Sight-Seeing

Sight-Seeing

A couple of years ago we took a trip to New York City.  We got a great guide book, marked off the tourist spots we wanted to see, made some reservations, and set off, intrepid travelers full of expectation.  And expectations were met.  After JFK spewed us from its terminal, we held on for dear life in a dirty yellow taxi clearly driven by a madman.

Sweating and breathless, I gasped at the near misses and close calls with cars and bicycles as we weaved our way to our hotel.   As much as possible, I craned my neck this way and that, trying like a sponge to absorb the city view.  Apartments running from block to block, laundry hung from the railings and fire escapes; lines of uniformed children on their way to a field trip at the museum on the corner; bricks, asphalt, concrete; shop windows full of women’s clothing, street carts offering a quick tasty lunch; glassed-in buildings stretching tall, so high you couldn’t see the tops without tipping your head back and back until dizziness set in.  So much to see!

One of my best childhood friends works in a building in Times Square.   Once we left our hotel and made our way to her office, we stood in the middle of the block, turning like  rotisseries, goggling at the lights, colors, costumed performers, and advertisements, each boasting more movement and neon than the last.  It was exhausting, the definition of sensory overload.

We entered her building and it was as if we’d stepped into an alternate universe.  The vacuous lobby echoed with the clack of polished heels.  Overhead lights reflected on the chrome and glass in muted shades of gray and sophisticated ivory.  I felt myself relax from the absence of sensory onslaught.  My friend was dismissive of the display just outside the doors.  She waved her hand and rolled her eyes.  “This is just for the tourists,” she said.  “If you live here, it’s kind of embarrassing.”   She gave us pointers on what to see for the afternoon and suggested we download KickMap, a great app for navigating the subway.   “Also,” she said, “Use Maps on your phone for when you come up out of the stations. It can be disorienting.”

Duly armed, we made our way to the nearest station and set off for our first tourist site.  We must have walked miles that day, jostling with other pedestrians:  all nationalities and colors, crowds of tourists, students from NYU, women in business suits and tennis shoes, hoofing to their next destination, high heels stowed in their designer bags.  Up and down into the subway stations we went, going from the gusty winds and sirens above to the stuffy, graffiti-ed tunnels below.  Every time–EVERY time–I emerged from the steps onto the street, pushed by the flow of people, my neck swiveled like a dizzy owl as I tried to get my bearings.  Which street was this?  Which direction were we headed?  I’d consult the Maps app on my phone, watch the blinking beacon that was “me” as I walked, and nine times out of ten I’d be headedcompass rose the wrong way.

Admittedly, a sense of direction was not one of my gifts.   When I was a kid, the compass rose on the top of a map caused me no end of confusion.  North was always at the top, so I reasoned that it was always in front of me.  Whichever direction I faced as I held the map, no matter where I was standing, would always be North.  East was always to my right, South always behind.  My disoriented brain did not comprehend that the directions were constant, while I was the one changing. At dinner parties, my father would call me over and ask which direction I was facing.  “North,” I would say, exasperated, “Always North!”   (Ok, so I was never in Girl Scouts.)

At the end of our sight-seeing day, we came up out of a subway station and a woman kept pushing my shoulder from behind, saying “Excuse me.”   I kept edging out of her way, but she kept pushing until I began to feel nervous and hug my purse tighter.  When I finally turned my head to give her a “back off, lady” look, I realized why she persisted.  She was blind.  She was in her mid 60’s, short with frizzy brown hair, and had a heavy New York accent.  She clearly expected me to do her bidding.  I turned to her, and as she sensed my posture change, she hooked her arm in mine.  “Can you point me in the direction of East 125th?”

I was already fumbling with the apps on my phone.  I stammered, “I’m not actually from here.”  She had no patience with my incompetence.  “I know where I’m going,” she huffed, “Just point me in the direction.  I don’t know how this subway comes up.”  By some miraculous stroke of luck, I happened to spot a street sign that was where she wanted to go.  I took a couple steps in that direction and told her that was the way.  She unhooked her cane from her free arm and set off confidently, her face tilted slightly up and to the left, as if she were listening to a pleasant melody.

I stood there stunned, my destination forgotten.  All I could think was how confused I’d been all day, the distances I’d traveled, the sights I’d seen, the swirl of color and lights in Times Square.  How I could barely navigate my way a few blocks with the repeated use of maps and constant landmark checking.  You know that game where you’re blindfolded and spun around and then asked to hit the hanging pinata?  She lived that every day.  Except instead of whacking a paper donkey for candy she was making her way through the congested streets of one of the biggest cities in the world.

She amazed and humbled me, this stranger, in our brief encounter.  While my husband and kids stood huddled over their phones, debating over which way we should head, I leaned back against the rough brick of a corner building and shut my eyes.  I imagined the life the woman might lead, and tried to distinguish direction without any visual cues.  The city’s sensory attack was definitely thwarted without sight.  With the sirens, honking taxis, cell phone conversations, and footsteps, I couldn’t discern any helpful pattern.  Smells:  hot dogs, sewage, someone’s bold choice of cologne, exhaust fumes.  Opening my eyes in panic, I realized how brave she was, not even a service dog to help guide her.

During the rest of our stay, I noticed the streets differently.  I marked the neighborhoods not by sight but tried to distinguish them by sound or smell.  The perfume of the flower stall on the corner, the spicy Thai restaurant, the quiet conversation of the old men playing chess by NYU, a solo saxophonist making music under a bridge in Central Park.   It was a game, eavesdropping on the city, trying to decipher the clues of my surroundings.   I let the family navigate by sight as I trailed along fascinated by the city’s other senses.

How ironic that a blind woman would have added such depth to my sight-seeing.  I still can’t find my way out of a paper bag.  But when we travel now, I frequently pause to appreciate the non-visual aspects of a new place, to think how I would describe it to someone without sight.  That day, we were each an example of the blind leading the blind.  I’d thought I was taking in the city in all its glory, but she showed me a deeper way to “sight see.”

See Rock City

See Rock City

I’m a transplant.  Growing up as an Air Force brat meant my family uprooted every couple of years and moved to a new place.  New schools, new friends, new geography.  Although I was born in Japan, we stayed only 6 weeks after my arrival before pulling up stakes for Virginia.  (I should tattoo “Made in Japan” on the bottom of my foot just to prove I was there.)  After that, it was Florida, South Carolina, then Florida again before finally landing in Tennessee for high school upon my father’s retirement.

Starting high school in the small-town South was cultural whiplash.  As the new kid, I talked “funny” (too fast, no accent), didn’t get local references (turn left where the old hospital used to be–huh?), and found it really hard to make friends with people who’d not only known each other since kindergarten but had a good chance of being related to each other.  Enter my new best friend:  the only other person in the county who’d moved in from Elsewhere.  She commiserated with me when we couldn’t understand the lingo (what the heck was a hosepipe and why was it ruint?) and reminded me I wasn’t weird just because I “wasn’t from around here.”

Maybe it was this scratchy-wool-sweater discomfort that gave me a restless urge to wander.  Or it could be that just after my parents finally got all five of us out of the house and on our own, they bought a camper intending to travel and explore together.  Not a year later, my mother had passed away from cancer and the camper sat unused and vacant in the driveway.  Once I was married with two children, the unquenchable wanderlust descended with a vengeance.  I remembered my own rambling childhood, exposed to different people in different places, and I wanted my children to experience the same, to embrace the new kids that moved in and to find other people interesting and worth knowing.

As soon as our youngest was out of diapers, we took off for the West Coast and the Golden Gate Bridge.  We had to wait til then because I have an innate fear of traveling with very small children.  My mother had told me repeatedly how I had screamed and wailed in her arms for the entire flight from Japan to the US.  She recounted the feeling she had that the resentful passengers who glared at her were plotting to throw her off the plane, midair.  I would just be asking for karmic payback if I tried to travel with an infant (sorry, Mom).  Our children, then 6 and 3, did great–fate was kind to me.  We began to deliberately pay our business pharmacy bills with credit cards in order to rack up air miles.   Since Tennessee is fairly centrally located (it borders 8 other states), we took long weekends and holidays and drove to nearby states to explore.

It didn’t take long to realize we had actually been to quite a few states, mostly in the Southeast.  We decided to set a family goal to visit all 50 before the kids left for college.  That gave us 10 years from the time we started to reach our goal.  We tacked up a big map of the US in my son’s room and began sticking pushpins into each new state we visited.  We got creative, taking an Amtrak sleeper train from Atlanta to D.C. once.  Family and friends became waypoints.  We visited family in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Florida.  We saw friends in Minnesota, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Mississippi.

As the kids got older, our travels usually included something educational.  We followed the Freedom Trail in Boston, explored the cliff dwellings of tribes in New Mexico, toured Frank Lloyd Wright homes and learned about architecture, and saw the 9/11 memorials in Pennsylvania and New York.  Long, tedious car trips transformed into an appreciation for the incredible varied landscapes of America.  Our country truly is America the Beautiful:   coastlines, mountains, deserts, lakes, plains, powerful cities and sleepy country towns.  We touched anemones in Oregon tidepools, marveled as Hawaiian lava ran into the ocean, and outran sudden prairie hailstorms in South Dakota.  Our nation’s national parks never failed to delight.  We hiked through Bryce and Zion in Utah, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Denali in Alaska, and the Smokies in Tennessee.

Along the way, whether it was Route 66 or US-1, we sampled clam chowder, fresh beef, and once, quesadillas made from Cheese Whiz that made us laugh until we cried because they were so terrible.  Our kids were intrepid travelers, expert packers.  It became second nature to navigate airports and hotels, to find their way with a map in a new city.  They witnessed how to handle mishaps on the way–we once broke down in the middle of the Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan–and they filed away memories.  Unexpectedly, I found that there’s a comfort in having a home base.  Having been raised with shallow roots, it’s been a pleasant surprise to actually sink deep in one spot and nestle in.  Each time we returned home from a trek to Elsewhere, it was good to hear the familiar cadence of people’s speech (slow, with an accent) and to know that I actually know where my town’s old hospital used to be.

Two years ago, we reached our goal, checking off the last state when we crossed into North Dakota. We had a celebration in the middle of nowhere, the only witnesses a couple of cows and a cloud of black flies.  We snapped a picture by the “Welcome to North Dakota” sign, and I gave a private, silent high-five to my mom, who would’ve liked to have seen North Dakota (despite the flies).