Shot Heard Round the Livingroom

Like many highly idiosyncronous tastes, anti-tourism is easy to experience, easy to explore individually, and easy to enjoy but notoriously difficult to describe. Like a fetish for donkey masks, the unavoidable question of "why?" is often met with grasping wildly at whatever explanation the enthusiastic but frazzled mind can cling to. But ultimately, one can simply hold up a donkey mask and simply say, "Well what exactly ISN'T arousing?" Not so with anti-tourism, or any vague concept. It's like art or communism in that it's passionately pursued but when it comes to the showdown the only explanation one can offer resembles Jell-O left out too long, one, sad piece of pineapple in mid-suspension just barely hanging on. This is exacerbated by the fact that so few people have heard of anti-tourism; the phrase itself sets off alarms with even the jaded traveler, the modern hipster who drains authority from everything, and even the ordinary chum wondering what exactly I'm yelling about. It doesn't sound right, "anti-tourism;" it's simultaneously interesting and boring which proceeds to final revulsion.

When asked -- and I have been asked, repeatedly, in one case multiple times from the same person -- I offer up this definition: travel is meant to explore the wondrous, the frontiers, but we live in an age where frontiers have all but evaporated. Space is mundane and anyway unobtainable for the regular Joe and I don't know of anyone who wants to vacation at the bottom of the ocean. What, really, is so special about the Taj Mahal? A house built for a second wife and I bet she was a nag. When it comes to brass tacks, is a cruise or an all-expenses paid trip to Milan all that enjoyable? Sure, they can be relaxing or fun in a conventional, amusement park sort of way, and there's the food and the culture, but why spend $5500 on a trip you can get for a Netflix account, some library late fees, and a cooking class? For the experience, is generally the response. For the privilege of being yourself, just somewhere else. Shouldn't there be some meaning?

I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's essay, "Shipping Out" (later to appear as the eponymous final essay in the brilliant "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") and his inverse, the people who would write glowingly and lavishly over such an experience, who coo like grandmothers over a baby, pieing about the same things that people have been talking about in travel writing since Marco Polo pretended he went any further east than the Volga. What boobs. Like Zach Anner has indicated (and I hope we soon will find out how insightful he can be), real travel is not about the perfect vacation, the perfect restaurant, and, o, hey it's Bono!

That's not travel, that's Hollywood. Throughout my childhood, I would visit my far-flung family in such places as London, Edinburgh, Nashville, Genoa, take trips to the Virgin Islands, and to the (later) point, prowl around Boston and its smells. What I found least interesting, least engaging, least worthy of my attention was the very things "everyone does:" be a tourist. I hated it! I thought it was completely phoney to be all agog over places the vast majority of people around you found utterly mundane or forgettable. That is, until I realized that the majority of people around me were other tourists. That made it even worse. The last enjoyable, truly touristy thing I got real interest out of was an automated edu-ride in Oxford and that's because it had spooky ghosts in it and I was ten. The extreme confirmation is this: nobody gives a shit about Gatlinberg. It's kind of a hole and there are two things interesting about it: it's proximity to Dollywood, and how outrageously crappy and bland American culture can get. The natural beauty around it isn't Gatlinberg; Gatlinberg is a strip of road that averages 4 "Olde Tyme Foto" storefronts per half-mile. Hilarious as that may be, is that really embodying the true purpose of travel or is it just demented schadenfreude?

My most beloved travel memory involves hiking up a steep, unforgiving mountain in Wales in a driving, bitter late-December rainstorm, my sister left behind in the clown car we'd rented for the excursion as she had a case of flu so severe I practically feel it infecting me through relativistic time, to see a castle that had been a ruin for longer than America has been a thing. We slipped and fell in the mud, my dad getting the worst of it in nearly splitting his head open on his fall, were soaked through, all but my dad came down with the exact contagion that was then wracking my poor sister, and we all, all were uniformly miserable and cursed the ruin, the rain, and the mountain as we futilely dabbed at the mud caked on our clothes in the understocked parks bathroom. I remember the resident who operated the gate looking at us with incredulity as he opened it to let us attempt to capture what centuries of sieges had not, but I don't remember what look he gave us as we departed: I was elated, I had had too good of a time and all memories after leaving the grounds' parking lot were effaced by my joy.

*****

In the preface to his book of essays, Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, Daniel Kalder cited an enigmatic, obscure and likely apocryphal text, "The Shymkent Declarations." Kalder may be one of the first active, recognized practitioners of anti-tourism -- though he and I diverge on how we go about our esoteric journeying -- and several of these declarations ring profoundly true. "The duty of the traveller therefore is to open up new zones of experience. In our over explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid."

That's the heart of it, but I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. It can be broken down to a desire if not need to go to bad or boring places that are difficult to get to and offer little to no, or only superficial, reward upon arrival. The lack of reward is its reward; a way to disconnect from society and its expectations, baffle friends, and potentially ditch anyone who's following you if that's something you need.

In his books, Kalder always ventures to places that appear in bizarre dictionaries next to the entry for "far flung" (if you have such a dictionary, let me know.) Places that perhaps were places once but whose population rightly decided that they are shit places to live. That sounds wild and interesting in a fascinatingly boring way and there are loads of places like that in this country. I remember going on a church youth trip to some crossroads north of Bangor. We were there as part of Habitat for Humanity and apparently the most humane thing we could do there was transfer a cubic ton of wood from one side of the street to the other. Also cram into a trailer and sing at an octogenarian short on marbles.

But it occurs to me that some places are not so far flung. The remoteness and desolation of that North Woods crossroads were compelling to me, but I've lived in northern New England most of my life; I knew it was out there and I knew there was a lot of it. When I first moved to Boston and started living an urban existence, as modern an American as I am, there was still a bit of culture shock. When that initial wave receded, however, I found that what was left on the tidal shore were these pockets of remoteness, these oddly inaccessible little groves in the seventh largest city in the country. What was even more striking about their inaccessibility was their sheer proximity to the eminently accessible.

Chelsea, Charlestown, Allston, even the South End neighborhood have spotty or bus-only access, isolating them from the city proper and the points in the city made accessible by the MBTA. Then there were the real anomalies. East Boston, Revere, Brighton, Brookline, virtually anywhere Dorchester and south should be accessible, but are made less so by the vagaries of the MBTA or historical undesirability.

So what, really, does "far flung" mean? For the resident of greater Boston with no car access, Wollaston can be as far flung Wyoming, Allston as prohibitive as Panama, Eastie as isolated as Estonia. And none of these places are even at the end of the line. Call it snobbery, but what the hell could there possibly even be in Braintree?

But that's the real point of exoticism, isn't it? The snobbish idea that in order to expand our ideas of what it is to live in this incomprehensibly large planet we need to experience those places most different from our way of thinking. My point with these sections of entries that shun the touristy destinations inherent in any large city (I will not be writing about Harvard or the Freedom Trail or fucking Faneuil Hall) and become instead a tourist of my own city, going to the ends of lines and the sometimes unsavory sometimes just boring places the lie as droplets from the splash of the city center.

The way I see it, New England is one of the most varied places in the country. We have sweeping, deep mountains and inaccessible woods practically adjacent to bustling cities and their frustrations and contradictions next to remote beaches that stand on the edge of the world. Boston has an incredible distillation of all of this and it's all accessible by the T, albeit with one of the most liberal definitions of "accessible" imaginable. But that provides the perfect foundation for the anti-tourist: it's close, it's boring, it's a bitch to get there and there's nothing to see once you do.

So let's go!