Onions remained predominantly a wild plant in the Americas much longer than in Europe and Asia.

The French explorer Jacques Marquette, traveling the shore of what is now Lake Michigan in 1674, relied for nourishment on an onion that the Indigenous locals called cigaga-wunj, which means “onion place” and is the origin of the name Chicago. In more recent times it has come to be known as the Canada onion, Allium canadense, and it grows wild in much of North America from New Brunswick to Florida and west to the Rocky Mountains. It is fairly easy to spot because it has a very strong onion scent and it flowers spectacularly in great globes of little pink or white blossoms. Today it is favored as an ornamental plant.

But some historians and naturalists insist that the wild onion that gave Chicago its name was actually the nodding wild onion, Allium cernuum. It is called nodding because it does not stand erect and, unusual for onions, is bent over even when flowering. It announces itself with white or deep pink or rose flowers with a strong scent of onion. According to a description from the 1890s, these onions look “bright on the whole since the reddish hues prevail. They are often in such quantities and grow so thickly that little else is noticeable where they stand.”

Such bright wild patches are a very rare sight today, even in their native habitat such as the Chicago area, though they are also found in Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

*

There are seventy species of wild onion native to North America. Native American Indians harvested them and sometimes ate them raw, but also used them to flavor cooked dishes or would eat them as a cooked vegetable. Onions were also used in syrups and in dyeing. Roasted wild onions and honey were used by Native Americans to treat snakebites.

There does not appear to have been much cultivation of alliums by Native North Americans, with the notable exception of the Aztecs. But Europeans could not imagine life without cultivated onions and so brought them with them.

Christopher Columbus, apparently finding no onions on his first voyage to the Caribbean, which was a voyage of exploration, brought along onion seeds, cattle, horses, and sheep on his second voyage, which was a voyage of colonization. In 1494 his crew planted onions in what is now the Dominican Republic.

But Mexicans may have already cultivated alliums. Hernán Cortés, in his march of conquest from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, found that the local people cooked onions, leeks, and garlic. According to Cortés, they ate an onion called xonacatl. This is a word in Nahuatl, the original Aztec language that is still in use. Today it means “onion,” but what kind of onion the original xonacatl was is not certain. In Mayan the word is kukut. Francisco Hernández, a physician to Philip II of Spain, was sent to Mexico from 1570 to 1577 to report on the flora. According to Hernández, xonacatl was an onion with a “split roof,” which probably meant a split bulb, more like a shallot.

Pre-Spanish cooking, much of which is still in practice, does not use a great deal of alliums. The rich sauces called moles involved dozens of ground-up ingredients but rarely an onion. The famous mole from Puebla, mole poblana, uses some five different chili peppers, chocolate, ground tortilla, seeds, and a dozen other ingredients including garlic, but no onions. Mole manchamanteles does include both boiled onions and garlic on its long ingredient list. Mole de olla also uses both onions and garlic.

It is far easier to trace pre-Spanish Mexican cooking than Sumerian, because the Spanish recorded what they found and the Indigenous people still have their culture and are continuing to cook the dishes they made before the Spanish arrived. Some modern inventions have crept in. City tortillas now are made by machine, but the people in Indigenous villages think this is a disgrace and tortillas there are still made by hand, exclusively by women. Recipes still call for xonacatl, but today cooks usually use the onion the Spanish brought. This is historian Heriberto García Rivas’s recipe for xonacatl in his cookbook Cocina prehispánica mexicana:

In a little hot chia oil, fry three onions finely chopped. Add three ripe zucchini squash, peeled and  quartered, a tablespoon of yucca or sweet potato flour, stir with a wooden spoon, mix in six large peeled and seeded tomatoes, maguey or corn syrup, salt, pepper, herbs, cook slowly.

*

It is not certain that the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest ate the bulbs of wild onions, but it is known that, like ancient Europeans, they ate other bulbs. They were particularly fond of camas, Camassia quamash, which, like onions, used to be thought of as a lily variety. More recent botanists have decided it is in the family of the agave.

White pioneers learned to eat camas in desperate times, noting that it was similar to but sweeter than an onion. But there is another camas that is deadly poisonous, known as “the death camas,” which grows among the edible camas and creates understandable reluctance among newcomers to harvest these bulbs. After the Nez Perce gave some good camas to Lewis and Clark, Lewis described it as “a tunicated bulb, much the consistence, shape and appearance of the onion; glutinous or somewhat slymy when chewed.” He thought lilies and hyacinths tasted better.

As in Europe, Native Americans were extremely fond of the wild onion called ramps, or ramson, a strong-smelling species. They cooked ramps as a vegetable sautéed in acorn oil. These alliums are among the first green vegetables to come up in the spring when little else is available and so were greatly valued, even used in religious rites by some tribes, including Chippewa, Cherokee, Ojibwa, Menominee, and Iroquois.

Early European colonists considered eating ramps to be a desperate move, and their smell was associated with extreme poverty, but they learned from Native Americans and these wild vegetables became an important resource for starving settlers. Native Americans continue to value these wild plants, but because of overharvesting and destruction of wild lands, they are becoming hard to find. They often grow undisturbed on the lands of national parks, but the reason they are undisturbed is that picking wild plants from national parks is illegal.

Native groups have tried to be granted an exception, but that is a difficult fight. Cherokee were charged in 2009 with illegally harvesting ramps from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, despite the park being situated on their traditional plantgathering lands. This is an ongoing fight for a number of Native American groups.

Europeans preferred cultivated onions because that was what they were used to. One hundred and fifty years after Columbus, there were still few onions cultivated in the Caribbean or North America. When Richard Ligon, escaping the English Civil War, moved to Barbados in 1647, he carried with him not only seeds for sage, tarragon, parsley, and marjoram, but also onion seeds, and thus began Barbados’s onion cultivation.

The first Pilgrims brought onions with them on the Mayflower. Onions were planted in Massachusetts in 1629 and in Virginia in 1648. The founding father known to be a great onion eater, George Washington, seemed passionate about them, and ordered onions to be planted at Mount Vernon, according to a 1798 report. Thomas Jefferson left detailed accounts that show that onions were a staple crop on his Virginia estate, Monticello, before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, and even on land he owned before construction began on the estate in 1769. He seemed to have favored white Spanish onions, but Madeira and tree onions were also planted. Amelia Simmons, author of the first cookbook published in independent America, in Hartford in 1796, recommended Madeira white onions if you prefer a “softer” flavor and “not too fiery.” But, like Pliny, she also recommended red onions.

By 1806 the new Americans were raising six varieties of onions, and by the time of the Civil War, there were fourteen popular varieties.

*

The Easterners who went west in the mid-nineteenth century found few onions under cultivation. They greatly missed them, even though they liked to call them “skunk eggs” because of their strong smell. Because of their ability to store well, onions later became a basic provision for migrating pioneers on the wagons that went west. An 1860 issue of Hutchings’ California Magazine listed onions as one of the “necessities” for an eight-day journey into the mountains.

Elizabeth Bacon Custer, the widow of the infamous George Armstrong Custer, did not write of his racism and genocide, but she did write about onions while camping in the west with Custer, saying that they were “as rare out there, and more appreciated than pomegranates are in New York.”

Custer and his younger brother Tom, who also died on the Little Bighorn, were zealous cepaphiles. But apparently, in a rare criticism, Elizabeth was not fond of her husband’s onion breath. In an 1873 letter to his wife while on an expedition to the Yellowstone River, Custer wrote that he was filling up on onions now that he was away from her. “I supped on RAW ONIONS; I will probably breakfast, lunch and dine on them tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after ad libitum ad infinitum . . . Go it old fellow! Make the most of your liberties! . . . If you intend to eat raw onions now is your only time for ‘missus is comin.’ ”

Custer seems to have taken onions as he found them, but some Americans wanted more—they wanted them bigger, smaller, stronger, milder, sweeter. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries onions were to become big business.

 __________________________________

From The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food – Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes by Mark Kurlansky, on sale November 7th from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 2023. All rights reserved.

Late one night in 1951, two Englishmen were wandering downtown Athens after an evening drinking in its tavernas. Passing beneath the Acropolis, they decided to scale its rocky north side and sneak inside the Parthenon. They were caught as they left the ancient temple by the guard on duty, but they had a stroke of luck. The sentry was from Crete, and one of the Englishmen was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had fought alongside the Cretans during the resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II. On Crete, Fermor had mastered the local dialect and memorized a vast trove of folk songs and oral poetry.

The night suddenly took a festive turn. The men drank to Fermor. They drank to the nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, who had traveled to fight in the Greek War of Independence in the early 1820s. They drank to the eternal friendship between Britain and Greece.

Three years ago, when my wife and I moved to Athens so she could finish archaeological research for her PhD, I found myself thinking of Fermor’s escapade. I spoke much worse modern Greek—and drank far less—than Fermor. But I saw in him an archetype of a certain style of traveler, one defined by a deep curiosity about history and culture and a desire to gain lasting friendships and a broadened view of life. I’d outgrown the assumption of my younger self that it was normal to expect everyone to speak English while living abroad. To approximate some version of the Fermor ideal, it would be essential to learn modern Greek.

Fermor mastered modern Greek by living in remote caves with Cretan shepherds, speaking and hearing the language constantly. It helped that he also knew ancient Greek. He and other undercover agents were picked to work in Greece in part for this reason. The stakes for mastering the language were high. If Fermor’s fluency failed to convince when he posed as a local, he risked being imprisoned or shot.

Like Fermor, I knew ancient Greek; I’d spent years learning the language and reading ancient Greek philosophy in graduate school. Unlike his linguistic immersion in mountain caves, my modern Greek lessons happened in our Athens apartment over Zoom, lasting barely an hour a week. And the stakes were quite low. If I stumbled over grammar at our local fruit shop, the cashier would just laugh and switch into excellent English, a language now ubiquitous in much of the country after sixty years of globalization and the enormous growth of Greece’s tourism industry.

We arrived in Athens in the summer of 2020. The strict pandemic lockdown meant there were almost no tourists in the country. Then again, it wasn’t a great time to strike up conversations with anyone. Cafés, restaurants, archaeological sites, museums—almost everything was closed. For a while, you had to text a government number to leave your apartment. Luckily, long walks were still allowed.

As I wandered Athens during the first year of the pandemic, knowing the ancient language sometimes gave me a disorienting sense of compressed time, with the lofty and ancient suffusing the mundane and modern. On the glass door of the mini-market near our apartment, the sign that told you to “push” used the same verb as Homer does in the Iliad when warriors “thrust” their spears.

At a carpet cleaners, the word for “cleaning” was essentially the same term Aristotle used in his theory of tragedy as catharsis—a “cleansing” of the soul. On cargo trucks and moving vans I saw the word that became the English “metaphor.” The ancient roots mean “to carry with.” Movers carry things, metaphors carry meanings from one domain to a new one.

Convenience stores and ancient songs of war, carpet cleaners and tragedy, moving trucks and metaphors: these millennia-spanning links somehow both enchanted the present and demythologized the past.

*

That first winter, a rare heavy snow fell on Athens, snapping branches, cloaking monuments, piling on cars and awnings. We took the day off and went for a walk around the city. Everyone else had the same idea. On the small hills near the Acropolis, people were sledding and skiing down the miniature slopes. Snowball battles raged between teenagers in the winding streets of the Plaka neighborhood, a zone of pastel-hued neoclassical architecture below the Acropolis. The whole downtown, usually jammed with traffic and tourists, now had neither.

It was a good day for Greek practice: everyone wanted to talk about the blizzard, as if to confirm it had really happened. The mood was a rare combination of elements: the joy of the snow, the release after pandemic confinement, but also the feeling that the downtown was not an overcrowded amusement park.

It was a feeling Fermor understood. He died in 2007, but by the 1960s he already saw the effects of globalization on Athens, where mass tourism threatened to replace the uniqueness of Greece with a generic nowhere aesthetic bleached of tradition. He found “many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine”; after a remodel, one of his favorite haunts had “the vast and aseptic impersonality of an airport lounge.” It’s hard to immerse yourself in a new culture or language in an airport terminal.

The explosion of tourism is not just a problem for the language-learning goals of foreigners. Even many locals who make a living from tourism are disturbed by its growth. “We just want them to go home now,” a worker at a downtown store told The Guardian last year. As AirBnbs and multinationals spike rents and unsettle neighborhoods, life has become more precarious for many. “The city center is being transformed into an amusement park for tourists, like Las Vegas,” one small business owner told the newspaper Ekathimerini.

I recently met a Greek friend in Kypseli, a neighborhood near the center of the city that hasn’t yet been overrun by tourism. A painter who has had shows around Europe, he can still afford both an apartment and a nearby studio for his work. He doubted this would last much longer.

As we sat at an outdoor cafe in a square, I asked what he thought of tourism. “It’s a plague,” he said, calmly. He gestured at the charming, eclectic architecture all around us, “They’re going to want all this, too.”

*

Many travelers to Greece split into two broad types: the intellectual and the sensual. The poet Lord Byron and his traveling companion John Cam Hobhouse are good examples. Hobhouse was a seeker of knowledge, always eager to decipher inscriptions, trace references, and visit monuments. Byron was inclined to toss the guidebook, scrap the itinerary, and soak in the atmosphere. A friend recalled Byron saying: “John Cam’s dogged perseverance in pursuit of his hobby is to be envied; I have no hobby and no perseverance. I gazed at the stars and ruminated; took no notes, asked no questions.”

When I studied abroad in Athens as a twenty-year-old in 2005, there were still Byrons and Hobhouses. The former leapt from cliffs into perfect pockets of blue sea; they zipped around island coastlines on rented motorcycles; they drank heroic quantities of ouzo by driftwood bonfires on the beach. They took no notes, asked no questions. The latter lingered among vase paintings in the galleries of the National Archaeological Museum; they thrilled to distinguish different orders of capitals on temple columns; they crouched to decipher faded inscriptions chiseled into marble.

I floated between these groups. I liked the sensual spontaneity of the first, but saw how easily it became an empty hedonism. I admired the knowledge of the second, but resisted its drift toward pedantry. Years later, reading Fermor’s two classic travelogues about modern Greece, I realized what makes him so compelling: he embodied a hyperbolic form of both approaches. He somehow managed to combine sensual abandon—wine, feasting, swimming—with deep knowledge of the language, history, and culture of Greece.

For many early travelers to Greece, learning modern Greek would have seemed like a bizarre goal. They wanted only to commune with traces of the glorious ancients. European travelers sought vestiges of antiquity in the people, language, and cities of modern Greece; the 18th century poet Richard Polwhele, for instance, believed he saw “Homer’s head” in the face of “many an aged peasant.”

The modern country rarely matched their ideals. “The Greek tongue is very much decayed,” the scholar Edward Brerewood wrote in the seventeenth century.  The nineteenth century English traveler Frederick Sylvester North Douglas felt that Corinth, “the seat of all that was splendid, beautiful, and happy,” was now “degraded to a wretched straggling village of two thousand Greeks.”

This mix of reverence for Ancient Greece and condescension to its modern inhabitants had a paradoxical result: some classically educated Europeans felt “more” Greek than the actual modern Greeks and made this known by taking artifacts or leaving their mark on them. Wealthy visitors like Lord Elgin employed agents to hack the marble frieze from the Parthenon and ship the sculptures back to England between 1801 and 1812. An English magazine article from 1814 endorsed vandalism, declaring that “it was an introduction to the best company….To be a member of the ‘Athenian club,’ and to have scratched one’s name upon a fragment of the Parthenon.”

By the mid-twentieth century, writers like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller shifted from reverence for antiquity to a sensual evocation of the Greek landscape and a romanticized vision of modern Greeks.  The prose is better, but Miller’s 1941 travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi, resembles the countless blogs and websites that now present the Greeks as masters of the carefree art of Mediterranean living, in which clocks are a nuisance, the sea sparkles nearby, and there’s always another glass of wine to be savored with a smiling friend.

This vision has become the bedrock of the modern tourism industry. One Greek travel website gushes that a cooking class on the island of Santorini is hosted “in a traditional local’s home.” Another offers the chance to become “Mykonian For A Day.” Beside a blog post called “Live like a Greek: The Art of Slow Living,” praising relaxed Greek attitudes toward time, a pop-up window promises that any email queries will be answered within twenty-four hours. It’s the art of slow living—just not for the person who answers your email.

*

In my modern Greek lessons over Zoom, when my desire for expression outstripped my vocabulary, I would reach for an ancient Greek word and hope for the best. The result was something like an English speaker interspersing bursts of Shakespearean diction with the general level of a toddler (“Do you like coffee?” “Coffee yes, banisher of the slumberous.”) My teacher found this amusing, and sometimes comprehensible, but many people were confused by the strange contours of my knowledge. I’d stumble over a simple bit of grammar, only to rally with fantastically grand vocabulary.

Sometimes this created an instant rapport. After one taxi ride, my driver parked outside our apartment, shut off the meter, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to sit and keep talking. I’d mentioned that I studied ancient Greek, and he spent the drive developing a theory of the internet as a version of the cave in which a Cyclops imprisons Odysseus and his men in Homer’s Odyssey. The details were murky, and not only because of my imperfect Greek. But I got his gist: the internet was a realm of darkness in which we were locked by the cannibalistic giant of big tech, and we should escape. He cracked the window and exhaled a luxurious stream of smoke.

“What’s the ancient word for bread?”

I told him: ἄρτος.

“Exactly,” he nodded. “Like we have on bakeries.”

He directed a stream of smoke out the window.

“Homer knew lots of things,” he added, with a significant glance in the rearview mirror, and I began to suspect he believed Homer knew about the Internet.

My Greek teacher and I sometimes played a game in which she listened to me speak for a few minutes and then decided how she would identify me if we were strangers. For most of the first year, I sounded like what I was: an American. By the second year, on good days, she upgraded me to a Greek-American who heard the language a bit growing up, but maybe just from grandparents on summer visits. By our third year, I was a more plausible Greek-American, as if I’d actually heard the language more as a kid, though I was still short of being truly bilingual.

As I was struggling to gain the language skills of a linguistically neglected Greek-American, my teacher enjoyed highlighting the distance between cultures that language can expose. When she taught me the verb χαριζω, which has a dense cluster of meanings related to giving to others and is connected to an ancient word for joy, she smiled. “This must be strange for Americans—you don’t connect these things very often,” she said.

*

Each summer we traveled to a small village in the mountains of Crete, where my wife was on a team of archaeologists excavating an Iron Age settlement roughly 2800 years old. The modern village sits midway up the steep slope of a mountain, its small whitewashed houses rising in tiers above a valley of olive groves. The population swells slightly in the summer, but there are only a few hundred permanent residents.  Many houses have been abandoned for decades, with green vines twisting over the crumbling stone walls.

The archaeologists stay in old houses throughout the village. Ours had a single area as kitchen and living room on the ground floo. In the basement, reached by descending a ladder, was a bedroom and a bathroom. The ceiling was a mesh of branches bisected by great gnarled beams from tree trunks.

We woke each morning marked by small red bites from fleas. To cook, we cranked open a canister of gas beneath the stove.  One afternoon we met a woman who had grown up in the house, and she started recollecting her childhood, roughly half a century ago. Six children, the parents, and their livestock animals all shared the two rooms.

By last summer my modern Greek was finally good enough for more complex conversations. Most mornings, while my wife was excavating the ancient settlement, I sat with a coffee among old shepherds and farmers at a taverna in the village’s central square, chatting and listening. The world my Greek illuminated was often dark. The dogs chained on short metal leashes at the top of the village were guarding drug houses. The kids roaming the streets were avoiding their house because their father was drinking again and often violent. This was not the Greece sold with the “Live Like a Greek” mantra.

The second taverna in the square was locked in a feud with the first: the staff squabbled over parking spots and the boundary lines between tables and competed for customers. By midday, groups of tourists appeared on ATVs rented in the resort towns on the coast six miles away. I was speaking with a waiter at the first taverna one day when the growl of engines signaled the arrival of a batch of sunburned tourists. He walked a few steps toward them, but as they parked, the daughters of the second taverna’s owner encircled them, menus in hand, steering them toward open tables.

“Beer, wine, traditional food, everything you want,” the owner of the second taverna said in English, walking up behind the girls.

He walked back toward me and shook his head.

“You see how it is?” He asked me in Greek, tossing the menus on a table and lighting a cigarette.

Late one night, we heard frantic pounding on our door.  On the street outside, the air was acrid. The sky was an eerie orange, with huge plumes of smoke banking and twisting. We grabbed our passports, dog, and shoes, and tried for several minutes to rouse our 90-something neighbor by banging on her door. We shouted a host of words for fire and flame, then headed for the edge of the village, away from the smoke.

We learned a few hours later that a fire had started just below the village on a grassy hillside. Firefighters and villagers had barely managed to extinguish the blaze just a few feet from town.

A few days later, a young man with a history of drug problems confessed to the police that he had started the fire. Various theories swirled through the village, but most people thought the owner of one taverna had paid the man to start the fire to intimidate the owner of the other. The hillside below the square was now charred and blackened, and the smell of smoke lingered for weeks.

The threat of real violence in the square, always implicit, now felt sharper. For the next few days the tourists, after parking their ATVs, would wander over to look at the burned slope. They had no idea they were lunching at the site of an arson attempt that nearly destroyed the village. As an undergraduate abroad in Greece, or even when I knew only ancient Greek, I would have been equally oblivious.

By last summer, my wife had finished her PhD and accepted an academic job back in America. We were leaving just as I was becoming a more persuasive modern Greek speaker. My ancient Greek, meanwhile, had morphed far from the standard Erasmian pronunciations taught in western universities; it had the pointy vowels and conversational cadence of an Athens cafe, not a seminar room.

When I arrived, my ancient Greek would come to the rescue, however haphazard, of my modern Greek. Now it was just as common that I’d decipher a word in an ancient text by knowing its modern descendants. After three years in Greece, I occupied a murky intermediate zone, somewhere between Byron and Hobhouse, ancient and modern, outsider and local.

The night before we left the village this summer, our neighbor in her 90s stopped to talk outside our front door. She was alive when Fermor joined her parents’ generation in the resistance to the Nazi occupation. She told us about her family, and how life in the village used to be. It was early evening, the sun staining the steep hills of the valley above us, the heat of the day finally broken. At this hour, she said, the street used to be thronged with people.

Now it was all different. So many had moved away or died. It seemed quieter every year. I felt a sudden twinge: we too would be leaving soon. Most of the people who lived in the village were old, she said, and only one still came to check on her. Then she smiled and patted my wife’s arm. We were good neighbors, she said, because we spoke to her.

A secret for centuries, the south-eastern coast of France became the Riviera. It brazenly created and recreated itself in the image of successive visitors attracted by its sun, sea and fragrant air. To become so famous, so desired, and yet prove incapable of satisfying everybody’s dreams, is a tough destiny. Paradise was threatened—but there was much passion, wit, intrigue and splendor along the way. This strip of land hosted cultural phenomena well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and villages transformed by foreigners enticed the talented, rich and famous—as well as those who wanted to be. For two centuries of opulence, scandal, war and corruption, the Riviera was a temptation. Nineteenth-century visitors came south to keep themselves alive or to die on a temperate coast that one Belle Époque writer called “an outdoor hospital.” These winter residents were often overbearing. Foreigners with spending power, they imposed their will and their languages. There was palpable xenophobia on all fronts. The English mocked their hosts, while the French were amused by English self-importance, German pedanticism and Russian bombast. By 1870, Nice—a medium-sized town of 50,000 plus—hosted consulates and therefore visitors from countries as widespread as Turkey, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. The list grew. The early quest for self-preservation was succeeded by a drive for dangerous living that reverberated through the first decades of the twentieth century. High-octane, the Riviera was spurred by hedonism and cultural frenzy as the English and American impact on the region made waves across the world.

The territory had been frequently contested. The French and Italians had been bickering over the frontier for centuries. When Antonio de Beatis visited in 1517, he recorded the prevailing wisdom that Nice, being on the border, was so-called because it was “neither here nor there”—“ni ici, ni là.” The claim has been questioned, but it is significant that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Nice coat of arms displayed an eagle whose raised claws seemed undecided about what to clutch.

The area’s motley and squabble-ridden past is echoed by its medley of voices. Before the French Revolution, the astronomer Jérôme Lalande observed Nice’s linguistic indecision. Polite society spoke French, the laws were in Italian, and the ordinary people spoke a verbal salmagundi. The larger Provençal dialect has been described as “French rubbed with garlic,” whereas the local lingo—Nissart—derives from almost any language but French. If “laundry” is lessive in French, in Nissart it is bugada—as it is in Catalan. The Niçois use cabossa for “head”—close to the Spanish cabeza. Spanish agua for “water” is corrupted into daigua, and so it goes on. The philosopher and art critic John Ruskin, visiting briefly in 1845, heard the Greek ara for “now” and Aspai ma picciota?—“Where are you going, my little girl?”—in which he considered aspai to be a corruption of aperçevoir, and picciota from the Italian picciola. There were also borrowings from Arabic, the Provençal langue d’oc and a slow corruption of Latin. As foreigners came south, the babble of sounds became even more diverse. Travelling to Genoa in 1878, the French writer Laurent Germain’s train stopped in Nice to pick up gamblers bound for Monte Carlo. His compartment was invaded by a gaggle of aristocratic gentlemen who rattled away in English, German, Russian, Spanish—even French. No matter which language they used, their discourse was predictable. “Did you win yesterday?” “No, I lost a lot of money.”

In autumn 1922, James Joyce—about to have leeches applied to drain the pressure of his glaucoma—took a room at Nice’s Hôtel Suisse and began to assemble ideas for what became his huge and forbidding multilingual pun, Finnegans Wake. He took inspiration from a polyglot city which, throughout its checkered history, hosted languages that came and went according to political circumstance. Russian diminished after the 1917 Revolution only to reappear on restaurant menus in the 1990s. German vanished after the Second World War and came back in the early 1970s, as hordes of West Germans came south to grill themselves lobster orange.

Earlier ages largely ignored the potential of the southern French coast. It took the British desire for a sympathetic climate for bronchitis and the Romantic attraction to untamed nature to make the Riviera a destination. The British saw paradise in a wilderness and created a pleasure ground. Over the decades, other nations followed and turned this thin strip of Shangri-La—snow-capped mountains towering on one side, the azure Mediterranean on the other—into a singular treasure. The Aga Khan spoke of meeting members of the aristocracy and plutocracy “over and over again” in London, Rome, Berlin, Monte Carlo, Cannes and Nice—three capitals widely separated and three resorts only miles apart.

There was an Anglo-Saxon land grab aided and abetted by the Russians, Germans, Belgians, Americans and a scatter of Scandinavians. The Parisian French also colonized the coast—seeking either commercial opportunity or enjoyment in resorts that boasted a wonderful winter climate and an international reputation. They found no indigenous high-cultural tradition—just a convivial lifestyle and a landscape in which to create a modern paradise; one full of temptations in which those who fell were rarely doomed to expulsion. As entrepreneurs recognized the commercial scope of the Riviera, they built restaurants and hotels in the grand French style while cunningly making strategic concessions to foreign tastes. Later, American improvisations on the themes of Gallic style and bohemianism modified the character of the coast. Later still, all levels of the French population grew to love and hate the Côte d’Azur.

As the “outdoor hospital” became a pleasure ground, it grew famous for its frivolity. The Riviera was a world of indolent aristocracy and Noël Coward’s poor little rich girls. It was also an attractive destination, where important decisions could be taken by powerful people relaxing at a remove and out of context—Winston Churchill was addicted. The Riviera provided a haven where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor went to escape reality. The landscape and the influx of international visitors made for a potent cultural cocktail that worked its magic on the likes of Hector Berlioz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, Katherine Mansfield, Jean-Paul Sartre, Igor Stravinsky and the Rolling Stones—to name but a few. Colors and forms cut by the strong Mediterranean light were inspirational to modern painters. The Riviera hosted the exceptional. “Out of time’s monotone,” recorded the American writer Allen Tate in a poem honoring a picnic at which 16 adults—in an act of intoxicated inversion—downed 61 bottles of wine. Tate and friends put into a small cove full of “amethyst fishes and octopuses darting, like closed parasols.” Over a driftwood fire, they started to cook a bouillabaisse—its ingredients lately caught. Lurching down the craggy goat track of the red cliff came an eighty-two-year-old peasant on a horse carrying all those bottles.

Drink has always been a feature of this festive enclave. Celebrated lush F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived hours late for a dinner with the writer Michael Arlen. The delay had been caused by Fitzgerald’s inability to pull himself away from a bottle. He sat down and declared, “This is how I want to live… This is how I want to live,” laid his head on the table and fell asleep.

This wayward coast—once a temptation for pirates and brigands—has attracted profiteers, corrupt politicians and the mafia—Italian and Russian. David Dodge’s book To Catch a Thief, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name, demonstrated that wealth lavishly displayed provided great opportunities for crime. The coast, wrote Dodge elsewhere, was “lousy with situations and characters.” Among these were notable crooks, from the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo to the famously corrupt mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, and the underworld that sustained him. Somerset Maugham’s celebrated quip “a sunny place for shady people,” believed to have targeted Monte Carlo but perhaps provoked by the unsavoury quarters of wartime Marseille—or by his disreputable lover Gerald Haxton—has become the motto for a dark yet sparkling coast.

The locals were swept up into the international scene that engulfed them. The 1960s École de Nice was a group of artists inhabiting the worlds of Pop Art and Conceptualism. In one of Nice’s most surprising hotels, some rooms are decorated by local artists. I remember standing in the foyer, listening to an American guest despair about the room she had been given. In true Pop style, the walls were covered with American license plates. “That’s what I came away to escape,” the guest groaned. “Perhaps the Louis XIV room would suit Madame better?” Indeed. I also overheard a couple of traveling companions suggest that having the bathroom facilities creatively exposed in the middle of their room was a teensy bit too “modern.”

This sunny coast lifts the spirit. Picasso found that Antibes and Golfe-Juan rekindled his delight in the joyous visual pun which had lain largely dormant during the years of the Second World War. Marc Chagall let his antic spirit loose in the installations he made for the Musée National Message Biblique. Yves Klein of the École de Nice signed the air above the Mediterranean, calling it a work of art.

Verbal wit has also embellished most aspects of life on the Côte d’Azur. Charlotte Dempster, who lived near Cannes in the second half of the nineteenth century, mocked the energetic attempts of Protestants to establish their own churches: “At Nice and Monte Carlo I dare say there are not many persons as devout as the Praying Mantis.” Even when they were ill, visitors could be witty. The ailing author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote to an old friend from Hyères in March 1884: “Dover sounds somewhat shiveringly in my ears. You should see the weather I have—cloudless, clear as crystal… aromatic air, all pine and gum tree. You would be ashamed of Dover; you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry… pray, how do you warm yourself?” Comparisons of southern sun and northern chilliness are legion. Vita Sackville-West suggested that “her lover, violet Trefusis, was the Mediterranean while her husband, Harold Nicolson, was Kent.” Ford Madox Ford thought the south of France was Eden whereas the north meant Brussels sprouts.

Social observation was spiked. The French writer and archaeologist Prosper Mérimée spoke of the arrival in Nice of a certain Madame de Vogué, “who left her husband somewhere en route but who has replaced him with impressive specimens from here or there.” Etiquette often gave rise to risible situations. A shabbily dressed, socially diffident and absent-minded Englishman attempted to enter the Casino in Monte Carlo. He was asked for his passport. “A passport? I’m sorry but I haven’t got one.” “No passport! Then you cannot enter.” “You see, I am the man who issues them.” “You! That’s a good one.” The Englishman left. When it was discovered that the thwarted visitor was Lord Salisbury, thrice prime minister and—at the time of the incident—Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the fear of bad publicity sent a frock-coated, top-hatted deputation from the Casino administration to Salisbury’s villa in nearby Beaulieu to apologize. The Foreign Secretary had merely been amused by the rebuff.

As performers began to adorn the coast in the 1920s and ’30s, the homosexual contingent—often fleeing from the stringent laws that pertained in England—prompted the actress Maxine Elliott to refer to the coast as an “Adamless Eden.” She sometimes found it refreshing to invite heterosexuals like Douglas Fairbanks Sr or Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Weissmuller. True to character, Tarzan dived from her top terrace, over the dining patio, into her huge pool.

A legend about the lemon-scented border town of Menton claimed that its citrus trees were a gift from Eve. Expelled from paradise for eating the forbidden apple, the mother of us all grabbed a lemon and—wandering over the earth—threw it down in the countryside near Menton, where it created a new Eden. Unlike Eve, many later visitors arrived not with lemons, but with oodles of their own forbidden fruit.

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Excerpted from The Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera by Jonathan Miles Copyright © 2023. Available from Pegasus Books.

A city is not a static unit. It’s a dynamic and constantly changing environment, adapting to the needs of its residents. And when that city has more than eight million inhabitants who come from every part of the globe, understanding how it works is a daunting challenge. New York City’s immense size and scope and the tremendous variety of its people make it impossible to reduce it to a set of empirically verifiable observations and conclusions as one would do with a clearly defined neighborhood—any attempt to do so cannot succeed. Rather, New York must be viewed as a broad portrait in which the sum is indeed far greater than its parts. And the stories of the city’s people and how they negotiate their lives are the vehicles that make it possible for us to enter and begin to comprehend this amazing world.

Walking New York City, block by block, brought into sharp focus a reality that I always knew was there but had never really articulated, because it was so much a part of me that I never felt a need to express it. It emerged time and time again as I spoke and interacted with people from every walk of life. To sum it up, New York is a city with a dynamic, diverse, and amazingly rich collection of people and villages whose members display both small-town values and a high degree of sophistication. This stems from living in a very modern, technologically advanced, and world-class city that is the epitome of the twenty-first century. That is both the major theme and conclusion of this intense and detailed journey to every corner of the five boroughs that constitute the city.

While these qualities reach a high level of expression here, they are by no means unique to New York City. They characterize people in other major cities too—Paris, London, Shanghai, New Delhi, and, in this country, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. While these cities each have their own unique identity, all of them are places infused by new arrivals from everywhere who blend in with longtime residents, who are in turn energized and reshaped by the churning mix resulting from such contacts. This outlook on life and the patterns of behavior that emerge from such exposure are not expressed or realized to the same extent by all New Yorkers, yet they are present in varying degrees among the vast majority of its inhabitants.

New York City has never been scientifically studied as a whole by sociologists. In fact, none of the city’s boroughs has even been investigated as a unit. What we have are many fine studies of communities.  I once mused aloud about this to a colleague. His response was, “Well, it’s a huge topic. Maybe no one was crazy enough before you did it to walk the whole city.” Perhaps he’s right. You do have to be a little crazy to explore the city as I did, though not so much if you see it as healthy, fun, interesting, and as a challenge. It’s also a matter of context. No one thinks of runners in New York City’s marathon as crazy, because it’s an accepted concept. They run about forty miles a week when training for the marathon, and as Abigail Meisel reports in The New York Times, growing numbers of cyclists are commuting from twenty to forty miles daily from the suburbs. But at least walking in Gotham is seen as an accepted form of activity. When I walked in Los Angeles, I almost never met anyone doing the same. For Angelinos, exercise meant only going to the gym, jogging, or swimming.

But the experience of walking the city is far more than that. Walking is critical to the task because it gets you out there and lets you get to know the city up close. However, you cannot merely walk through a city to know it. You have to stop long enough to absorb what’s going on around you. And the only way to do that is to immerse yourself in it—spending as much time as possible in the streets; hanging out where others gather; attending meetings, concerts, sporting events, and the like; in short, doing what those who live there do. That is why the ethnographic method—direct observation, and sometimes even participation in whatever was going on—became the primary approach of my project: The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City.

My initial plan was to walk twenty representative streets of the city from end to end and use them as a basis for the book. But I soon realized that there was no way any particular twenty or even one hundred streets could claim to represent a city as large as New York. To do it right I would simply have to walk the entire city, a daunting but eminently worthwhile project. If nothing else, it would be great exercise!

This decision was crucial, for I now had hundreds of examples from what I observed to write about. The many stories and vignettes presented in this book were selected either because they were typical of phenomena I saw again and again in many parts of the city or because their uniqueness enables us to learn something interesting about the city. When there is so much to choose from, you can pick the very best examples to make your points. Obtaining a general understanding of the entire city ultimately means you won’t be able to present in-depth portraits of every neighborhood, but the benefits of getting a broader picture are well worth that limitation.

I ended up walking about 6,000 miles, the distance between New York City and Los Angeles and back to New York (4,998 miles), and then from New York City to St. Louis. I covered almost every block in Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, including seldom-traversed industrial sections of the city. At the end of each walk I wrote down the number of miles I had traveled, as measured by my Omron pedometer. I averaged about 32 miles a week over four years, starting with Little Neck, Queens, in June 2008 and ending with Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in June 2012. This came to a grand total of 6,048 miles, an average of 1,512 miles a year, 126 miles a month, or 120,960 city blocks (twenty blocks equals one mile). I wore out nine pairs of San Antonio Shoes (SAS), the most comfortable and durable shoes I’d ever owned. And all of the outer boroughs turned out to be much more interesting than I’d anticipated.

As I walked, I interviewed—you could also call them conversations because of their largely spontaneous nature—hundreds of people whom I met, and this too was critical to my efforts. Speaking directly with the city’s residents was the second critical approach to my undertaking. Hardly anyone refused to talk with me. I asked no one their full names, so as not to invade their privacy, but quite a few people volunteered them anyway, and when they appear in this book, it’s with their permission. Although I have changed a few minor details, most names and places are accurate.

Many people asked me why I didn’t save time and just drive through the city. I’ll start by saying that driving via the highways that go through New York City is practically worthless. From that vantage point, you’ll focus mostly on the tall buildings, like the public housing projects, and miss the gardens, trees, and smaller buildings that make up 80 percent of the area, and the storefront churches that often tell a story in their very names. From the Bruckner Expressway you’ll see five-story walk-ups in the Bronx that remind you of Bonfire of the Vanities, but you’ll miss the teeming life that is actually happening in front of them, on the stoops, and in the streets filled with playing children. Driving through the streets slowly is a little better, but not much.

You need to walk slowly through an area to capture its essence, to appreciate the buildings, to observe how the people function in the space, and to talk with them. Driving gives you nothing more than a snapshot. More to the point, it creates a physical wall between you and the neighborhood. By the very fact that you’re driving through, you are making it clear that you are not from the area and are an outsider. When you walk through a neighborhood, although people may see that you’re from the outside, the mere fact that you’re walking suggests that you’re at least visiting. More likely it lends plausibility to the appearance that you have some business there—you work in the area, or you’re meeting a local resident who might be a friend, a business contact, drug dealer, whatever. You might be a cop. Or notwithstanding the fact that you don’t resemble a native, you might be just too poor to live elsewhere. None of these thoughts (except for the cop scenario) are likely to occur to others when you drive through. Walking is infinitely more difficult, it is more time-consuming by far, but it is indispensable for anyone who is seriously interested in comprehending the city and gaining the rapport with the locals that’s necessary for it. And that’s why I chose to walk.

I walked the city mostly during the daytime, but I also traveled through its streets at night. Things change when the sun sets. The avenues throb with far more activity. People are out and about, standing, talking, and joking in front of the buildings, on street corners, and also enjoying the entertainments available after dark—the theaters, restaurants, and various squares where citizens congregate. Walking on weekends or holidays, as well as on weekdays, which I did, also makes a difference in what you see, as do the different seasons.

In my back pocket I carried little street maps of whatever neighborhood I was visiting. That’s how I made sure that I walked all the blocks. Generally I traveled to the neighborhoods by subway, where I would often use the opportunity to read a book. I would travel by car only when the area I planned to explore was an outlying one. Not wanting anything in my hand while I walked, I used what I called the “Tic-Tac method.” I’d buy a box of Tic-Tac mints in a small grocery store, pay for them, and then ask the clerk to hold the book I’d been reading on the subway until I returned, leaving both the book and the Tic-Tacs with him and saying jokingly (I hoped), “If I don’t come back, you can keep both.” They almost always agreed. On one or two occasions store owners even said to me, “You don’t have to buy something for me to hold on to your book. I’ll do it anyway.” As for the tape recorder, it was in my pocket.

Until you do it, it’s impossible to realize what walking six thousand miles really entails. If you walk west to east, just from the Hudson to the East River, down Fifty-sixth Street, it takes about forty minutes (including waiting for lights to change) and runs about two miles. Then if you go on to walk from Fifty-fifth to Fifty-first Streets, it comes to a total of ten miles. This gives you an idea of how big the city is. I walked anywhere from five to thirteen miles each trip, depending on the length of my conversations with people and the points of interest I discovered. There are times when you just lose your “research voice.” Maybe instead of writer’s block you have “walker’s block.” You’re not in the mood to talk to people, you can’t think of any interesting questions to raise, what you see doesn’t inspire any original thoughts. You start thinking, “Maybe I’ve just been doing this for too long.” I do think that when ideas, themes, and so on start repeating themselves, it may mean that it’s time to stop walking and write some more, but on the other hand, when you’re in new territory, a part of the city where you’ve never walked, that isn’t necessarily the case. You may simply need a temporary break. And if so, you should take it and fill up the time with more reading, or take a brief vacation. Fortunately, walker’s block didn’t happen to me too often, probably because New York City is just so interesting.

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Excerpted and adapted from New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich. Copyright © 2013. Available from Princeton University Press. The last book in the series, The Bronx Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide is available now.

The Sistine Chapel frescoes are much looked upon but rarely seen. And this is not exactly because of a collective failure in those who travel from all over the world to see them. Okay, maybe you could have read a little more about the images themselves, to understand the significance of the expulsion from the garden of Eden and the depiction of Noah and the story of the flood.

But you’ve come for more than just the facts, which you could acquire without leaving home. I would bet that you’ve come to see great art because you want to know what it feels like.

Inside the Sistine Chapel I once experienced a sense of myself in time, as a body of energy that has existed forever with a consciousness frustratingly limited to now. But I also felt my consciousness reaching through the images painted on the ceiling to connect to the mind of an artist who has been gone for nearly half a millennium and who himself was trying to connect to the thoughts and stories of the past, maybe even to God. It was quite something.

And because of that experience, I have returned numerous times, and I have approached that feeling again while looking at the images of the pagan sibyls and at the frescoes as a whole, though never quite with the quiet shock of the first time when it crept up on me while I sat on a bench under the scene of the flood.

And isn’t that why we go to visit famous works of art, why we travel and build our holiday plans around a trip to see Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, Botticelli’s Primavera in Florence, and Michelangelo’s frescoes in Rome? Or are we just checking things off a list: Raphael’s School of Athens—done. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment—done?

You might wish you had learned more about Michelangelo while you are standing elbow-to-elbow with a room packed full of your fellow travelers trying to get a look at the ceiling, trying to find one image to hold onto. Maybe it’s the famous one of God and Adam reaching toward each other, or maybe it’s the Prophet Jonah with a fish tucked under his arm.

And just as you’re thinking—hey, didn’t Jonah get swallowed by a whale? And what is that look in his eye?—one of the guards will demand silence through a thought-shattering loudspeaker while another guard tries to herd you toward the exit.

The reason I was able to catch a glimpse of the strangeness inherent in these images and to feel anything at all, was because I managed to get a seat where I could rest away from the current of bodies that were moving me toward the door and out of the room that I had spent all morning trying to get into.

When I sat down, I could disconnect from the chaos around me and connect with the surprising sight of the victims of the flood depicted in the moments before all was lost, when maybe there was still a chance left in their minds that they might make it. And then to remember that, of course, they do not.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes are so hard to see. They unravel a view of spirituality, a poetic and nonlinear embrace of human origins that the Catholic Church veered away from after the Renaissance. To really make it difficult, the ceiling is about sixty-five feet overhead.

Even if you could lie down on the floor (you can’t, don’t even think of it), it wouldn’t help. And if you try to use binoculars, you will be able to see some detail but lose your sense of the whole (and feel queasy afterwards and have to miss lunch).

Another problem is each other. There are too many of us there on holiday, all at once, all of us wanting to see the same thing. We might have the best of intentions. We might truly want to see this feverish, sensuous, dream of sixteenth-century spirituality and we might also want to understand how it spirals out of the Vatican Museums and into the streets of Rome. We might want to find the historical connections in the contemporary city that run through the Renaissance and back to the pre-Christian ancient world of the Caesars.

But the problem with art tourism, as with tourism in general, is simply each other. There we are, each on our own mini grand tour, but we cannot get away from the rest of us. We’re like Lucy and Charlotte in A Room with a View unable to shake off Mr. Emerson and his son, except multiplied. There they are again, doing everything that we’re doing.

Only now we can hardly walk through the historic centre of the city on a summer night because there are so many of us, consulting our apps and looking for that authentic trattoria, which, when we find it, is lined up with people just like us, clutching our phones, consulting our apps. We can’t quite grasp that elusive sense of meaning in the artwork when being squashed into churches and galleries with our fellow travelers.

The director of a museum in northern Italy once told me that cultural institutions shouldn’t use numbers to measure their success. They shouldn’t count turnstile clicks and revenues. The point of such places is not to make money but to allow visitors to experience the art, to allow it inside themselves, rather than to graze the surface as they walk past paintings, clicking their phone cameras presumably to look at the images later.

But how does an institution measure your experience of the art? Should they ask you some questions as you’re leaving? Excuse me, but did you have any meaningful experiences today? Has the sense of your place in the universe been altered? Would you say quite altered, only a little altered, not altered at all?

Will you walk out of this place, buffeted and bumped in this stream of humanity and feel a little flutter in your stomach for having caught the edge of a thought that came from a world that no longer exists? And if only you could just be left alone with it and your own mind, do you think you might be able to take hold of it?

The difficulty of modern tourism when it comes to seeing art is that we need a little quiet. This isn’t because we art lovers are so precious, but because it takes time and humility to look down the centuries to see that these artists who were wrestling with their own questions about existence and how to live a good life in the eyes of their god were working on a puzzle that has never been solved.

And you feel that if you could be allowed a few tranquil minutes, you might be able to sense something close to meaning in your own life, something that includes you and these long dead artists, as well as the generations of people yet to come, and, even though you might not want to admit it in the moment, includes the guy next to you who is loudly filling the air with information.

Art tells us something we need to know, but it does so quietly. So, next time you find yourself in the presence of a piece of art that has been gazed upon so much it’s in danger of disappearing behind a curtain of familiarity, try to remember to close your mouth and open your eyes. See if anything happens.

My grandpa, John, wore his war story on his face. It was there the whole time I knew him, from my earliest days, but I never really knew how to read it until long after he passed away.

The story’s broad outline lay in the incongruence between the colors of his eyes, one a deep dark brown and the other a grayish blue. He’d lost his second brown eye, and half the sight he was born with, to a piece of shrapnel flying along a Normandy beach on D-Day. He would have faced a lifetime of disfigurement had it not been for the scientific advancements that produced the prosthetic eye he was eventually fitted with, which came complete with a white sclera, a pupil, an iris, and painted-on blood vessels.

Still, the timing could not have been worse: He was one of thousands upon thousands of soldiers who lost their eyes to battle or disease during the war, and the United States struggled to meet their demand. By the time it was John’s turn to get a new eye, his only option was blue.

Maybe white veterans ended up with mismatched eyes, too. But they certainly got the first and best pick of everything else. Back home in Montgomery, Alabama, John stood by as white veterans took plum manufacturing and defense industry jobs that rewarded their tactical expertise, enrolled at the University of Alabama and Auburn to prepare for career changes, got specialized vocational training to start their own businesses, and received loans to buy homes for their growing families during what would come to be known as the baby boom.

Meanwhile, none of those options were available to John or the other African Americans who fought in the war and helped hold down the home front. The latter group had worked (along with white women, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans) in factories and defense plants that were desegregated by presidential order so they could help build tanks, planes, and weapons to support overseas troops, only to get laid off at war’s end to make way for white veterans.

Those layoffs saw years of economic gains, professional development, and social progress come to a grinding halt. Training for new career paths was almost entirely out of the question since local universities and trade schools refused to admit African American applicants, which resulted in endless waiting lists at historically Black colleges and universities. Added to that was the double bind created by Federal Housing Administration—endorsed racial covenants that prevented African Americans from buying homes in white neighborhoods, and redlining practices that prevented them from getting mortgages to invest in their own.

Even if John could have managed to sidestep just one of those hurdles, there were others still blocking the way in the form of white staffers at government agencies. The ones at the Veterans Administration found arbitrary reasons to deny African Americans’ access to the GI Bill of Rights, even as they freely signed off on subsidizing white veterans’ educational and wealth-building dreams.

And the ones at the United States Employment Service, which was supposed to help veterans find jobs in the defense industry, instead steered African Americans toward janitorial work, restaurant service, and porter jobs, none of which required the specialized training or expert skills acquired on the battlefield and factory floor. The local banks were in on it, too, refusing to underwrite African American vets’ home or business loans, even with government backing.

John wanted to marry his sweetheart, Willie Mae, and start a family. But what kind of life could they lead in Montgomery? How would he be able to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, or provide for any children they hoped to have? He found himself thinking back on how skeptical he’d been when he was first drafted, how afraid he’d been to risk his life for a country that would ask so much after giving so little. And he began to wonder if he’d made the right choice.

So little had changed in this world he had sacrificed so much to keep safe. It was 1945 and he still had to sit in the back rows of streetcars and buses. He still had to climb the stairs to the stifling-hot balcony sections of movie theaters. He still had to trudge to the back of gas stations to relieve himself in filthy outhouses, and sneak into dark alleyways when the sign on the only restroom said: “Whites Only.” He still had to endure the rudeness of white cashiers at the stores where he spent his hard-earned money and listen to white men call him “boy.” And he still had to tread lightly in the face of such insults, lest he end up one of the lynching victims he read about in the paper.

Amid this piling on of injustices, the United States was sending billions of dollars in aid to rebuild postwar Europe and promote American-style democracy. John read about it in the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal, the same newspapers that showed indifference to Black people’s suffering, even blaming them for their own experiences of racial oppression and violence.

Their front pages trumpeted the benefits of the Marshall Plan (named after its chief architect, former U.S. Army chief of staff turned secretary of state George C. Marshall), insisting it was the only way to halt the spread of Communism from the East. John marveled at the hypocrisy. Like so many African Americans, he wondered how the United States could bang on about democracy without ever truly practicing it. Black newspapers around the state and country, together with the newly founded Ebony magazine, a Chicago-based publication that John would read from its first issues until the day he died, amplified these questions and warned of a foreign policy failure if domestic civil rights issues weren’t resolved.

Their writers knew that the Soviets were using their own propaganda machines to spotlight the United States’ hypocrisy and gain support for the Communist cause, particularly among African Americans. And they knew that even the Western Europeans on the receiving end of U.S. largesse were skeptical of the country’s claims of moral leadership when it treated its own citizens with such cruelty. They heard it with their own ears when they went to places like London, Paris, and Rome.

They also knew that the American money flowing into Europe had a way of silencing open criticism there, no matter how righteous or necessary. But what they did not yet know, could not yet see, was that the United States had the means to extend its power and influence in ways that would make even the farthest reaches of the world feel, to African Americans at least, like they hadn’t left home at all.

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From Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad by Tamara J. Walker. Copyright © 2023. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

I arrived in in Paris with a plan in my mind: to make a pot-au-feu recipe from a nineteenth-century French cookbook. It was for a book project that had begun to bubble and form in my mind, about national food cultures told through their symbolic dishes and meals, which I would cook, eat, and investigate in different parts of the world.

Now I sat on a Parisian park bench in the multicultural 13th arondissement—unwrapping a hyper-globalized sushiburrito while I contemplated a super-essentialist quote from the great scholar Pascal Ory. France, wrote Ory, “is not a country with an ordinary relation to food. In the national vulgate food is one of the distinctive ingredients, if not the distinctive ingredient, of French identity.”

Italians, Koreans, even Abkhazians would certainly wax indignant that their relation to food is every bit as special. But if our identities, at their most primal, involve how we talk about ourselves around a dinner table, it was France—and Paris specifically—that created the first explicitly national discourse about food, esteeming its cuisine as an exportable, uniquely French cultural product along with terms such as “chef” and “gastronomy.”

It was France that in the mid-seventeenth century laid the foundation as well for a truly modern cuisine, one that emerged from a jumble of medieval spices to invent and record sauces and techniques the world still utilizes today. To create “restaurants” as we know them, and turn “terroir” into a powerful national marketing tool.

Of course (to my not-so-secret glee, I admit) this Gallic culinary exceptionalism had taken a terrific beating over the past couple decades. So where was it now? And where, and how, did the idea of France as a “culinary country” come to be born?

*

The pot-au-feu that was to occupy me in Paris, my symbolic French national meal, came from a book by a deeply influential nineteenth-century chef whose fantastical story befits an epic novel. Abandoned on a Parisian street by his destitute father during Robespierre’s terror, Marie-Antoine Carême would have been invented—by Balzac? Dumas père? both were gourmandizing fans—if he didn’t already exist.

Self-made and charismatic, he rose to become the world’s first international celebrity toque (in fact he invented the headgear). Not only was Carême the grand maestro of la grande cuisine’s architectural spun-sugar spectaculars, he also codified the four mother sauces from which flowed the infinite “petites sauces,” sauce being so essential to the French self-definition. And cheffing for royalty and the G7 set of his day, he spread the supremacy of Gallic cuisine across the globe. Or to put a modern spin on it, Carême conducted gastrodiplomacy (our au courant term for the political soft power of food) on behalf of Brand France.

Even more influential was Carême’s written chauvinism. “Oh France, my beautiful homeland,” he apostrophized in his 1833 seminal opus, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle, “you alone unite in your breast the delights of gastronomy.”

How then are national cuisines and food cultures created? The answer, as I’d come to learn, is rarely straightforward, but a seminal cookbook is always a good place to begin. And as the influential scholar of French history Priscilla Ferguson observed, it was Carême’s books that unified La France around its cuisine and food language, at a time when French printed texts had begun making the ancien régime’s aristocratic gastronomy accessible to an eager, more inclusive bourgeois public. “Carême’s French cuisine,” Ferguson writes, “became a key building block in the vast project of constructing a nation out of a divided country.”

As the Chef of Kings addressed his public: “My book is not written for the great houses. Instead…I want that in our beautiful France, every citizen can eat succulent meals.”

And the succulence that kicks off his magnum opus is the pot-au-feu, “pot on the fire.” Broth, beef, and vegetables, soup and main course all in one cauldron, it’s a symbolic bowlful of égalitéfraternité that Carême anointed un plat proprement national, a truly national dish. Pot-au-feu carries a monumental weight in French culture.

Voltaire affiliates it with good manners; Balzac and even Michel Houellebecq, that scabrous provocateur, lovingly invoke its bourgeois comforts; scholars rate it a “mythical center of family gatherings.” Myself, I was particularly intrigued by its liquid component, the stock or bouillon/broth—the aromatic foundation of the entire French sauce and potage edifice.

“Stock,” proclaimed Carême’s successor, Auguste Escoffier, dictator of belle epoque haughty splendor, “is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking.”

Stock was homey yet at the same time existentially Cartesian: I make bouillon, therefore I cook à la française.

*

“Carême…pot-au-feu…such important subjects.” Bénédict Beaugé, the great French gastronomic historian, saluted my project. “And these days, alas, so often ignored.”

In his seventies, his nobly benevolent face ghostly pale under thinning white hair, Bénédict radiated a deep, humble humanity—the opposite of a blustery French intellectual. His book-lined apartment lay fairly near the Eiffel Tower, in Paris’s west. Walking up his bland street, Rue de Lourmel, I noted a Middle Eastern self-service, a Japanese spot, and a wannabe hipster bar called Plan B.

“Ah, the new global Paris,” I remarked, to open our conversation.

“And a chaos, culinarily speaking,” Bénédict said. “A confusion— reflecting a larger one about our identity—lasting now for almost two decades… Though a constructive chaos, perhaps?”

He wondered, however, as I’d been wondering, about the “overarching idea of Frenchness, of a great civilization at table.” In Paris nowadays, he said, only Japanese chefs seemed fascinated with Frenchness, while Tunisian bakers were winning the Best Baguette competitions.

“Yes, immigrant cuisines are changing Paris for the good,” he affirmed. “But the problem? In France, we don’t have your American clarity about being a melting-pot nation.”

Indeed. Asking journalist friends about the ethnic composition of Paris, I’d been sternly reminded that French law prohibits official data on ethnicity, race, or religion—effectively rendering immigrant communities like the ones in our treizième mute and invisible. All in the name of republican ideals of color-blind universalism.

“Ah, but pot-au-feu!” Bénédict nodded approvingly. “That wonderful, curious thing, a dish entirely archetypal—meat in broth!—and yet totally national!”

As for Carême? He smiled tenderly as if talking about a beloved old uncle. “An artiste, our kitchen’s first intellectual, a Cartesian spirit who gave French cuisine its logical foundation, a grammar. However…” A finger was raised. “The rationalization and ensuing nationalization of French cuisine—it didn’t exactly begin with Carême!”

“Ah, you mean La Varenne,” I replied.

In 1651, François Pierre de La Varenne, a “squire of cooking” to the Burgundian Marquis d’Uxelles, published his Le Cuisinier François, the first original cookbook in France after almost a century dominated by adaptations of Italian Renaissance texts—and the first anywhere to use a national title.

Hard to imagine, but until the 1650s there really wasn’t anything remotely like distinct, codified “national” cooking, anywhere. While the poor subsisted on gruels and weeds (so undesirable then but now celebrated as “heritage”), the cosmopolitan cuisine of different courts brought in delectables from afar to show off power and wealth.

All across Europe, cookbooks were shamelessly plagiarized, so that European (even Islamic) elites banqueted on pretty much the same roasted peacocks and herons, mammoth pies (sometimes containing live rabbits), and omnipresent blancmanges, those Islamic-influenced sludges of rice, chicken, and almond milk. Teethdestroying Renaissance recipes often added two pounds of sugar for one pound of meat, while overloads of imported cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and saffron made everything taste, one historian quips, like bad Indian food.

Le Cuisinier François offers the earliest record of a seismic change in European cuisine. Seasonings in La Varenne’s tome mostly ditch heavy East India spices for such aromates français as shallots and herbs; sugar is banished to meal’s end; smooth emulsified-butter-based sauces begin to replace the chunky sweet-sour medieval concoctions.

Le Cuisinier brims with dainty ragouts, light salads, and such recognizable French standards as boeuf à la mode. One of La Varenne’s contemporaries best summed up this new goût naturel: “A cabbage soup should taste entirely of cabbage, a leek soup entirely of leeks.”

A modern mantra, first heard in mid-seventeenth-century France. “Then following La Varenne, in the next century,” said Bénédict, a frail eminence among his great piles of books, “the Enlightenment spirit fully took over, while print culture exploded.” Fervent new scientific approaches teamed up with Rousseau’s cult of nature, whose rusticity was in fact very refined and expensive. Among other things, this alliance produced a vogue for super-condensed quasi-medicinal broths.

And the name of these Enlightenment elixirs? Restaurants.

As historian Rebecca Spang writes in The Invention of the Restaurant, “centuries before a restaurant was a place to eat…a restaurant was a thing to eat, a restorative broth.” Restaurants as places—as attractions that would be exclusive to Paris well into the mid-nineteenth century—first appeared a couple of decades before the 1789 Revolution, in the form of chichi bouillon spas, where for the first time in Western history, diners could show up at any time of day, sit at their separate tables, and order from a menu with prices.

By the 1820s Paris had around three thousand restaurants, and they already resembled our own. Temples of aestheticized gluttony, yes—of truffled poulet Marengo and chandeliered opulence. But also, crucially, social and cultural landmarks that inspired an innovative and singularly French genre of literary gastrophilosophizing—attracting Brit and American pilgrims who assumed, per Spang, that France’s “national character revealed itself in such dining rooms.” Which it did.

“Of course national cuisines don’t happen overnight,” cautioned Bénédict, as I made ready to leave him to his texts and histories. It was a long process that mirrored developments in culture and politics. But one uniquely French hallmark, he stressed, going back to the mid-1600s, was a culinary quest for originality and novelty, made even more insistent by the advent of restaurants and the birth of the food critic.

And pretty much ever since La Varenne, each triumphant new generation of French cuisiniers has expressed a recommitment to the ideal of goût naturel, to a more inventive and scientific—and more expensive—refinement. Carême? He, too, professed the “vast superiority” of his cuisine on account of its “simplicity, elegance… sumptuousness.” Escoffier boasted of simplifying Carême—to be followed by an early-twentieth-century cuisinebourgeoise regionalist movement that ridiculed Escoffier’s pompous complexities. Then the 1970s nouvelle cuisine rebels (Bocuse, Troisgros, and the like) attacked the whole Carême-Escoffier legacy of “terrible brown sauces and white sauces” to raise the conquering flag of their own (shockingly expensive) lightness and naturalness.

*

I spent my next weeks in Paris literally knee-deep in bouillon, researching pot-au-feu along with the history and science of stocks—fishing for broader connections between cuisine and country. It amazed me, for instance, how an eighteenth-century cup of restorative broth sat so smack at the French Enlightenment’s intersection of cuisine, medicine, chemistry, emerging consumerism, and debates about taste, ancienne versus nouvelle.

While a century later, broth represented democratization of dining, as inexpensive canteens called bouillons—the world’s proto–fast-food chains—sprang up in fin de siècle Paris, serving beef in broth plus a few simple items to disparate classes in hygienic, gaily attractive surroundings.

Now in the living room of our apartment rental with its clutter of Balzacian bric-a-brac, I reexamined once again Carême’s opening recipe in L’Art de la Cuisine Française: “pot-au-feu maison.”

Put in an earthenware marmite four pounds of beef, a good shank of veal, a chicken half-roasted on a spit, and three liters of water. Later add two carrots, a turnip, leeks, and a clove stuck into an onion . . .

A straightforward recipe, if a little weird. Why the half-roasted chicken?

What made the recipe a landmark, Bénédict told me, was Carême’s Analyse du pot-au-feu bourgeois, his opening preamble. For here was the Chef of Kings, who’d dedicated his pages to Baroness Rothschild, explaining the science and merits of bouillon for a bourgeois female cook—bridging the gap between genders and classes, praising his reader as “the woman who looks after the nutritional pot, and without the slightest notion of chemistry… has simply learned from her mother how to care for the pot-au-feu.” This preamble, according to scholars, was what truly nationalized the dish, leading generations of writers and cooks to start their own books with this one-pot essential.

But how else, I asked myself, and for what other reasons, do dishes get anointed as “national”?

There was unexpected economic success abroad (pizza in Italy); tourist appeal (moussaka in Greece); nourishing of the masses during hard times (ramen in postwar Japan). Even, sometimes, top-down fiat: see the strange case of pad Thai, a Chinese-origin noodle dish (like ramen) that got “Thaified” with tamarind and palm sugar and decreed the national street food by the 1930s dictator Phibun—part of his campaign that included renaming Siam as Thailand, banning minority languages, and pushing Chinese vendors off the streets.

Among all the contenders, of course, one-pot multi-ingredient stews made the most convincing national emblems with their miraculous symbolic power to feed rich and poor, transcend regional boundaries, unite historical pasts. In Brazil, feijoada was canonized for supposedly melding Indigenous, colonial, and African slave cultures in a cauldron of black beans and porkstuffs, while in Cuba the exact same thing was said about the multi-meat tuber stew, ajiaco. Or consider (if one must) the creepy Nazi promotion of Germany’s eintopf (“one-pot”) for forging some mythical völkisch community. Never mind that the word “eintopf” never even appeared in print until the 1930s. (A not-uncommon sort of situation, I would discover.)

And so here was my pot-au-feu with its very genuine historical roots. Although hardly a dish of the peasants (for whom meat was once a year) it was still easily mythologized as the perfect embodiment of French republican credos, a fraternal pot for toute la France. Even that towering snob Escoffier praised it as a “dish that despite its simplicity…comprises the entire dinner of the soldier and the laborer…the rich and the artisan.”

By Escoffier’s belle epoque reign, France’s Third Republic ambition to aggressively nationalize its citizenry through universal education, military service, regional integration, and rural modernization was almost fulfilled. Although women remained second-class citizens—unable to vote until 1944—“teaching Marianne how to cook,” as one scholar puts it, “had become a national issue of paramount importance.”

And pretty much every domestic science textbook for girls began with pot-au-feu, which was also the name of a popular late-nineteenth-century domestic advice magazine for bourgeois housewives. Why, pot-au-feu even perfectly illustrated the era’s embrace of regionalist “unity in diversity,” since every region in France had its version (garbure in Languedoc, kig ha farz in Brittany), all now celebrated as parts of a grand, savory national whole.

The more I thought about it, the more pot-au-feu seemed like an obvious master class in “national dish” building.

__________________________________

Adapted from National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home by Anya von Bremzen. Copyright © 2023. Available from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

My father traveled. Still in his teens, he traveled from Michigan to Alaska with a tent when the Alaska highway was still pitted dirt and gravel. He went moose hunting in Northern Ontario. He tried to travel to Korea in the 1950s, but a hernia barred him from enlisting. He met my mother in the early 60s, and despite being Depression babies from hardscrabble backgrounds, far from the avant garde, they were early adopters of Travel as a leisure pursuit.

They flew to Northern Europe where they rented cheap rooms across Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. To afford this, they lived in a tiny, unfinished attic room in his parent’s house for the first eight years of their marriage. When my mother was five months pregnant with me, ticket prices fell to a pittance, and they took off for two weeks so he could see the running of the bulls in Madrid. We joked later that she should have made a tiny window for me to see out.

Later, I knew my dad as a man who seemed happy only when he was traveling or fishing. He worked as a draftsman for a job shop that fed into the Detroit auto industry (before that industry was piecemeal dismantled and shipped around the globe, requiring a great deal of travel for management and affording little travel money for global employees or furloughed-then-fired American workers). He quit his job every June so that we—he—could travel, assuming he’d get it back when Labor Day forced our return.

This from a person who turned everything into work. His Second Commandment: Thou shalt eschew technology and convenience in favor of labor-intensive rituals of self-sustenance. Don’t use your central heat if you can spend your weekends driving to the countryside to cut and split wood and your evenings tending to a woodstove, the warmth of which doesn’t reach the bedrooms. Don’t hire a backhoe to do in an hour what it will take your two elementary school girls two summers to complete.

His First Commandment was: Thou shalt travel to store up memories in which you can reside when not traveling. “Remember this,” he’d implore, from the shore of a glacial lake, “in the winter months!” We honored both commandments with the labor-intensive practice of camping, fittingly in a tent my mother sewed. We took a month each summer, to camp out of the back of a station wagon, eating cans of beans around a fire or bread and a limp slice of cheese at a roadside pull off. The east and west coasts, the mountain states, a historical tour of the original 13 colonies.

These trips were followed by two months camping on the land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that my great-grandfather passed down to his eight children, where we fished, bathed in the river, and hunted partridge out of the window of a WWII era Jeep. So that all may be well with us, and we mayest live long on the earth—wherever on that earth we mayest wish to roam.

Despite—really, I should say because of—the time and cost of travel and its lack of productivity, travel was cast not as an indulgence but as a moral good. Travel was the real education: we were spending time in Nature, learning History, getting Out There. He read (and exhorted us to read) every plaque; he talked to every park ranger or ferry operator or local pulling into shore with a chest full of fish. When you returned, you could think of all the things you’d seen that others had missed.

In the 70s and 80s, not many people in our extended families or in the working-class neighborhoods around us traveled. They didn’t have the vacation days, or didn’t want to use them racing across the continent. Or simply didn’t see the point in looking elsewhere—with the Great Lakes, Michigan was a vacationer’s paradise. Travel was to the family cabin on weekends. Some seemed to suspect that we were secretly rich. My dad spent money on almost nothing except travel and very little on the travel itself; the unthinkable luxury was giving himself a three-month vacation each year.

Or maybe they just sensed my dad’s judgment: we were better than people who didn’t travel, special and morally superior. Others were content to live in provincial garrisons, incurious about the larger world. We were even morally superior to the folks who pulled up in an RV rather than a homemade tent, and those who stopped at the same attractions but breezed through, skipping plaques or reading them too quickly. Later, I tried to touch that foundational beam and my finger went right through.

*

Travel gave me my mind. It made me dreamy, the hours spent trying to stay on my side of the invisible backseat divide, as we rolled through big sky country and temperate rainforests and rocky shorelines. I’d send my brain out into the landscapes or billboards or passing cars and then reel it back in, examine what I’d caught, store it for later. When we arrived, after helping to set up the tent and picnic table, I could run off and let my mind disappear into a tidal pool or the eddies in a creek, or the process of peeling a stick bare of bark.

Once in a while, our mother would require us to write a poem in the backseat (no doubt, at least in part, to buy herself a spate of silence) but it wasn’t this that made me a writer. It was the passive absorption of great gobs of countryside, and the minute examination of anything that fell to hand—pebble, seed, snail, starfish. It was imagining who I’d be if I lived in this town, that cabin, overlooking this bay. Who I’d be if I lived here 100, 200, 5,000 years ago. Travel demolished our low-slung ranch house as the parameters of the world. I lived in the ocean, on the continental divide, in a sky cloudy with stars.

Today, I don’t know what I or my writing would be without the comparison/contrast of “not home,” “not routine” that generates images, anecdotes, sorting, metaphors. I feel like I need to take in great quantities of “images” and interactions and sensory combinations that I can later wander around until one image sticks to another and another. A years-long habit of visiting natural history museums in European cities, for example, gave me a mental menagerie of dusty, misshapen taxidermy and some insight into the colonial European process of collection and extraction, into the way curiosity was wielded like a machete.

*

At seven I revered the figurines I got in a Wyoming souvenir shop—a family of three dressed in buckskin and beads. I would run my finger over the buttery hide and make sure their braids were tidy, their papoose strapped tightly to the mother’s back. But state and national parks, history books, my parents, place names, and advertising threw up a scrim, beyond which lay reservations, the American Indian Movement (happening at the same time, in the same mountains), or Native American kids in gumpy cords and t-shirts exactly like mine.

When we visited Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, they were just two colossal monuments, one unfinished. I learned nothing about land theft and the desecration of a sacred mountain. At Colonial Williamsburg, I learned to churn butter and dip a quill in ink, but nothing about chattel slavery. I learned a reverence for “untouched nature” by touching it, learned to avoid all but the historical centers of American cities, which were too grimy and crimey.

In my middle school years, we went on two month-long international trips, the first roughly reproducing my parent’s trek across Northern Europe, the second traveling across Ireland, Scotland, and England. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, we stayed in zimmers, rooms-to-let, often in farmhouses, where we ate dark bread and boiled eggs in cups with tiny spoons at the host family’s kitchen table.

I learned a smattering of German from strangers at restaurants in the evening, whittled in the backseat with a Swiss Army knife, and pretended to be Maria Von Trapp on hillsides dappled with brown Swiss cows outside of Salzburg. But I don’t recall a word about the Holocaust or Hitler, whose summer estate was not far from that dappled hill. We certainly didn’t visit Dachau, only an hour’s drive away. This was a dirndls and lederhosen tour, and, when we drifted west to Holland and Denmark, a windmill, cheese gondola, and little mermaid tour. Not an Anne Frank, continent-wide genocide tour, which might itself fall into questionable trauma-tourism.

Two years later, travel through the British Isles hit all of my late-blooming thirteen-year-old neural pleasure centers. How could I not get gone climbing the turret of a broken-down Highlands castle jutting out into a loch, not another soul in view? You’d best believe I was a Lady with high color in my cheeks, waiting for my love to return across the loch, fierce in my quiet ways. Nothing about the Troubles. Nothing about the inequity of class structure and wealth extraction embodied by the castles, cathedrals, universities, and country estates we visited.

I was living more and more in my imagination, but that imagination was inseparable from the lessons I was absorbing about power and the primacy of Europe, which sells a fantasy version of its history and authority as its number one domestic product and export. It was not so much history I was learning but allegiance. It’s a monumental operation to jack up a house and swap out the foundation and rotten support beams without the house falling to pieces.

*

This is to say that travel is not neutral, ethically or ecologically. You drop into a different culture, a woven mat of flora and fauna, but you bring you with you. Never neutral despite the carbon offsets you can purchase for net neutrality, hoping to clean up the contrails of jet fuel emissions. All those trees planted so we can take a zipline canopy tour in Costa Rica.

Large aircraft burn about one gallon of jet fuel per second. Climate scientists have learned to use literary devices—imagery and analogy—to help us understand the numbers. The Suzuki Foundation, a science-based environmental nonprofit, takes a few tacks. The micro: one five-hour flight emits as much carbon “as heating a European home for an entire year.” And the macro: “If the aviation sector were a nation, it would be among the top ten global emitters.” The BBC puts it this way: a one-way “flight from London to San Francisco emits… more than twice [the CO2] produced by a family car in a year.”

I had long thought of my car as the notable villain—a hand-me-down with its combustion engine, it was my foot on the pedals, my hand reeking of gasoline at the pump. I’ve tried to walk or bike before driving but thought little of flying, perhaps imagining it, with its constraints and its bulk transport of humans as a (dirtier) form of public transport. But, even factoring in a slew of variables, flying is almost always worse. Peter Kalamus, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and current Cassandra, says, “There is no more potent way, hour-for-hour, to warm the planet.”

Jet fuel produces an average of 21.5 pounds of CO2 per gallon and aviation gas 18.4, while auto fuel produces 19.6. Not a calamitous disparity, but airplanes burn a tremendous amount of fuel taking off and landing. And then there are the contrails, a mixture of CO2, heavy soot, and water vapor. Contrails “that persist for hours can form human-made cirrus clouds, which trap huge amounts of thermal radiation that would otherwise escape into space.” The radiation trapped by these clouds causes “a warming impact 3x that of CO2.” And jet fuel emissions contain nano-particles, which lead to “increased risk of disease, increased hospitalizations, and self-reported lung conditions” in airport employees and those who live near airports.

Not computed in the carbon footprints of flights is the jet fuel airlines sometimes dump in the atmosphere when they need to lighten the plane before landing. They try to avoid this by filling the tanks with little over the fuel needed for the voyage. British Airways once estimated that “only .01% of fuel used by the aviation industry each year is dumped.” But that still equals “almost two million gallons [per year] by U.S. airlines alone.”

Jet fuel emissions are set to spiral upward, just as the planet approaches the climatological Tipping Point. Currently, flights make up 2.5-5% of global emissions, though many climate scientists would weight the percentage higher to reflect the outsize damage those emissions cause. And this is with just three percent of the world population flying—the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest countries. With burgeoning middle classes in China and India, the most populous nations, the number of passengers is “set to double in the next 20 years.” Even factoring in expected innovations in efficiency, emissions are expected to triple by 2050.

Oh, but carbon offsets! Modern day Indulgences, built on similarly shaky theology. It takes a leap of faith, in fact, to believe in the power of offsets to buy a clean conscience and a smaller footprint. The main mechanism for offsets is planting trees, but those trees are usually monoculture “forests,” terrible as a platform for biodiversity, and extra vulnerable to pests, fires, and species extinction. And offset forests, locations undisclosed, don’t repair tourism-ravaged landscapes or cultures. You can’t offset travel-dependent economies.

[Pullquote]It is difficult to separate seeing and taking: the privilege of being among the 3 percent of the world’s population that flies.[/Pullquote]

Often, not a tree is planted. The money is paid, instead, to landowners (usually already wealthy) to prevent potential deforestation. But can hypothetical tree-saving cancel out the burning of an actual tank of jet fuel? What offsets do accomplish is market protection, ensuring guilt-free flights, cruises, tours, and resorts. Kevin Anderson, climate researcher for Nature, definitively scorches the offset economy as “…worse than doing nothing. It is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading and almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global emissions growth.”

But travel is still treated—even or especially among those of us who have presumably spent some time thinking about climate change and colonialism—as a net positive. Even a moral good: We have a responsibility to see the world, to claw our way out of provinciality, to tap a shunt into our brain and pour in experiences where they will alchemically turn into knowledge and empathy.

The theory is that when we leave our familiar surroundings, our understanding of history and custom and ecology and communication surge. We could get at least a bare outline of another’s perspective; and have the chance to see ourselves and our homes more clearly, from a distance, in contrast.

The conversation among travelers in a foreign place is often, either directly or indirectly, about home—how is this place—its food, laws, expectations, design, flora and fauna, air, pace, language—different from what we know. In the liberal theory, exposure = empathy; being mired = myopathy. You can’t find yourself, you can’t triangulate, without at least two other points on the map. We have a duty to fling ourselves elsewhere and read every plaque.

*

Class and morality have always been silent partners, so it’s just one click from moral obligation to social hierarchy. Commercial flights have been available for 100 years, but only to the middle class in the US since the 1960s and to the working class after federal deregulation in 1978. Forty-four years for mass flying, a sliver of time.

But it has ballooned in our hive mind as one of the ways to satisfy inflationary appetites for novelty, prestige, and class escape. How can we live a satisfying life without a bucket list, more pins in the world map, more likes for our vacation pictures, how can we navigate without proof that we are not stuck, provincial, in a rut, a loser.

And, my god, there are so many positives. The last trip my husband, son, and I took, three summers ago, pre-Covid, began with a flight to Prince Edward Island, a spot familiar to me from childhood camping trips, moved through Nova Scotia, and then to the edge-of-the-continent unknown—Newfoundland, the thought of which still gives me a catch in the chest of affection and bigness and longing. We hiked to one of the only accessible portions of the earth’s mantle. The sky tipped fiery, and the visible crust vibrated in deep reds and oranges.

In a spot along the lonely western shore, great swaths of rock had heaved up and beached themselves so that you could run your toes and fingers along clear stripes of 500 million years of sediment. The severity of the skies in Newfoundland stirred me, and the cool and wayward weather, the small communities along the west and north coasts, the isolation of which preserved 18th-century Welsh, Cork, Westie, and Aberdeen accents; the “Potted Moose Meat” for sale at a cafe in hand-labeled jars.

I could have read about Newfoundland, instead, but a book would not have allowed me to observe the Viking kitsch embrace of L’Anse aux Meadows, an archeological dig at the northern tip of Newfoundland. Before 1960, the bumps on this spit of land were called “Indian mounds” by locals, and nobody cared. They weren’t excavated or fenced off or named. Not even a plaque. Then a Norwegian couple arrived with a hunch and asked locals if there were any unusual topographical features nearby.

The locals showed them the mounds, which, when excavated, were revealed to be a Viking settlement, the first European encampment in the Americas, 1,000 years earlier. Though theirs was a brief stay—only ten years or so—L’Anse aux Meadows has been turned, in its own small way, into a tourist destination. Viking iconography gathers at the roadsides—red beards, sheep skins, and horned hats, and in most of the business names—Viking RV Park, Viking Nest B&B. Vikings as faux-menacing, Vikings as cheerful mascots. It’s what counts as a tourist boomtown in Newfoundland.

Half a day’s drive down the west coast, though, lies Port au Choix National Historic Site, which encompasses an area of the Atlantic shore used as a seasonal home for 5,000 years by Archaic Maritime Indians, Paleoeskimos, Inuit, and later indigenous tribes to fish and hunt seal.

About a mile from the parking lot is a large meadow dotted with clusters of wild irises. The irises bloom only in low spots across the meadow, depressions created by tents pitched year after year for thousands of years. I’ve never felt so acutely the way that land itself might remember, not for a season, or seven, but 700 x 7. The flowers store the memory in the rhizomes on which they grow and mark it with darkest violet every year.

We walked down to a beach thick with fossils and took a hypothermic dip in the ocean in our underwear. We’d met almost no one else that day, so we stripped without fear of discovery. I might have guessed that cultural remembrance, an artifact of colonial value—would work that way: the Norse L’Anse aux Meadows on bucket lists and Port au Choix as subtle as a low-lying iris, as quiet as fog rolling down a beach. But now I carry that knowledge along my myelin sheaths.

*

It was a little hard to get to Newfoundland—an overnight car ferry with prohibitively expensive berths, everyone in steerage belly-up in recliners, Say Yes to the Dress on loop from every angle. Difficult was part of what made me pre-love it, though. I have always wanted to work a little for experiences—trek through the woods to a swimming hole rather than roll up to the beach; cross country skis instead of chairlifts and lodges. Difficult as a moral good, again. On vacation, I want to see everything, go to the end of the road, to the place where habitual life becomes inaccessible, where things get surprising, quiet, impossible to turn into anecdote.

Yet I did: A post about the moose meat, a video failing to capture the way you could run your fingers across eons, like keys on a piano, a post about a ceilidh—a “kitchen party”—we crashed at a Prince Edward Island church, where the elderly gathered to dance all night, tried to teach us a “Northern Set,” and paused at 10pm for “lunch.”

When I was a child, people would host slideshows of their vacation—actual projectors beaming light through tiny, haunted images to their guests’ obligatory murmurs of admiration. Who would want to see another family muffled in their ski gear, greased with fondue, or frozen upright in front of the Vatican? Why would we care that you ate salmon right off the boat in Sitka, or wienerschnitzel in this half-timbered café in Rothenburg ob der Tauber? It was narcissistic sadism—your guests on folding chairs in the basement, watching you click through iterations of your family in front of landmarks.

In the age of social media, however, posting vacation pictures is an obligation, the minimum requirement for being an interesting person. Your life is small and sad if you don’t occasionally frame a plate of moussaka on Crete, or the view from a yoga retreat on an Indian tea plantation, or the remnant of an iceberg that floated from Greenland to the tip of Newfoundland.

They come in different shades, these posts, but usually gather under the same capitalist banner: work hard, play hard. We have produced, churned up the cream, and now we get a fingerful. A virtuous trip to a Serengeti animal foster, a Grandmaster art tour, sojourns to familial homelands, lavish (or made to seem so) resorts and food tours, my-trip-is-more-surprising-than-yours treks to Mongolia or a little island off Tasmania. Family trips, friend-gang romps, solo-hikes.

Unless the poster is, or is trying to seem like, an influencer, the trips are situated as necessary, as earned. Earned through stress and labor (“After a difficult year, we’re finally…”). Through the schisms of class ascent (“my parents never got to….”, “I could never imagine, as a little girl in Goodwill dresses, that I’d be…”).

With a frontloaded caveat or two about suffering, sacrifice, deprivation, or thrift. Underneath which, pulled taut, are the steel cables of our will, our right, and our obligation to travel. And an obligation to use travel as a font and showcase for vitality. This is, at least, how I often have felt about travel: here is evidence for myself, maybe others, that I am fully alive, vigorous, curious.

If vacation travel is cultural currency, professional travel is career currency, career necessity in some cases. Globalization has made travel often mandatory for the management class: Americans alone make “over 405 million long-distance business trips per year” and US business trip expenditure is set to rise from 3.28 billion pre-pandemic to 500 billion in 2022.

And despite the tedium of connecting flights and anonymous hotel rooms, “65 percent of millennials see business travel as a status symbol” and don’t want to be left out. If you are crisscrossing the globe, you must be important to the system, planes like needles pulling thread, stitching the whole operation together. Until you get into super-sized CEO territory, at which point people come to you and you send yourself into space, the new travel frontier.

If you labor in the arts or academia, you are asked to build or demonstrate an “international reputation.” How will we know if we matter without travel? If we don’t have proof of this “reputation”? And unless local means a solo show at LACMA or a fellowship at the New York Public Library or a residency at Princeton, you must present work, accept invitations, and do research anywhere but home.

You must fly your bodily vessel around the globe and convince strangers that you’re brimming with knowledge or talent or, at the very least, improvisational skill. Your work does not count—in an act of obliterating metonymy, you do not count—if you are local.

Local is at best a quirky addition to your CV or tenure file, like volunteer work or a side hustle; at worst, an embarrassment. A friend at a Midwest college has had twenty-two exhibits of his work in the past four years; yet he’s run into static in his tenure review because six were local. Building an artistic and intellectual community around you counts against your work. The more you travel, the more you matter. The more you seek or are asked to leave home, the more power you have in that home. Until you use that power as a launchpad to a new home, and the cycle begins again—farther, more.

During the pandemic, universities drafted policies regarding “lapses” in CVs where conferences, readings, presentations, and residencies elsewhere should have gone. We could explain our deficiencies, be “forgiven.” This scorn for local, for home, is baked into our prestige-based institutions, institutions which often have equity and sustainability initiatives while demanding that their show ponies cart themselves around the world. Unless, again, you are famous or powerful enough that the world comes to you. Either way, someone’s flying.

I think these things, too. I want to know people who are from and have been elsewhere. When I hear that someone is traveling internationally—or even nationally—for their work, I’m reflexively curious, impressed, I ratchet up their intrinsic value. If I hear someone is presenting down the street, my (nearly unconscious) response is: that’s sweet but insufficient. Insufficient for what? These knee-jerk appraisals don’t track with values I would like to claim, but “it”—let’s call it travel prestige—is like a Renaissance fortress inside me. I chisel at the mortar, lob a few sticks of dynamite when I remember to, but the fortress, jagged around the edges, remains.

Part of my initial attraction to my now husband was wrapped up in his quasi-international life: he lived in the Caribbean at the end of junior high, lived in Costa Rica a decade later, traveled to Brazil, Cuba, and Portugal in the few years before we met, and was about to embark on a year-long art installation project in Geneva, requiring weeks on location over the course of a year. The stories of his international life have become a source of fascination, now, for our son, who asks for anecdotes as if his father is an audiobook.

But those experiences really did change him: they rearranged his chaotic childhood, transferred his adolescent focus from himself to other people, places, and languages. It turned him into a collaborator—you can’t be a pillar of self-sufficiency if you spend a year in a foreign country. You have to make a feast of mistakes and confusion. You have to find cognates.

And now we are responsible for a tween I’d like to see changed by travel. People say: I want to give my child the world. I don’t want him to have the world; I want him to see it. But it is difficult to separate seeing and taking: the privilege of being among the 3 percent of the world’s population that flies; the pain X number of flights causes other creatures, human and otherwise.

*

As air travel shuttered in the first months of the pandemic, the skies cleared a bit and not as much sunscreen fanned out into the ocean and filtered down to graying coral. Mountain goats, lemurs, deer, jackals, even sea lions wandered the streets of tourist towns. Life without human mobility and ceaseless consumption and roving entertainment looked, for a moment, a lot freer for everything but humans. Who became obsessed with not traveling. For the 3 percent, it was not just intolerable to remain indoors, it was intolerable to remain in one geographical spot. An unchosen, insufferable monogamy.

Then came the summer of 2021. Not unlike the Brood X cicadas that emerged that summer and furiously, deafeningly lived a full cycle, humans who survived the pandemic seemed to take it as their duty to get in their “lost” living. By March 2022, domestic flights were nearly back up to pre-pandemic levels, and flights between the US and Europe shot up 398 percent between January 2021 and January 2022. Luxury spending, gun violence, and traffic deaths also soared—the life cycle cacophonous and brief. Tell us we can’t have a thing and we will have five of that thing, with a whiff of aggrievement.

*

The world teed us up for epiphanies, but they didn’t last or they’re muffled under loads of nihilism or willful optimism: nothing I do can change anything; no sense in me and the future being miserable; we need structural, not individual change; we’ll figure it out, we always do. As the climatological bad news keeps rolling in, Americans seem pathologically dependent on optimism, which seems increasingly like a contortionist’s trick.

But what if tech will save us from sacrifice? The tech-solution contingent points to recent advances in battery-fueled aviation. NASA is developing a two-seater prototype, and very small electric planes with a range of 50 or 100 miles are already available. Tesla hopes to make electric plane taxis available to Uber as soon as 2023.

Large capacity electric flight is still decades away, though. It would currently take 1.2 million pounds of batteries to get a jumbo jet off the ground. But, of course, the trajectory of innovation usually is not linear. We could not have imagined ten years ago that the Detroit auto companies would be hard-selling macho-American electric pick-up trucks. One problem gets solved in Slovakia, one in Canada, one in India, then a confluence, followed, sometimes, by a supernova.

So, perhaps we’ll be commuting in electric planes in a handful of years. Perhaps in 2055 large passenger jets will be hybrid or fully electric, the batteries more like tissue packs than cruise ship anchors and reduced-harm flying will be widely available. That will be too late for me, likely, but I am not the point, not the customer-who-is-always-right.

The point is: it likely will be too late to avoid stumbling past the tipping point. If we jet-fuel fly now and take what we cannot give back later, a question should hang over us: who will fly in those electric jumbo jets and under what circumstances and over what scenes of flooding, drought, and forced migration. We fly over those scenes now, well above the cloud line.

I have already disclosed that I was reared on a doctrine of maximum effort/minimum ease, and thus am not a neutral or maybe even reasonable commentator on the effort/ease of others, but I’ve always chaffed at the term “sustainable.” The actual sustainability movement works to change the way we farm, shop, handle water and waste, and power our lives so we don’t continue borrowing from an increasingly depleted future.

But in practice, the emphasis shifts from sustaining the ecosystem, to sustaining our lifestyles through “green alternatives.” The very idea of sustainability seems designed to a) calm the consumer classes and b) direct us to a whole new market for “sustainably produced” goods—those greenlight taglines for eco-nervous shoppers. But what about the lifestyles most Westerners have now—structured around (or striving for) convenience, accumulation, expansion, and ease—should be sustained?

Eco-strategists know the drill: if you make something a bummer for people, they’ll lash out or squirm away. If people think they might lose something (toilet paper, the right to build on flood plains, their centuries-long racial privilege, their Amazon-to-doorstep-emissions-belching pipeline), they’ll do more, do everything. All the toilet paper, all the edicts against teaching accurate history, all the fill, the sea walls, porches full of packages—every day your birthday!

It’s a truism of politics: try to remove a right, benefit, freedom, and you’ll likely be voted out. This seems many times truer in the consumer arena: sure, we’re worried about tipping points, but how many hours of free time would we be willing to surrender, how much repair work will we learn? Will we live without novelty—the new clothes, the structurally unnecessary home renovation and decorating, the travel, travel, travel? If TV is our culture’s vision board, HGTV and travel channels and the broad swath of luxury-lifestyle reality shows would suggest—would shout and jump cut—No. So Sustainability tries to avoid the scare of sacrifice.

*

If we changed our orientation toward sacrifice and bad news, though, what would that look like? If you and I said no more flights?

This is already a thing: the no-fly movement, known in the EU by a very Calvinist term: flygskam, or “flight shame.” Organizers in countries across the world encourage people to take pledges for a flight-free year (or years, or a lifetime), and create a like-minded community with which to navigate a world that assumes and encourages air travel. This is easier in countries and continents with healthy rail systems. But it’s often still time consuming and difficult to coordinate.

In a British no-fly group, one man writes cheerfully of taking a ferry to France, then multiple trains to the Atlantic coast of Spain, then another ferry—over three days of travel one way to attend a conference in the Maldives. One writes of visiting the Galapagos by hitching a ride on a working barge, six months at sea. A British sociologist spent a full month aboard cross-continental trains in order to conduct research in Ningbo, China.

Brit Lewis McNeil has been flight-free for 15 years, despite the high travel demands of his job as a project manager who builds community orchards across the UK. His speaks of “a ‘letting go’ period, akin to the end of a relationship,” but says “…things got exciting when I realized that one can travel, and travel far, while creating a fraction of the emissions that air travel is responsible for.”

Perhaps that’s what I’m feeling: the end of a relationship, and the fear, grasping, emptiness, and sorrow rush into the void it leaves. Perhaps peace will come if I sit still long enough. Perhaps local thrills can get a toehold after that.

Efforts in the US to build a flight-free movement are smaller, quieter, partly because most areas of the country have no access to rail lines, partly because of the US Janus head: one face molded by an inferiority complex, forever trying to shed the stigma of provincialism, one face chiseled by unchecked imperialism, literally, economically, or culturally planting a flag everywhere. Even domestically, the often-vast distances between regions and cities, between isolated rural places, implies a need for flight if we would conform to our culture’s expectation for speed and mobility.

There is a Flight Free USA chapter, though, with an undisclosed number of participants. They lobby to prevent airport expansions and share stories of how they navigate a flight-free life. This is where I found Janie Katz-Christy, a Boston architect and longtime environmental activist who has been flight (and car!) free since 2007 (apart from a single one-way flight during a child’s medical emergency). She travels with gusto on Amtrak and takes electric bike tours with her husband and grown children who they raised to be environmentally responsible.

Her son, she says, used to “go to sleep with the MBTA subway map and the Amtrak timetable in his hands.” She would like to emphasize the potential pleasure of a reduced footprint lifestyle—“Let’s have fun and live lightly!”—but her frustration at the carbon profligacy of others sometimes drowns out the joy. She sees Boston as the hypocrisy capital of the world, full of highly educated people, concerned and well informed about climate crises, who don’t “limit themselves in any way.”

Neighbors tell her of their trips and she’s proud of herself if she holds back a “sour” remark. She admits, though, that “If I weren’t doing this, I think I’d hate the people who were doing this.” Friends and family, she suspects, hide their vacations from her, fearing her judgment.

I admire her and also fear my own self-righteousness. That I won’t be able to give air travel up if others don’t—if I’m going to suffer, you should too! Or that I won’t be able to give it up and not be a sanctimonious twat about it, flying a great big banner in the sky announcing my self-sacrifice for the good of the earth, like those who announce their departures from social media on social media.

Her children, says Katz-Christy, are “trying to teach [her] some balance” a release from black and white into gray. Yet her—everyone’s—responsibility to the earth is indisputable. Though institutional change is the crucial driver, as her husband puts it, “The only thing you know will happen is what you do yourself.” She’s working on ways to have the joy and peace of a positive personal choice without the social bitterness.

Two acquaintances of Katz-Christy made the personal choice to quit flying while also pushing for a reduction of emissions in academia. Joe Nevins, a scholar of environmental science and geography at Vassar, and Park Wilde, a scholar of food and nutrition policy at Tufts, have begun the project Flying Less: Reducing Academia’s Carbon Footprint, to spur institutional change in a sector that feasts on hyper-mobility and globalism.

They are asking for institutional pledges, not individual ones, while recognizing that all institutions, scholars, and fields are not created equal, and, further, that academic flying only increases inequality: rich nations have emitted the vast majority of greenhouse gasses and would like to demand emissions austerity from poor countries, a pattern reproduced in academia; poor nations get “studied” by rich nations which then hold the majority of conferences, demanding that scholars from the global south come to them; scholars from poor countries must get credentialed in or at least travel to rich nations for the sake of prestige, and must return home frequently if they wish to maintain family and community ties.

In a collaborative paper, Nevins writes that academic flying “reconfigures various forms of violence, including those associated with coloniality,” and “reproduces individualist and modernist ideals and discourses of enlightened ‘free spirits’ moving through space…” There’s a conviction deep down in many Western scholars (and artists and writers, publishers and corporations) that the importance of their work and their right to conduct it supersedes all other considerations. Not to mention the glamor. Being the one everyone wants to hear from, being in the room—every room—where it happens.

They believe that Western institutions approach travel like kids in a candy store, that short, flight-dependent “study abroad” trips are wasteful, that conferences should transition permanently to virtual attendance, at least for privileged institutions and individuals, and that each flight should trigger questions about the necessity for and implications of that flight.

While their focus is on social change through institutional change, both Nevins and Wilde have forsworn flying for over fifteen years. Nevins had to give up his research in East Timor and Mexico, but he’s critical of that work now: the idea that you can drop into another country for a year, two, even longer and come away as some sort of authority now strikes him as a colonial fantasy, a fantasy that earned him tenure. And the idea that one needs to do this work is neoliberal god-complex territory.

Since giving up air travel, he and Wilde have worked on projects closer to home: Nevins collaborating on A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, a social justice history “tour book”; and Wilde creating a charmingly evangelical YouTube travel series called Lifestyles of the NOT Jetset, in which he extols the virtues of the places he can reach by rail or bike. They’re creating a rich connection between their creative/intellectual life, their social justice convictions, and the knowledge that carbon emissions are threatening life on Earth.

They both acknowledge that they’ve made these changes post-tenure, and that, even as the earth dies, having a career, an intellectual life, and a way of producing both facts and theories matters. And so, they recommend that senior faculty and “senior” institutions should be the first to let go. And face the repercussions. As sustainability scholar Kimberly Nicholas puts it: “We are not going to be able to save all the things we love…. [We have to] swim through that ocean of grief…and recognize that we still have time to act, and salvage many of the things we care about.”

*

What might be waiting beyond the grief? Some are already finding out. British playwright Katie Mitchell has said no more flights. In 2022, her work, A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, opened in Milan, wearing its environmental concerns visually and structurally. The show was designed to tour Europe without a bit of shipping or travel, not even for the writer or director. They coordinated from London with directors in the host theaters, which employed local actors and crew, and constructed sets in situ from repurposed materials.

This is where artists might feel a twinge: No nuanced collaboration with actors and crew at a new location, no in-person accolades, no eating and drinking local specialties, no diving into bodies of water or hiking trails or renting a vespa and zooming down streets unknown to you on a rare day off? Not being the guest of honor? Mitchell says, “In the light of climate change, you can’t have the normal hierarchies… You have to relinquish artistic control.” Instead, you are a head in a box fumbling with technical issues. But this is the old orientation, face buried in loss and sacrifice. Mitchell has already re-oriented herself: “We had to have a different protocol of communication. You could view everything as a problem. Me and my team, we chose not to.”

The show had few absolute requirements. One was that actors were required to power the lights, sound, and video projectors by pedaling stationary bikes on stage for the duration of the show. There they were, during every scene, working away. Their effort had to be visible since electricity is invisible. It’s generated elsewhere and shows up in our buildings like the magic it was first presumed to be.

And since we don’t have to wield an axe for it and are not choked by its smoke in our living room or paying $50 for it at the gas pump, we add it to our giant pillowy pile of forgetting. So, for the duration of the show, you see calories turn into kilowatts. Janie Katz-Christy also prefers making the invisible visible, at least through metaphor. “Flying” she says, “is like sticking an exhaust pipe directly into a poor child’s mouth.” People should picture that the next time they feel the urge to take a flight, she suggests.

*

I took two trips this summer. One by train from Memphis to Ann Arbor, MI (approximately 21 hours), then by car with my sister to the eastern corner of the Upper Peninsula where our father lives and is beginning to fail to live.

This is what I can report about my first Amtrak experience outside of quick trips along the northeast corridor:

It was full of small disappointments, likely a measure of how I’d unwittingly romanticized train travel, hopeful for its promise as an alternative. Each of the four legs of the journey was delayed, sometimes by hours. Each car had an inviting spigot that said “Ice Water”; each was empty. The attendant in the dining car said, “I’ve been working on the Wolverine for 30 years and I’ve never seen anyone use them.”

The boarding area at Union Station in Chicago was chaotic—passengers for three separate trains crammed into a narrow hallway with their often copious luggage. Someone yelled, “This is a fire hazard!” and it got a little more chaotic. But these are normal travel bumps, negligible if—and these are pretty big ifs—you’re healthy, constitutionally patient, and not prone to panic attacks.

Then the roomette. I’d slept in a chair in coach on the night train to Chicago but had a sleeper on the way back—an indulgence I’d dangled ahead of myself to get through an arduous week. A roomette came with bunk beds, fresh sheets and pillowcases, a door that locked, complimentary meals in the dining car, and a separate lounge in the train station.

When I got to the roomette, though, I thought there’d been a mistake. It looked like two regular train seats facing each other, a pillow on each, and a very narrow place to stand and pull a curtain closed behind you. The ticket was twice as much for that bit of privacy? Sleeping in a chair behind a curtain rather than in a car with forty strangers?

The mistake was mine. Several instruction cards alerted me to the fact that the chairs converted into the bottom bunk, and a handle I hadn’t noticed pulled down to form the top bunk. God help anyone taller or more than average weight or traveling with a companion who might use the second bed. You would have to take turns stepping into the hallway while the other person origamied themselves into a bunk.

I had imagined myself sitting in a little room, typing away on my laptop, eventually getting sleepy and easing myself back into the bed. But this dark nook felt claustrophobic. After getting on the train two hours late and hoping to fall into bed, I wanted to cry.

But it was a marvel of space-efficient engineering, and space efficiency = fuel efficiency. Once I was vertiginously perched in the top bunk, sleep gummies melting in my stomach, I was feeling game, ready to laugh at the giant sleep-seatbelt that could keep one from pitching off in the middle of the night. I took my chances without it and, in the morning, having fully slept off my petulance, I worked happily on the lower seats in the early light.

*

These are merely logistics, but they don’t occur in a vacuum. When you travel, a window is not a postcard. You are moving through and arriving in places; you are seeing and leaving people; you are altered by the things that happen or fail to happen there.

You feel the ground in a train, you see the backsides of people’s yards and junkyards and work yards and railyards. And farm fields and thirsty weeds and muddy streams, and the crossings with and without signals and protective arms. And you are making that famously lonesome whistle and trailing it along behind you. And you are not, by and large, poisoning the towns through which you travel—more than staying home, less than driving or flying.

And, a happy holdover from the heyday of rail travel, trains pull into the center of town. You can simply step off and join the foot traffic in major American cities. No TSA or baggage claim, no half-hour taxi rides. On my layover on the way there, I was able to meet a beloved former student for tea. On my return layover, I walked for hours, reacquainting myself with Chicago, a city I had barely visited since living there briefly in the mid-90s.

And here is a sense memory: On the first leg of the return, from Ann Arbor to Chicago, I’m being pulled backward through the countryside, and it reminds me of my intense desire to be sucked backward into sleep. Propofol a beautiful dream; Michael Jackson’s desire to anesthetize himself every night becoming more and more understandable.

The trip to MI used to be one of complex family relationships and bodily happiness—swimming, foraging among evergreens, cold nights deliciously burrowed under quilts in a popup camper. But these past few years, it has been about trying to wrangle my father in his mental decline—no longer autonomous and crouched in frightened denial.

He was flying, all these years, away from himself and the messes he couldn’t own and the person he couldn’t be. Even as he insists the ground is still frozen in July, he says, “I think I might take a long cruise this winter, all the way around the tip of Argentina.” Starts to talk about the cruise he took several years ago through the Panama Canal—not how beautiful or interesting or special the experience, but of two women who disembarked for a shore stop and didn’t return on time. “The ship was honking for them. Dumb ladies, holding us all up.” There’s a world map with a hundred pins inside his cabin; what exactly did all that travel teach him? I wish to fly away, too, to be gone quickquick.

*

I did fly away after that to stay with friends for the rest of the summer in an Alaskan town accessible only by plane or ferry. I looked into taking the train from Memphis to Bellingham, WA, where we could catch the Alaska Ferry, a route that, all told, would take about a week, but portions of the train route were already sold out.

Instead, the trip required three flights each way, one of which flew us 2.5 hours in the opposite direction. Flight “dieters” often aim for a maximum of one round trip flight per year; this would have blown that budget for six years. I rationalized hard to myself: this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend time in the homebase of the family closest to us. But not long after we arrived, I thought: I have done the wrong thing. I thought flying, in this case, was about closeness, but dynamics are complicated and proximity is not a guarantee of closeness.

*

No one can tell us what we must surrender. They can try, but, if we have options, we can form callouses over our eardrums. There are people and places that feel like home 1,000, 1.500, 5,000 and more miles from where we live. And I would like to know what so many places are like—the air in Morocco, food in Sardinia, water in the hot springs of Japan. The feast etiquette in Tahiti, circadian rhythms at the southern tip of Chile, lemur negotiation in Madagascar.

And, even as I write this, I’m rebelling, wanting to accelerate my travel, like a person who binges after simply imagining a diet. But, as John Nolt, professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, tabulates: “The average American is responsible, through his/her greenhouse gas emissions, for the serious suffering and/or deaths of one or two future people.” How does that stack up against our quest for new and not home?

I understand that travel is often fantasy, an understanding reinforced by both trips this summer. And our collective moment, on the precipice of ecosystem death, requires a kind of stillness and honesty most people (who have a choice) are not ready for. All of these flights, the novelty and prestige-mobility, is a way to perpetuate and escape culpability for systems of global inequality, to keep churning and spooning up the cream. Not flying away from yourself can be hard. Staying in one place is hard. Loving that place, the people in that place, the person you are in that place, can be hard.

My friend reminds me of the value of what novelist Marilyn Robinson calls “the dear ordinary.” This friend no longer travels, not with a pledge, but as a disposition, an orientation. She looks out onto a field teeming with creatures, ruthlessly tends a garden, clocks the seasons and migrations, the sometimes incremental, sometimes swift changes that aging brings. She sends me what she sees in gorgeously precise language.

When I visit (two plane rides), we sit on her porch and watch the field with our breakfast, and I think, I too could be content here. But I’m just passing through.

In Lazio, two hours north of Rome, I followed signs to “the town that is dying.” I walked across the footbridge to Civita di Bagnoregio, a striking medieval hill town that sits atop a volcanic pedestal in the middle of a valley, much of the town cleaved away over time from successive earthquakes and landslides. The Etruscans built their settlement on this mesa to get away from malaria down in the riverine valley, but they chose a doomed column of porous, volcanic tufa.

Ever since a devastating earthquake in 1695, Civita has been in decline, shrinking from about 3,000 inhabitants to a recent full-time population that has drifted between six and ten, depending on the year and the season. As research for a novel set in a dwindling Italian town, I was visiting half a dozen settlements in varying states of abandonment from Abruzzo to the Alps. I’d come to Civita to interview some of its residents and to stay in a medieval house that overlooked the valley.

As soon as I walked through the Etruscan archway and into the piazza, I knew Civita would become the model for my fictional town of Valetto. There was a centuries-old church with an imposing campanile, a row of ivy-covered stone houses with potted geraniums on their windowsills and stairs, and an impressive colony of meandering or sleeping stray cats.

There was also a three-story building facade at the edge of the mesa, its rooms erased by some distant seismic event and its window openings looking out onto dead air, the canyons and badlands of the valley hundreds of feet below. On a clean page of my notebook, I wrote “Civita offers an excellent view of oblivion.”

*

For a country of 60 million people that would easily fit within the state of California, Italy punches well above her weight when it comes to vanishing places. There are more than 2,500 towns and villages—about a third of all small settlements—that are considered “perilously depopulated.” The Guardian estimates that more than two million houses are sitting empty across Italy.

Like the ghost towns of the American West, many of these dwindling places are on the wrong side of history. The promise of jobs and a more prosperous life has been luring Italians away from their ancestral villages to urban areas—both within Italy and abroad—for at least a century. But many of these places are also on the wrong side of geology. Much of the Italian peninsula is seismically active and major earthquakes have caused the abandonment of dozens of towns and villages. Almost two hundred years after the earthquake that devastated Civita di Bagnoregio, another big one hit in Liguria, causing the residents of two vibrant towns—Balestrino and Bussana Vecchia—to eventually abandon their homes.

*

I traveled to Italy not only to understand abandonment as a social and historical force but also to understand the people who stay behind in places that have been “cast aside.” The day before I arrived in Civita di Bagnoregio, one of the locals had fallen off the side of the unstable mesa while pruning his garden and had to be airlifted to a nearby hospital.

What makes a person so loyal to the ground beneath his feet that leaving ceases to be an option? For 25 years, Giuseppe Spagnuolo has been the sole inhabitant of Roscigno Vecchia, a hamlet located 1,300 feet up a mountain in Campania. There were just five people living in the alpine town of Ostana, in Piedmont, until 2016, when a miracle happened: the town’s first birth in 28 years. Today, there are about 80 people who’ve returned to the town or newly settled there.

*

The word abandon carries with it a sense of weight and history. It can mean to leave without intending to return, to give up control or influence, to withdraw in the face of danger (abandon ship), to withdraw protection, support or help, or to give oneself over unrestrainedly. It can also mean to cease maintaining a practice, like abandoning a native language. The word came into English usage some time in the fourteenth century from the Old French abandoner, which originally implied “to bring under control,” and later “to surrender to.” The sense of abandon as desertion—to forsake someone or something—entered English in the early 1800s. And it’s this newer usage that is now the most prevalent. It puts the emphasis on who or what was left behind and the cruel indifference of the leaving.

I’d also traveled to Italy, it seems to me now, to understand the idea of being forsaken and the weight of emotional abandonment. The narrator of my novel, a social historian on a similar mission, has returned to the vanishing town in Umbria where he spent his childhood summers and where his elderly grandmother and aunts still live. As I tried to understand my narrator’s motivations and emotions, I found myself reflecting on my own life, both as one who’s been left behind and as one who’s done the leaving. Emotional desertion, like its physical counterpart, often divides people’s lives into two—there is the beforetime and the aftermath. And every once in a while, as with the alpine town of Ostana, there is also a return.

*

Our abandonment began in 1980, the year I turned nine. I say “our” because it happened as much to my mother, who technically did the leaving, as it did to her children. Although she’d left my father and their unhappy marriage in 1978, that was not her real vanishing act. After she moved to Sydney from the Blue Mountains, she got a job as a secretary and rented the top-story of a converted house in Manly, big enough for all four of her children.

In those early days of our new life together, I remember her as exuberant and hopeful. She got a perm with blonde highlights, lit candles at night, and played the vinyl anthems of her newfound freedom—Neil Diamond, ELO, Carol King, and Barbara Streisand. Some nights, after she came home exhausted from work, we helped her make pizzas with Lebanese flatbread, spaghetti sauce, and grated cheese, and we spread a blanket on the living room floor to have a picnic. She was 37 that year and dating for the first time since the early 1960s. There was Jack, who wore tank tops and drove a sports car, Michael who entered rooms on a cloud of Aramis aftershave, and Byron, who sported a Van Dyke beard and nautical, cable-knit sweaters.

The upswing of this new life flattened out one August morning. My mother complained of a migraine but nonetheless took the ferry into the city for work, where she collapsed some hours later in a corporate high-rise bathroom. A female colleague found her unconscious on the bathroom floor and my mother was rushed to the hospital for emergency brain surgery. She’d had a stroke, the result of a kinked blood vessel in her brain that had been waiting to breach its banks for decades. After weeks in intensive care, and another month in the hospital, she was moved to a residential rehab center, where she spent months trying to recover her short-term memory and pull on the thread of her previous life.

As a novelist, I have a heightened fear of sentimentality and melodrama. I would never, for example, write about a mother of four, not yet settled into middle age, who suffers a stroke only to discover that her rental house has burned to the ground while she’s in recovery. What little remains of her material claim on the world is destroyed, including most of the family photos and all of her clothing, jewelry, furniture, and kitchenware.

In fiction, a narrative choice like “fire-after-stroke” makes the reader suspicious that their sympathies are being overburdened. Even in real life, where all this unfolded, I’ve routinely withheld the fire when I tell someone about the stroke for fear that it tips the conversation into maudlin territory. And I certainly don’t tell them that the fire started in the apartment directly below my bedroom, in a room where paint was being stored by the downstairs tenant, and that if I hadn’t been troubled by a bad dream and gotten into bed with my father, who had come to live with us, even though he frowned upon such things, that I might not have been alive to tell the story in the first place. In art, we edit the narrative details to maintain credibility. In life, the universe never doubts its own veracity.

By the time my mother returned to live in the new house that my father had rented for us after the fire—less than six months after her stroke—there was no sign of the original Frances Smith. Not only because she’d gained a lot of weight and now took lithium for depression, but also because she couldn’t remember how to navigate the simplest of tasks. Most days, she sat in the living room with the blinds drawn watching television from morning until night. If she ventured out at all in those early months, she had to write her name, address, and phone number on a piece of paper and pin it to her clothes.

We all lived on the tide of her inertia and the house quickly fell to ruin, the dishes piling in the sink and the garage full of garbage bags of smoke-laced items rescued from the fire. My three sisters and I all shared a silent pact that no one could be invited into the house on Brighton Street, a perfectly ordinary red brick house in a middle-class Sydney suburb. If we’d been abandoned, then it was surely in the fourteenth-century sense of the word—we’d been brought under the control of something infinitely more powerful than we were. But as a ten-year-old in 1981, despite all reason, I couldn’t help feeling that my mother had just walked out on us and left us in the custody of a vacant-eyed, feckless stranger.

*

We think abandonment is about walking away and never looking back, but in Italy there are many places that are abandoned in plain sight. Instead of remote valleys or mountains, these towns and villages are often visible through the windows of the people who’ve left. When Tocco Caudio, a village in the province of Benevento, was abandoned after a series of earthquakes in the 1980s, the townspeople resettled at a slightly higher elevation, just a few hundred meters away, in a town called Friuni.

And the now-empty town of Balestrino, about 40 miles from Genoa, sits behind a chain-link fence, effectively condemned, presiding over the newer settlement of Balestrino further down the mountain. After the big earthquake of 1887, a run of landslides made the original town untenable and eventually, in 1953, the 400 people who remained were evacuated to the new town to start over. On the day I visited both Balestrinos, an elderly woman from the new town was walking her fox terrier up by the old town, doing a sort of perimeter check on what had been left behind.

From my online travels, I knew that trespassing tourists had photographed the empty buildings, where newspapers from the 1950s and the occasional piece of furniture still lingered. When I asked her in my faltering Italian if she was from the original town, she looked through the chain link fence and said, “Certo, sono nato lì dentro. È da dove vengo.” Of course, I was born in there. It’s where I’m from.

*

Although Italians are historically prodigious at settling new places, they are also excellent at honoring where and who they’re descended from. On il giorno dei Morti, Italy’s All Souls Day, you can see throngs of families in cemeteries in every corner of the isthmus holding white and gold chrysanthemums and paying their respects to their ancestors. They speak reverently to framed pictures of the departed and many families set an empty place at the table. They buy roasted chestnuts from street vendors and stroll in remembrance of former times.

Some people return to abandoned towns and villages to commune with their family history. Italians, it seems to me, rarely leave things fully behind. There are places in Rome where it’s possible to see the ruins and relics of three successive eras—Etruscan, Roman, Fascist—from a single street corner. Nothing could be less Italian than the suggestion to “walk away and don’t look back.” In fact, looking back seems to be more than half the point of leaving in the first place.

*

We are all, of course, surrounded by people who feel abandoned in plain sight. In the same way we mythologize that abandoned places are sitting in the shadows of some impenetrable valley, we tend to think of the lonely and the deserted as sitting perpetually in darkened rooms or nursing homes, when, in fact, some of them are our neighbors or colleagues.

When I think of the house on Brighton Street, where we all lived in the aura of my mother’s debilitating stroke, I wonder how it’s possible that we didn’t have any meaningful social support. No one dropped in to see how we were doing. Surely there should have been social workers, old friends and acquaintances of my mother’s, follow-ups from the rehab center, or even my father sounding the alarm to the wider world. But somehow we kept the vigil of our secret life.

When my father finally entered the house after a year of picking us up at the front door for weekend outings, he was horrified by what he saw. There was a blitzkrieg of cleaning under his stern direction and the memory of carrying out trash bags full of rotting food and dishware beyond redemption still fills me with shame. Not because I blame us for the squalor, but because it was the moment that our humiliation had finally been brought under the world’s scrutiny.

*

If you ask my adult sisters, they wouldn’t say that I abandoned them when I went to live with my father and stepmother in 1982, the year I turned 11. But abandonment is often more of a feeling than a brute condition and I’ve always felt, quite viscerally, that I walked out on them. After the revelation of how we’d been living with my mother, my father and stepmother decided that they could take one of us in, but not all four.

As the youngest, I was offered the spare bedroom in their small house near Bondi Beach. Why they chose to only put one of us into the lifeboat is a subject for speculation, therapy, or a different essay, but that decision—their offer and my acceptance—changed all of our lives. If my mother’s stroke was the earthquake that triggered the initial abandonment, then my leaving was the landslide that finished the job.

While my sisters were largely left to navigate their teenage years on their own, I began a new life in a suburb of Sydney where I knew no one. I joined the local surf lifesaving club, took up karate, joined the debate club, and became a straight-A student. That first year, I was horribly lonely and took multiple buses, trains, and a ferry to spend weekends with my mother, perhaps paying the penance of the one who walks away.

We watched television together but there was no music in the house anymore. Somehow, Barbara Streisand and Carol King belonged to a vanished era when my mother had a perm and a working short-term memory. The default for our conversations was always her saying, “Stop me if I’ve told you this already…” But I seldom stopped her. That seemed like a very small price to pay.

After my sisters left home and the child support from my father ran out, my mother became increasingly erratic. While her finances dwindled and she struggled to pay the rent, she reserved airline tickets for a trip to Hawaii, or talked about leasing a commercial photocopier to run a desktop publishing business out of the apartment. When she was finally and inevitably served an eviction notice, I took a day off from high school to take her to the hearing.

In the taxi on the way to the courthouse, she told me that she thought she was having a heart attack. So we directed the taxi driver to the ER, where my mother emptied out the contents of her handbag on the seat next to her—yarn, a toilet paper roll, paper sugar packets, chewing gum, a wad of tattered envelopes with official-looking letterheads inside—before putting it all back carefully, announcing that she felt fine, and standing up to leave. I remember that as I followed her outside, I had that sense that nothing in the world could be relied upon. Within a few months, she would find herself homeless, occasionally sleeping on couches of people we didn’t know, while my sisters and I scrambled to find a way to help.

*

I want to say that every abandoned place and person dreams of a comeback. But that’s the sort of aphorism that blurs the edges of the actual thing in the world. The reality, of course, is more nuanced. Some places and people are so accustomed to having been left behind that they can’t summon the will to imagine anything else. In Italy, though, I’ve been struck not only by the sheer variety of comeback schemes for vanishing places, but also by the handful who’ve managed to reverse their bleak trajectory.

Up near the border between Switzerland and Italy, tucked into a steep valley, the town of Viganella has seen a steady decline of residents over the decades, in part because it doesn’t see the sun between November 11 and February 2 each year. To combat the seasonal exodus, the mayor commissioned a local architect to build and install an enormous mirror on one of the peaks above the town. For more than fifteen years, the mirror has reflected six hours of available winter sunlight down into the town square, guided by a software program that helps it follow the sun’s path, giving the residents a welcome reprieve from the darkness.

In Laviano, high in the Apennine hills southeast of Naples, the population thinned so much that the mayor began offering couples 10,000 Euros to have a child and stay in the town. During the pandemic, the medieval village of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, in Abruzzo, began offering people grants to move there and work—up to 8,000 Euros a year for three years, and more if they started a business.

The Swedish-Italian millionaire Daniele Kihlgren, who stumbled upon the town on a solo motorcycle tour and then proceeded to buy up its houses, brought the town back from the brink of abandonment. He opened an albergo diffuso, an upscale hotel where you stay in a restored medieval house instead of a traditional hotel room. On the October night I stayed at the hotel, there were just a small handful of other guests. I slept in a medieval house and ate in a cellar restaurant that served locally sourced food on earthenware dishes. If “medieval luxe” is a design aesthetic, then Santo Stefano has it in spades.

But perhaps my favorite comeback story is Bussana Vecchia in Liguria. In the early 1960s, more than half a century after it was abandoned in the aftermath of the 1887 earthquake, Bussana was reclaimed by an international community of artists and hippies. Initially, the newly arrived residents were viewed as squatters by the local municipality and they had no access to electricity, running water, or sanitation. But over time, they’ve managed to achieve official recognition from the local government. Today, you can walk through a thriving artistic oasis among the ruins of the original town. There’s a café run by a Dutch sculptor, a bookshop, art galleries, a leatherwork studio and, improbably, a jazz and blues club dug into an ancient stone cellar.

*

When I think of our own comeback, it reminds me a lot of Tocco Caudio or Balestrino, where the people fled to settle on more stable ground, but within plain sight of the old ruins. My sisters and I all went on to build lives and families of our own. Collectively, if you include our children, there is a novelist, a member of parliament, a Rhodes Scholar, two lawyers, six university graduates, and a Doctor of Philosophy. There is also a history of substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and long-standing hurts and silences.

The only time the four of us siblings have been together in the same room in the last few decades was in the hospital where my father was dying of cancer in 2017. As for my mother, she is somehow still alive, though in a steady decline in a nursing home. In truth, she never really came back from the stroke. It’s one of the great losses of my life. We managed to keep her housed and get her on public assistance, but she only became more erratic over time and often fell in with schemers looking for easy prey.

Over the years, my sisters and I have talked about the houses and apartments where our lives took a turn or where we felt abandoned by the wider world. One day, about five years ago, my oldest sister and I decided to take a driving tour of the old rentals, to see what sort of power they still held over us. We drove across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, into the suburb of Manly, and onto Kangaroo Street, the last known address of the real Frances Smith, the apartment consumed by fire while she was in hospital.

We drove into the suburb of Balgowlah, along Brighton Street, looking for number 5, where we’d lived after my mother’s stroke and where neither of us had been in close to 40 years. There was no trace of either house. In their place were chic, multi-story, modern apartments. We were incredulous but also relieved. We’d spent so many years looking back at these ghost houses that it had somehow never occurred to us that they might have already vanished.

____________________________

Return to Valetto by Dominic Smith is available now via Farrar, Straus and Giroux