As I write this, I am a guest on ancestral lands of the Ho-Chunk Nation. I also discuss experiences of being a guest on other unceded/colonised lands, both in North America and Scotland.
If Condé Nast and T&L are any indications, experiences of place are consumerist by default. Sights previously unseen, near and far, are sold by the proposition that experiential value and social and cultural capital all lie in unfamiliarity.
Travel doesn’t interest or excite me because of its commodified novelty. It saddens (but doesn’t surprise) me how many people seem to thoughtlessly move through new places without developing a sensory engagement with them. I won’t tread any tired rhetoric that rails against contemporary trends; this commercialist approach to globetrotting long predates today’s “tickbox tourism” and influencer pool-hopping.1
The fascination of a situated experience often isn’t about newness at all. The profundity of place is in its uniquely uncanny familiarity, in the flickers of the known that play across one’s field of vision. Foreignness is simply that which one has not yet dismantled into its identifiable parts. To search for the familiar, to seek that which is comfortable and recognisable, is a process of both observing and remembering.
One autumn, I was traveling with friends through the Scottish highlands towards the Isle of Skye. We drove west out of Glasgow and then north, skirting the edge of Loch Lomond. There was a stop for lunch at Kingshouse, full-length glass windows offering us a view out across Glencoe. Then, not long before we left the main road and took the switchback along the banks of Loch Levan to draw deeper into the shadow of Ben Nevis, we stopped to stretch our legs.
The road from the highway to the parking lot was narrow and rocky.2 As we drove, the woodland became denser - and oddly familiar. I thought, It looks like Goldstream. It was half a world away, but the surrounding forest in this tiny corner of Glencoe transported me to the nature reserve where I went hiking with university friends on weekends when we weren’t busy studying. We parked and made our way to the trailhead. I almost expected to smell the sweet rot of the west coast salmon who die each year in the creek, mid-spawn.
The profundity of place is in its uniquely uncanny familiarity.
At the base of the trail was a small sign. The woodlands here were supposedly planted in the 19th century by a Scottish baron, Lord Strathcona. Like several Scottish names and places - Calgary, Airdrie - Strathcona was a word familiar to me from back home. The sign went on.
Lord Strathcona’s wife was Canadian and sick for home. He planted this forest grove around the lochan with trees native to Canada, to help her feel more comfortable in the Scottish north. The sign admitted that this attempt had sadly failed; Lord and Lady Strathcona emigrated to Canada.
The trail around the small lake was short - no match for the hike to the head of the waterfall in Goldstream Park. Where my memory wanted to fill in a rope bridge and a winding track up to a railroad trestle, there was only the path that curved around the lochan. The effect was both comforting and unsettling; the experience of this new place was defined by absence, a lack of confirmation of the persistent, warm signal of familiarity.
To search for the familiar, to seek that which is comfortable and recognisable, is a process of both observing and remembering.
Lately, I’ve experienced similarly pleasant dissonance in the Mississippi River Valley and spaces of urbanity in the American Midwest. A verdant hillside is a facsimile of mountain valleys I can picture on Canada’s west coast, but suddenly the very same hill opens up into a rocky bluff that doesn’t match my memory. A charming residential street could be a transplant from cities I’ve known well in the past, but here the water that I glimpse between the houses is an inland lake rather than the Pacific Ocean.
Disorienting, certainly, but not usually disturbing, as long as memory and sensation aren’t in competition with one another. When I experience both in concert, my delight in the natural beauty of a new place is enhanced by warm memories of places I’ve loved before.
I haven’t been able to confirm the facts of the story of Lord and Lady Strathcona. It seems that the details have been twisted around, which somehow hasn’t lessened its emotional resonance for me.
Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona, was a Scotsman who typified the “rags-to-riches” experience of settler colonists in Canada; he extracted his fortune with the Hudson’s Bay Company and participated in Canadian politics at the highest echelon during the time of confederacy. His wife, Isabella Hardisty, was Canadian, but Smith’s ties to Canada predated their marriage and their time spent there doesn’t seem to have been motivated by any homesickness on her part.3 I’m still caught in the romantic notion of familiar trees planted to cure ailments of the spirit, even if this is one of those stories - like many memories - that can’t be corroborated.
My travels these days are stirring up the familiarity that hides within and behind novelty. I walk along a narrow man-made dam that I’ve never seen before, reminded of a breakwater that I used to walk, and I feel caught somewhere in my memories as they are recalled and re-made.
Questions to Ask out loud.
The internet has everything. Here’s part of the walk we did.
For more, see: this starry-eyed colonialist biography of Smith.
Love these reflections! It has me thinking about places that speak to me, in a way I can't explain, even if I don't often experience that sense of familiarity - at least not explicitly. Or maybe (probably) I just haven't been paying enough attention. The places that speak to me are somehow full of possibility - the promise of somehow becoming more me. It also has me thinking of home, though I truly don't know anymore what that means or where it is. I sense these things are all connected. Thanks for sharing your insights.