Sometimes the best part of travel is when the travelers come to you
Good Morning, People! Time for travel tales, true travel tales! I work at a large outdoor adventure and travel retailer on the edge of Downtown Seattle. We often engage with people coming and going from all over the nation and from all around the planet. Such encounters are one of the great and fun aspects of working there.
On the first Friday in June of 2024 met and worked with a couple from Iceland in the Climbing Department. In their mid-30s, maybe about 40ish. Spoke English that was a little too perfect with an odd lift of the vowels, but the man’s T-shirt gave it away, some little scenic place no one ever heard of outside Iceland except map freaks like me. So they were a little impressed. “Come to Iceland!” they said.
The woman went from being solemn to moving as if in some kind of slo-mo shadow dance as she described, eyes closed, her sadness so many people outside of Iceland seem to dismiss her native country as merely freezing glaciers surrounded by the cold, icy ocean.
“We also have fire!” She said as her arms and hands and fingers weaved mind crafted shapes in the air. “And volcanoes! We have volcanoes! And earthquakes. And the Aurora Borealis! And wild, wild oceans! We are a land of fire and ice constantly being born again from the depths of the Atlantic.”
She was so happy. I’m paraphrasing her, of course, as those aren’t her exact words but an approximation of what wonders she drew in the air. Her partner, the man in the blueish-gray T-shirt with the long Icelandic name on the front, stood there in silence, smiling, slightly embarrassed, and also immensely proud.
Started to share I’ve a thing for Icelandic film and Of Monsters and Men is one of my favorite indie folk rock bands ever. “Dirty Paws” is one of my anthems! But I felt too shy to say such things nor did I want to distract them with my silly Americanisms, didn’t want to make it all about me, so I just listened to them in awe instead.
The very next couple I helped out was this odd couple of about 30ish – he was a bearded German stoic and she a hottie from Brazil with a mane of wavy black hair. He was so stiff and she so fluid and his Portuguese so bad and her German so precise and their mangled 3-way English so amusing we all three laughed and laughed especially when I mispronounced what little Brazilian Portuguese I had learned, but they thought my tiny bit of German was better. He complained he could not understand the German dialects from the former East Germany, to make me feel kin somehow, I imagined. The young man explained how he had moved from the north south into the Alps.
“To be deeper in the bigger mountains,” he said.
She explained how Brazil had numerous regional dialects and accents just like the States and my Portuguese attempt was more the textbook version from the big São Paulo metro area in their South. Which is where a woman I once fell in love with but never met face to face in perhaps the strangest of strange relationships still lives. She was from somewhere in the East of Brazil, or north of Rio de Janiero…I think. Not sure. Couldn’t make out all of her vibrant speech.
There are so many places in both Germany and in Brazil, indeed across Europe and South America, I wanted to visit and explore. All three of my children have been to far more countries than me. One of my exes lived abroad for nearly a decade. My current spouse is an immigrant. My travel focus in my youth was on the abundance of outdoor adventure right here in the United States, and it was this same abundance these two couples sought to experience for themselves.
Oh gosh, interactions like this make me wanna travel bad. The travel bug bit hard, and, hey, it was all fun. Both couples were a delight to work with and outfit with climbing gear. Both appreciated I seem to know more than the average American. I explained my background included world history, geography, and geopolitics. The main thing is, the nature of my job aside, engaging with these two couples from three countries passing thru my own and listening to them share their stories. People often come across first as expressions of certain socio-cultural stereotypes. Allow them time to relax and the real person emerges. Each shows up as a unique individual liberated from stereotypes yet we recognize even if briefly the transcendence of our common humanity. We’re all from the same species sharing the same little planet third from the Sun.
William Dudley Bass
Saturday 8 June 2024
Tuesday 11 June 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
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