Travels: The Extraordinary and The Strangely Familiar

Several decades ago I read an autobiography of Agatha Christie about which I remember very little except for her caution to think twice before returning to a place you remember as extraordinary, with emphasis on the exquisite precision of that word’s meaning. There are a few places I am hesitant to revisit because they are preserved with such visual clarity and heightened emotions in my Hall of Peak Experiences: our twentieth anniversary/fortieth birthday trip to the islands of Greece, our family sunset walk at Bryce Canyon. They are trips that wove together unique landscapes and fleeting life events: I will never be 40 again, blinking at the astonishing blue and white landscape of Santorini, accompanied by the person I had loved for 20 years; I will never hold hands with my 7 and 9 year old sons again as we enter a sculpted landscape painted in desert hues I could not have dreamed up on my own. There are also places I have been brave enough to revisit, like the interior of Ste. Chapelle in Paris, where I remember standing as a 17 year old and thinking with that self-drama only a 17 year old American in Paris can muster, that it would be okay if I died right then, bathed in the light of a stained glass Bible and sung to heaven by the choir echoing in the chamber. And the reason I once again had to blink back tears on my revisit three decades on was that I was returning with the one thing I didn’t have in that room of color and sound thirty years ago: a family to share it with. The voyage among the Grecian Isles seems complete in a way the experience of Ste. Chapelle had not been, since not even Ste. Chapelle’s ecstasy of light and sound exempted me from the inchoate yearning for human connection. That feeling of being almost integrated with a time and a place, that not yet fulfilled yearning itself might provide the password back to a place. What I bring to a place on the second visit might be what I didn’t possess on the first, and it might be what closes the circle.

Then there are places, like New Zealand, that I return to because I don’t think I will soon be done with the discoveries I can make during my stay. New Zealand is a place best explained by that useful oxymoron, Strangely Familiar. It feels like home, but a home entered from a different door and in which I have an inarguably finite amount of time. So I make time to see friends, visit places, learn about the native literature, art, and natural world without putting any of it off till tomorrow, next week, next month. It feels like a home where they speak my language, but with phrases for which I must seek definitions, and pronunciations I sometimes ask to be spelled. Because the strangely familiar subtly shifts the tectonic plates of experience and expectation upon which I normally stand, I have to daily acknowledge the fact that I’m balancing on moving ground.

Last week I returned to Nelson, a small city on the northern tip of the South Island, a place I visited with Bill and the boys 15 years ago. It was a city enlivened by a burgeoning art scene, heavy on glass and ceramics and wearable art. Its small art gallery had an exhibit of pieces by artists I was moved to contact and interview for a magazine article I was researching on NZ textile artists. It’s also the city whose setting seemed perfectly Kiwi to me, nestled in a turn of Tasman Bay, reachable by a long drive on a twisting two lane road after a three hour ferry ride from the North Island.

Nelson View

Those interviews resulted not in a published article (the magazine folded) but in close friendships with the artists, one of whom, Ailie Snow (http://ailiesnow.com/), was with me on this trip. A trip we took not by car and ferry but by plane, something we wouldn’t have done 15 years ago when it cost as much to fly to Australia as it did to the South Island. The art scene has been muted, tamped down by a world economy that isn’t directing enough tourists with disposable income to a small city tucked on the Tasman and by a government that has dialed back its support of craft and art. And it is a larger place now, with big box stores and new blank-faced buildings, making it a bit more like everywhere else. But the view from our room recalled the impression of ocean and sky from my previous visit, and my favorite mural was still there, repainted in response to the bleaching effect of the strong NZ light, but still perfectly embodying the feeling of strangely familiar: a landscape that is hyper-real and surreal at the same time, that might be the very manifestation of perfection or the imagined ideal of perfection. 

Aotearoa

This time around, the visit was more about people than about place, as Ailie’s sister-in-law took us to meet her sister, Sally Burton (http://www.sallyburton.co.nz/), a local artist (and like her a Nelsonian from birth),  Susanne Williamson, a dyer and clothing maker from the US who washed ashore in the seventies and never left, and various family members and friends with interesting stories to tell. On this visit, as on the last, the circle remained invitingly open when our plane took off for Auckland, inviting a return to the unchanging view, evolving cultural scene, and growing number of people whose stories I’d like to follow here in Nelson.

Need to ask what a gumboot is? Why, it's a wellie.