HOME
With only a week until I leave again I have been both here and not here at the same time. But I have become aware of two things in the last three weeks. One is how travel, being dislocated by another culture, makes you not only much more aware of your own culture but aware of culture itself, of the cultural conventions each human community invents for itself. It is not only clear that each human tribe invents a cultural bubble for itself which can seem very artificial when seen from the outside. But it is clear that your own culture is just as much an invented bubble—language, religion, ways of saying hello—as any other culture. A second realization, as I have become involved in more and more experiences since returning from Montevideo, is that I am becoming more and more aware of the difference between the way that I experience my own culture of Western North Carolina and the way that I experienced Buenos Aires and Uruguay.
I am realizing that we experience a new culture as a tourist in a very different way from the way we experience our hometown culture as a lifetime resident. The big difference, which I have noticed before, is that when experiencing a new culture for a few days we seek out the tourist experiences that are most stimulating and do so in the company of other tourists with almost no hometown people participating. In Asheville that would be visiting the Biltmore House, the Smoky Mountain National Park, riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway, watching the sunset from the porch of the Grove Park Inn with drink in hand, or riding on the LAFF bus or visiting the River Arts District.
But this last week the experiences that I had were ones that tourists rarely hear about and don’t attend. And at all of these as I was experiencing them I was thinking of how rich a visit by a German or an Italian or an Argentinian would be if they could experience these things. But they wouldn’t even hear about them. This is partly because the Zillicoah Brewery or the Saturday evening by the French Broad River in Marshall with a local band playing is not something that a tourist would know about unless guided by someone who lives here. The same is true of the free outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s Tempest put on by amateurs, a marvelous, exuberant, wild experience. Susie and I didn’t know about the performance but were invited by a friend. Art on the Island is something that only people in Marshall know about, but it was a wonderful sunny afternoon and would a allow a Uruguayan to experience small town USA if he ran across it. And then the Uncommon Market, crowded with Asheville people, was a wonderful experience of Western North Carolina local artists. Even the visit by Susie, Todd and me to Lake Fontana, while it could be listed as a tourist attraction, was an experience of local lake living that you had to be invited into to fully experience.
And of course the opposite must be true. I missed out on so much in Buenos Aires and Montevideo because it was local and off the beaten tourist path. I don’t know what I missed out on just as visitors to Asheville don’t know what they miss out on. And of course I, a local, wouldn’t have wanted to sit among crowds of tourists at the Zillicoah Brewery or at Art on the Island or the performance of The Tempest or the Uncommon Market.
There are even more ordinary but special local experiences like going to church, which I did today, or being invited to my neighbors for dinner, or attending Warren Wilson Homecoming next weekend, which are so personal that an Argentinian or German might feel out of place.
So the point of this post, I guess, is the realization on my part that in comparing my tourist experience abroad, which I am about to dive back into, to my experience of being back home, I am really comparing two different things, I am comparing apples and oranges, completely different kinds of experience.
In the end what both kinds of experience have in common is that is me having them. Going to Sicily is a way of discovering what it is to be American. To really experience Sicily I would have to speak Italian and need to live in Taormina for a year or two and fit into a community. Two weeks in Taormina will teach me a lot about myself and a little bit about Sicily. To have a full community experience I have to come back to Asheville. But I do think that being an outsider somewhere else can make my appreciation of community in Western North Carolina more intense and make me more appreciative as I am discovering in my one month as a visitor back home.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 