The World Around the Corner

My passion for travel photography was rekindled, as luck would have it, by a Facebook algorithm.

Your memories for December 18, 2016

“So, I’m stuck in London ANOTHER night,” I had written in the status update. Facebook had, at that moment, thought it a good idea to remind me of that particular incident on my feed.

“Technically Slough,” My past self continued. “British Airways screwed up my replacement booking. But at least I get to enjoy the comforts of the finest Holiday Inn in Slough!” That particular incident had been sparked, initially, by nothing less trivial than fog. London fog, it happened, descending upon Heathrow Airport at the climax of Christmas travel season, just as I (and thousands of other travelers) had connecting flights on the same day. In my case it was between Berlin and Washington Dulles, flying home from my graduate studies in Germany for Christmas break back in the States. Hundreds of fog-cancelled flights and a botched next-day booking left me stuck in the vicinity of Heathrow airport for two days, counting each date as Christmas rapidly approached and I was looking all the more likely to enjoy the festivities alone in the nearest hotel the airline could find for me in the sea of thousands of other travels in a similar position.

But, of course, the centerpiece of the memory lay in the comments. Just below the main status update, and the few “likes” and “thumbs up” emojis from relevant friends and family, was a single picture, taken haphazardly with my phone, that I posted in the comments below. It depicted nothing more exciting than a single pint of Guinness, set without fanfare on the cheap plastic table of the hotel’s dining area, framed by the near-empty bar and a TV in the background set to some British reality show.

“At least I got a free pint of Guinness out of it!” I wrote. Indeed, the single complimentary pint, alongside one night’s stay, had been the airline’s only conciliatory gesture for not being able to control the weather and the wilderness of their own booking programs.

“Now get six more,” one friend commented.

“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough,” wrote another.

Luck, as a long-dead relative used to say, is never good or bad, but something of a hermaphrodite. He undoubtedly meant that any happenstance can bear good or ill for us, depending upon how we react, though when he told me that particular aphorism. I was a bit too hung up on the imagery to make a deeper connection. But these past two years have really brought the truth of that to light. Having spent too many of my formative years as the one scrolling longingly through the picture feeds and photography of other people’s travels and adventures, I was, at the start of 2020, finally in a position to explore much more of the world myself, engaging in my newfound interest in photography to document my journeys around our planet, sharing not only the well-known sights, but the hidden, secret wonders as well, the back corners and mysterious pathways found only by the most fearless and driven of travelers. 2020 would be my year of exploration.

Of course, we all know how it ended. Rather than spanning the world, camera in hand, I spent the rest of 2020 like billions of others across the globe, stuck inside and in limbo, imprisoned by a global plague that canceled our lives and wiped more or less an entire calendar year from the annals of our collective histories. On my end of the pandemic, things were, on paper, quite a bit better than they were for many others. I neither contracted COVID myself nor did I know anyone personally who died from it.

But, going back to my relative’s colorful metaphor, this particular stroke of circumstance was, for me, both good and bad. While my life was put on hold for over a year, this time kept away from the world did at the same time enhance my appreciation for it. I, like so many people in similar situations around the globe, spent much of my newfound free time wistfully scrolling through Instagram and the like, browsing pictures from past travels, and the few bold souls who managed to venture into the COVID-conquered world in some form or another. Looking at these social media posts of the adventures of others, my own burning passion for both travel and photography, for adventure and storytelling, only burned even hotter in my mind. Quarantined from the world, it called to me even louder, and soon the haphazard malaise and procrastination that held me back in the past were finally superseded by a firm resolve to cast caution and laziness to the wind and follow my wayward path wherever it may take me.

Ironically, it was during the pandemic itself that my particular knack for travel photography and travel blogging became most apparent. Having only memories of my past travels, and imaginings of future ones, I spent much of my free pandemic time writing on exotic sights both seen and unseen. I began writing, as a lark, a series of poems based on recollections of past travels. Interestingly enough, even as I based these poems on the pictures I found on my phone or saved on my Facebook profile, the memories that sparked the most creative insight were often the seemingly insignificant ones.

Here, for example, is a picture taken from a train window, blurred from motion, of the hills of the countryside of Wales as I ventured into the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, a village nestled in a mythical hillside that had become notable among certain people for its vast quantity of bookstores. The next picture, likewise obscured, was taken through the window of the (then-closed) Hay-on-Wye tourism office. It seemed, as the memory goes, that I had misread the schedule of the public bus service that would take me back from the village (with my newly-fatted bag of recently-purchased books) to the train station, where I would catch my train back to London. Having missed the last bus, and living in the days before Uber and Lyft, I was forced to take a haphazard picture with my phone’s zoom function of the single ad for a taxi service that I could make out through the window of the closed tourism office.

And here, now, is a darkened alleyway in Berlin’s Warschauer Straße district, featuring rows of communist-era warehouses that had been converted into all-night dance clubs. Here is where I, a drunken American adrift at 3AM on a Friday night, had encountered a boisterous woman from Uzbekistan, whose name, if I was ever told, was certainly something I could never hope to pronounce or remember. But, nonetheless, we ended up dancing spontaneously under the flickering streetlights of the alleyway, caught in three distinct rhythms reverberating from behind the walls of three nearby clubs, all blending into a strange, engaging polyrhythm that seemed to have been composed for us only by the very night and city itself.

These memories, more than my impatient waits in line at the Eiffel Tower or Buckingham Palace, held firm in my memory, and defined the paths that I craved more and more the longer the pandemic kept me trapped in my own house. And, more importantly, when reflecting on these seemingly unimportant moments in strange, foreign locales, I felt a deep, consuming sense of peace descend upon me, a peace that loosened the muscles in my back and neck, slowed my breathing, and unburdened the clusters of tension that encircled and clumped around my mind after each passing day.

Your memories for March 12, 2020

“They just canceled the fuckin’ parade.”

The bouncer was several feet away, but tall enough to extend earshot range farther away from where I was standing.

“Who did?”

“City.”

“Cause of the virus thing?” This was spoken through a cigarette. The second man was a few inches smaller than the bouncer himself, but still formidable. “This fuckin’ Chinese bullshit, man.”

The bar we were standing in front of was called Butch Maguire’s, sporting a standard green façade complete with cartoon leprechaun, and perched in prime real estate on Division Street to serve as the epicenter of many a St. Patrick’s Day bar crawl. By that point, early March had not yet ventured from winter into spring, and the cold, piercing air flowing off of Lake Michigan and down through the vents of the skyscrapers surrounding Chicago’s Magnificent Mile blended with the greyish clouds into a thin, late-winter haze predicting cold rains and wind for the next several days. But the Irish spirit of the city, never dulled by the elements, seemed once again ready to erupt in a blaze of green and stout-black in the annual commemoration of that great Irish saint. Or, would be, were it not for the sudden, foreign threat whispered through the airways and in the news, building in quiet intensity on foreign shores the past two months or so and now, though once a mere abstraction, seeming ready at last to threaten the windy city directly.

“They said they got a few cases in Seattle,” the bouncer said. His friend, already finished with his cigarette and sporting a tank top despite the temperature, had retrieved his phone from his pocket.

“I thought it was on a cruise ship,” he said. The bouncer shrugged.

“I know it fucked up Italy pretty bad,” he said. “I guess they’re taking precautions here, or something.”

Through the front door of the bar, the normal stream of patrons was beginning to fall in as the afternoon fell towards evening. Among what seemed to be the “regulars” were groups of college-aged youths, many sporting green clothing and some even donning novelty shamrock hats and other ornamentation. None, as far as I could tell, were at all perturbed by the viral threat that seemed to be threatening the city enough to cancel the festivities that they had apparently come out for.

“It’s every fucking year,” the short man said. “There’s always a fucking bird flu or monkey flu or fucking ebola or something, it kills like three people in Thailand or some shit and the news acts like we’re in that fuckin’ Stephen King novel—what was that called again?”

“Running Man?” the bouncer said.

The Stand, my teenage book nerd replied inside my head. My adult self, though, was still standing outside the door of the Walgreen’s, holding my bag of razors and vitamin water in one hand and with my other trying, for the last several minutes, to get enough of a wifi signal from the afore-mentioned bar to see how late Ditka’s was open. That particular establishment, located by chance right next to my hotel on Chestnut Street, had, I recently found, the best banana cream pie I had ever eaten, and I was hoping to get another taste after having my requisite deep-dish pizza and shot of Malört at the nearby Lou Malnati’s.

The TV over the bar at the pizza place was showcasing some March Madness preview that I was only half paying attention to as I waited for my deep dish. Since I had brilliantly ordered the one dish that took about 45 minutes to make, I had ample time following my trek to Walgreens to enjoy some of the city’s finest craft breweries and check my phone incessantly for updates on the virus situation. Being a unique combination of hypochondriac and skeptic, I was torn between the abject panic of a plague being visiting upon my humble person and the eye-rolling cynicism displayed by the bouncer’s friend a moment earlier. If warnings were coming in from on high to avoid crowded gatherings as a safety precaution, no one had yet told any of the scores of people packed around the tables and the bar at the Lou Malnati’s on State Street, preparing their palates for upcoming Saint Patrick’s Day festivities. As the waitress walked past my seat at the bar, my eyes briefly flirted upwards to see if it was perhaps my own order (alas, it wasn’t). In my half glance upward, I noticed that ESPN, which the bar’s big-screen TV had been airing, was switched to a BREAKING NEWS alert.

RUDY GOBERT DIAGNOSED WITH CORONAVIRUS

Without sound, I couldn’t quite pick up relevant details beyond what was displayed on the screen, and not being particularly knowledgeable in sports, I didn’t exactly know who this was or why it was significant, though it appeared, from a glance, that the gentleman in question was some sort of basketball player.

It was at that moment that a friend of mine decided to text me.

It got Tom Hanks!!!

Looking down at my phone following the sudden, ubiquitous vibration (and already nursing two and a half beers and a shot of Malört), I needed to spend a moment trying to work out whatever strange cryptography was apparently going on here.

Within an hour the new reality had become apparent. The NBA announced abruptly that they were canceling the rest of their season. Then, NCAA March Madness was likewise canned. Then Major League Baseball. Then the NHL. Then the PGA. And so on.

And Tom Hanks now infected.

Walking back to my hotel down State Street, feeling my thoughts lean more towards fear than skepticism. In want of anything else to occupy my thoughts with, I turned my eyes upward to take in the intricate and vast lights of the Chicago skyline at twilight. By that point, the fog and wispy rain clouds encircling the city from Lake Michigan had obscured the higher peaks of the buildings, the lights from the John Hancock Center and, further down, the Willis Tower all seeming to float on the air, the steel and concrete holding them up lost in the mists. Without thought, I lifted my phone and took a single photo, at a skewed, upward angle, of the building tops, catching the strange array of crystals stretching into the air and the dark monoliths of the skyscrapers that appeared to be somehow even more immense and imposing in the darkness of the evening.

Still, without much thought, I quickly uploaded the picture onto my Facebook feed. Needing a title, I reached for what was immediately on hand.

“Foggy Chicago,” I wrote. Then, a pause, and finally added:

“The day that sports stopped.”

With the incredible communities I have found on Vocal, this can be my new world in 2024. Crafting new worlds through a rough angle of a foggy Chicago skyline. Or a hectic cab ride from a small Welsh bookstore town. Or a dance in an alley behind a warehouse-turned-nightclub in Berlin.

Or a single pint of Guinness, perched on a cheap table, in a quiet Holiday Inn in Slough.