Don't Take Your Own Hometown For Granted, Either

THE VIEW FROM HERE — WEEKEND SERIES

Don't Take Your Own Hometown For Granted, Either

A Financial Times essay on the modern privilege of travel, and one month spent proving its point in reverse.

The Financial Times ran a piece this month by Martin Sandbu making a point worth sitting with: for most of human history, travel wasn't about discovery. It was about war, trade, or finding your way home. Only recently has it become possible, for most of us, to go somewhere purely to see something different. He calls it "a fundamentally humanist act."

I read it near the end of a month spent driving around my own childhood.

That's the part nobody warns you about. I wasn't chasing the unfamiliar this August. I went looking for the place that made me, and it kept rearranging itself on me anyway.

Old Lyme gave me a compass check — proof that leaving a place doesn't erase it, it just gives you distance to measure yourself against. Ninety minutes from Waterbury, the mill town where I grew up, and a million miles from it in every other way — that's how I put it at the start of the month, standing in a rented house off Main Street, looking for the right spot to take a picture.

Essex gave me a boat, a sunset, and two St. Petersburg acquaintances who turned out to have grown up twenty minutes from where I did. We never once talked real estate. Just drinks, dinner, and a sky that did most of the work.

Litchfield gave me the town that trained the nation's first lawyers and sent them out into the world — Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun both studied law a few minutes' walk from where I was staying, on their way to becoming vice president. A few doors down from that same house, my sister raised her family, in a town none of us are actually from. She chose it once. Her daughters chose it again. Three generations now, on purpose, one at a time.

Cheshire gave me Blackie's — the same order I've been getting my whole life, a hot pepper relish thick enough to need a birch beer chaser, and ten friends I've had since freshman year of high school. Three of us live within a mile of each other now, a thousand miles from where any of us started.

Piermont gave me an old friend's engagement, a proper French lunch in a garden, and a lesson it took five different towns to teach me: the towns were never really the point. Sandbu's argument is that travel done right unsettles what you thought you knew, and makes it a little harder to take your own life for granted. Mine wasn't discovery. It was rediscovery — looking at the place, and the people, who built me, from a distance I only earned by leaving in the first place. I'd like to think that counts too. Back in St. Petersburg now. Same frame of reference. A month's worth of new evidence for why I trust it.

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