I grew up in small town North Dakota, population of about six hundred. When I was young it seemed interminably dull. Occasionally I would visit my grandparents down in the Twin Cities and as we drew closer the excitement would build. The interstate seemed to me like a rushing river bringing me ever closer to the glamorous sights and sounds of the metropolis. The tallest building we had was the grain elevator, anything larger than that was awe-inspiring.
As I grew older I daydreamed constantly of traveling the world and visiting cities like New York and Los Angeles. I even started a travel club in sixth grade. Of course I was the president and we would call various convention and visitors bureaus for travel literature. My parents bought me a filing cabinet one Christmas to store all my travel material. I didn't know what I would find out in the world but it had to be better than my small town that, to my youthful eyes, seemed to have nothing to offer.
Eventually my dreams of travel came true. I traveled to Washington DC when I was I was thirteen. The view from my hotel room consisted of an endless expanse of concrete with not one green thing to be found. I also watched a homeless man wash windows with newspaper for the first time. I nicknamed him George and every day I would watch him frogger his way out to the cars when the light turned red. I sat on a crowded bus and jostled my way through the crowds to the major tourist sites. What had seemed so exciting at first was beginning to lose its flare.
But the travel bug still persisted. I was, after all, president of a travel club. My parents brought us on various little trips here and there throughout high school. After graduation I road tripped with my friends to Chicago. I saw bars on the windows of homes for the first time and a man on the L train who was covered in filth and kept cleaning his hands with the same dirty cloth. Chicago was my first real taste of big city life outside of tourist areas. The siren song of the metropolis was beginning to sound a little off-key.
I took a hiatus from traveling for a while. In 2006 my husband, mother-in-law, and I made the trek to Germany. While parts of the country were spectacular I do remember seeing the rats in the subway in Munich and the druggies in the subway of Frankfurt. I also experienced my first extremely full train where the whole journey was spent shoulder to shoulder to the person next to you. The next trip was Maui. It was beautiful and the people, as cliché as it sounds, were genuinely nice and wonderful. It didn't feel crowded although they receive millions of tourists each year. But Maui is an anomaly. I returned to the states to crowded airports and rude security people. We also visited Las Vegas and while all of the buildings on the strip are far taller than grain elevators they no longer held an allure for me.
The veil had been lifted for me and I began to realize that my small town had elements that a big city could never hope to achieve. There were no bars on windows and people left their doors unlocked, I never once saw a rat in a public place, there were no homeless people because we took care of our own. I didn't have to board a crowded train or bus to get to my destination. The largest expanse of concrete was the parking lot at the grocery store or the church and even the sidewalks had grass growing between the cracks. There are places that I still wish to visit especially after my child is born but the illusions of my youth have faded. They are now replaced with the reality that the majority of the world lives in a hive-like state of existence, never really enjoying the splendors of solitude. What was once dull to me is a gleaming beacon of hope that there are still places where the individual reigns and is not dependent on the ebb and flow of the flow of the city.
