SWANNANOA AGAIN
I have been back for five days. As on every trip abroad it has been hard to fit back in. All my life the most intense culture shock has been coming back home. As with every trip I have retreated and spent almost all of my time sitting on my porch looking at the fields below me or inside shut off from the world. Today I spent the whole day inside beginning to plan circling the United States by Amtrak in a month. I am doing this because I have to. If I am going to visit a number of friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in years, even decades, I have got to start feeling out how welcome I am and figuring out a loose plan. The plan may include Washington and New York and then Minneapolis and Glacier Park and Bellingham, Washington and Eugene, Oregon and San Francisco and Monterrey and Los Angeles and Ogden, Utah and Denver and then home. It is all very fluid and I will wonder here about this trip later.
But it could be that the reason I am so suddenly planning another trip after just getting back is that there is something about coming home to a place that you know well and settling into a familiar routine that I am resisting. Paris and London were so stimulating and now I am in Swannanoa where I have lived for 50 years. Travel was all adventure and being dislocated and simulated. Coming home is fitting into routine with nothing unexpected happening, complete culture shock.
I used to think that the United States was flat and unstimulating which was both a reason to escape and a reason I found it hard to come back to. But now I suspect that this is not true. For the Afghan refugees in our community Swannanoa is a strange and dislocating place. They are homesick for Kabul but probably also find every day here to be an adventure. Every immigrant that has come to America has probably felt both loss of home but also wonder at the oppotunities in this new place. It could be that immigrants feel more stimulated and alive than residents.
For some residents of the United States immigrants with their different language and food and clothing and religion somehow are a threat to their usual conventional ways of living. But maybe the dislocation that immigrants threaten us with is really a chance to open up and leave our conventional patterns and be dislocated. If we would really open ourselves up and listen we might begin to question our conventional ways of doing things and be more alive. But instead we are often eager to fit outsiders into our own conventional patterns until in the second generation they are just like us.
I’m rambling here. But I think that the reason that Swannanoa conventional patterns seem flat and unstimulating when I come back from a trip has little to do with Swannanoa cultural patterns which must be stimulating and dislocating to foreigners. But we are all foreigners everywhere except in our hometown and it could be that realizing that you are a foreigner and that everything you do seems strange in the rest of the world is the first step to finding Swannanoa to be intensely interesting and alive. Maybe instead of resenting foreigners we should welcome what their foreignness teaches us about our own foreignness. Maybe it is when Swannanoa feels as different as Paris that Swannanoa will come alive. Maybe if I shut out the rest of the world I am barely able to see Swannanoa and Swannanoa seems flat and uninteresting and a place to escape from. Maybe the reason I had no desire to take photographs of Swannanoa today while taking 500 a day of London and Paris is because I couldn’t be open to its strangeness as I was to Paris and London. Maybe.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 