The Problem With Travel: How To Really Know A Place

Exploring new parts of places I thought I knew

Roger Deakin’s book Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain was published in 1999 in the UK but only made its way to U.S. markets in 2021. I read the book this fall wanting to understand what it is that draws some people to water but came away with many more questions and only one conclusion: Water is a threshold, and the promise of a threshold — a line we can cross in which everything changes — is endlessly compelling.

The premise of the book is simple: Deakin goes for a swim one day in the rain in a moat outside of his Elizabethan farmhouse and decides to log a year’s worth of wild swimming through Britain. The book was an immediate hit. Shortly after Waterlog’s publication, the wild swimming movement took off in the UK, with an even greater number of swimmers emerging in 2020 during the pandemic.

The book made me want to swim too, and halfway through I found myself up a mountain on a chilly fall afternoon, stripping down to nothing, diving into the freezing water. Onlookers far off on the opposite shore cheered me on while I gasped at the cold water, clawing my way back to the rocky bank. The urge to submerge myself in something other than a highly treated, highly controlled swimming pool was one benefit of the book. But I felt there was something else — beneath the surface, if you will — that Deakin was getting at.

Because I have little to no geographic knowledge of Great Britain, as the book moved along, I used Google Maps to figure out exactly how Deakin was moving through the landscape. I followed the map, zooming further and further out to get a clearer picture of his voyage, only to realize by the end of the book that I didn’t actually know the difference between the UK, Great Britain, and the British Isles.

A little more Googling laid out the maps of these landscapes and another realization arose: All of Great Britain (which, if you need a little refresher is just England, Wales, and Scotland) is actually smaller in square miles than the state of Colorado (80,823 square miles compared to 104,185 square miles).

I was so swept up in the story and so intent on creating a picture in my head that I made leaping assumptions that a swim through his country must look mightily similar to a swim through mine — even if I knew the ecosystems were different.

Perhaps this isn’t news to you, but the sheer scope of the United States consistently baffles me. Sometimes I feel deficient for my relative lack of international travel thus far in life, until I remember that my moves from Pennsylvania to Colorado to Washington and back to Colorado would be the mileage equivalent of transversing a dozen European countries.

This expanse, this ability to cross thousands of miles and dozens of ecosystems and still end up in the same country makes it very hard for those of us living in the U.S. to truly understand place. When you can drift with relative ease from red rock desert to coastal red cedar and still claim to be in the same place — America — it’s a wonder any of us manages to feel rooted at all. Even if you compare a country like the U.S. to a similarly sized country like Canada, the numbers still don’t add up. More people live in California than all of Canada. How are we to wrap our heads around such disparities?

Waterlog provided gorgeous mental images of wild swimming, but what Deakin’s book really got me wondering was what square mileage a person could really come to know. And what obligation do we have to understand the intricacies of that mileage? How many waterways should we be familiar with? How many birds should we be able to name? How many plants should we be able to identify? Obviously, there is no right answer, but I believe there must be some sort of obligation spectrum that we should all work to move ourselves along.

During a brief stint of online dating in 2018, I noticed something strange in so many people’s profiles. They’d list the emoji maps of every country they’d ever traveled to, as if there were some sort of unspoken goal to accumulate them all. So many men (but interestingly almost no women) asked me if I liked to “travel,” a question I still don’t entirely know how to answer. Do I like to go in search of new experiences, new stories, outdoor adventures, and different ways of taking in the world? Absolutely. Do I like delayed flights, jet lag, food poisoning, traffic, crowds, tourists, and spending thousands of dollars all so I can add a new country to my collection and gain the gold star of getting to be “worldly?” Absolutely not.

I think this is what made Waterlog so compelling to so many; this was not a story about some grand adventure to the ends of the earth requiring oodles of time and money, it was a story about what could be accomplished in your own backyard over the span of nine months if you just took the time to look around.

That’s the thing about travel recently. I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that too many people use “travel” as a means to claim they’ve done something interesting or courageous without really having to do anything at all. The ability to book a flight and show up to the airport on time isn’t all that interesting. But to know a couple dozen birds that pass through your backyard, their migration patterns, the water sources they hang out by, and the foods they seek out, that’s fascinating. That shows a kind of commitment and dedication that hopping on an airplane just doesn’t.

Moving back to Colorado this year has filled me with so much joy, knowing I’m back in a landscape my heart is drawn to and among the stories I’m most excited to tell. That nagging urge to travel as a means to avoid feeling my own displacement is quieting. And I’m realizing that even though I’d lived here previously for six years, there’s still so much about this region I don’t understand.

In the spirit of getting to know my home more deeply, I’ve made a rudimentary map of what I currently consider “my landscape” and where I believe my landscape could grow.

*Map absolutely not to scale

I don’t feel the need to confine myself to just Colorado because state lines are arbitrary boundaries that don’t mean much to me outside of where I can vote and where my health insurance works. I moved back here not just because I love Colorado, but because I wanted to put myself in the epicenter of the landscapes I love most and want to come to know better. Sitting down with a map makes me realize how much of my own home I’ve managed to miss.

Brendan Leonard made this short video earlier this summer about the seven summits of his neighborhood and I was surprised by how profoundly it moved me. It’s endearing and funny and so perfectly demonstrates how much there is to learn about our own backyards. And perhaps it also demonstrates the ways in which we place too much value on escaping the places we are lucky enough to call home.

In the afterword of Waterlog, nature writer Robert McFarlane said of his dear friend that, “Roger and I found ourselves returning in conversation…[to] the frontiers we perceived to exist within even familiar landscapes (hill-passes, snow-lines, forest thresholds), and the transformations that might occur as you crossed them.”

I think that is the crux of it. I loved Waterlog because Deakin accomplished with his writing exactly what I aspire to do: Take familiar landscapes and explore them so thoroughly that they turn into unfamiliar thresholds that together we cross, unsure of what we’ll see on the other side.