos a day with most of them later discarded. If I get 20 out of 500 that I like I feel I am successful. I have a measly 0.20 batting average, a pitiful performance, a batter who only cares about the rare home run.
Why make a big deal about any one photograph when I am almost certain not to use it in the end. If you are at all under the impression that I am a good photographer because you like some of my photographs posted here be assured that if you were to see all of the photographs I took each day you would think I am clumsy and without any artistic judgment.
But of course this method means that that I don’t just interrupt a walk by stopping for one or two photographs but for hundreds.
So the point of this long expose is that my way of relying on erratic GPS can be irritating and my way of taking photographs can be very irritating to the person who is with me. And all of this in a country where we don’t know what the proper thing to do is and are trying constantly to do the right things.
But my motivation in Paris was not to see the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower but to take candid photographs, that is what turns me on, and when I manage to take a good one I am happy.
I have led group trip after group trip overseas. I have seen good friends find that while they get along well at home they can barely tolerate the other person’s presence overseas. The other is too loud, or asks too many questions, or says dumb things, or reveals themselves as ugly Americans. We also project our insecurities on each other. And I caused irritation on this trip for my brother Richard who could not resist snapping at me when his annoyance became too much. I’m not faulting him.
When I suddenly remembered in the Old Vic theater in the middle of the play that I might not have put my phone in airplane mode I carefully pulled it out and shielded it to at least put it in silent more. I snapped the switch just as Richard hissed at me in fury for interrupting the play and then I realized as I hugged it to me that the ringer had been turned off to begin with it and now I was in real danger of getting a scam phone call offering to extend my car warranty. But I wasn’t going to infuriate Richard any more by trying again. I held it tight in my armpit breathing shallowly until intermission and then pulled it out and turned it off in every way that I could, while Richard, still furious at me went off during intermission to calm down.
I’m not pleading innocence. This kind of tension can happen more easily when traveling when everyone is slightly on edge than it can happen at home where irritations are easier to avoid. But what it teaches me is that I have to see what I can do on future trips to prevent this (but still take photographs and find my way around by GPS). It was the third thing I learned in London.
Both of these digital activities in the end are small things but illustrate for me one of the perils of travel. Richard and I, brothers who hadn’t been alone together for this long in our lives, talked and talked and walked and walked and had a great time in London, by far the best part of my visit to London, and I apologize for ticking him off digitally and thank him for coming to London and spending a week with me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 