The Best Women's Travel Writing 2007 - Introduction

by Lucy McCauley

Why do we return to places where we’ve been before? What propels us to move away from our familiar orbits to revisit the landscape of memory? Is it that we hope to recapture a previous experience from an earlier time? Do we return out of a lingering sense of incompletion or to rewrite the past somehow, hoping to uncover a hidden layer that might enable us to craft a new ending to our story? Or do we return simply to know a place more deeply and fully?

I was thinking about that idea of return last spring when my husband and I revisited the place where we’d honeymooned six years before, in Tübingen, southern Germany. This time we’d added a new travel companion—our young daughter, Hannah—and as we walked the streets of that medieval university town, I felt acutely attuned to the layers of experience conjured like specters by our act of return. I was aware of how we inevitably return to a place as different people from who we’d been before, and how that in turn changes the place for us even as the place itself has undergone its own transformations. How that palimpsest of experience alters the way a place shows itself to us.

My husband’s own return held several such layers: long before our honeymoon, he had spent four years in Germany as a student. His return, this time with Hannah and me, was through the lens of a youth grown to adult middle age; single young man to family man. I had first come to Germany as a bride, and now I was a mother. Yet for both of us there was the added layer of a particular period in between, when my husband and I had separated when Hannah was a year old. This trip marked our return not just to Germany but to each other as well. And the occasion was appropriately laden with another mantle of significance: the couple with whom we’d stayed during our honeymoon (the man a friend from Charles’s student days) was at last getting married after many years together. My husband would be best man. Layer upon layer of return.

We walked the stone streets of Tübingen, viewing the same sites we’d seen on our honeymoon. Much remained physically the same: the medieval castle that crowned the old part of the city; the Neckar River edged with lilacs and chrysanthemums; the geraniums that burst forth in fuchsia and orange from window boxes; the solitary tower where the poet Friedrich Hölderlin had lived after he went mad, in a round room overlooking the roiling river. On the Neckar bridge we posed for a photo, as we had on our last trip, and this time we lifted our daughter high between us like a prize.

Yet time, even a short six years, had changed our experience of the place—and not just because we’d added an extra (small) pair of legs to our excursions. We walked again up the wide expanse of hill that stood at the edge of town, every inch covered by yellow buttercups through which Hannah ran, laughing; through which my husband and I walked hand-in-hand, just as we had on our earlier visit. But this time, walking up that slope, our daughter galloping ahead, I felt our fingers fitting together differently somehow, nestled into a deeper understanding—the hard-won kind, like the centuries of experience etched into the stone and mortar of the town itself. To regain our footing together as a couple, we’d had to excavate and re-lay the foundation of who we were to one another and of who we wished to be ourselves, as individuals. On this return to Germany, our hands fit together differently because we fit together differently.

As we walked up the hill, I thought about part of the reading we had chosen for our wedding years before, from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Perhaps that captures one reason why we return to the places we’ve been before. Not simply to know the past or our past selves again, but out of a deep and impossibly complex desire to know the place—and ourselves—anew. That is how it felt to return to the place of our honeymoon. That is how it felt to return to each other. We had begun our life together only to end it a few years later. And now we had begun again.

In the accounts of journeys in this volume of The Best Women’s Travel Writing we are confronted, through a diverse range of voices, with this enigma of return. Many of these authors do this through memoir—Diana Cohen, Laurie Covens, Suzanne Kratzig, and Lonia Winchester all write about travel through the lens of their personal pasts, in places as far-flung as Israel, Thailand, Africa, and Poland, respectively. Other writers—such as Francesca DeStefano, Diane Johnson, Tehila Lieberman, and Carmen Semler—write about a physical revisitation to a place, recapturing it through older, more experienced eyes, bodies, and interpretations. Other selections in this book recount returns of writers to places and experiences through the simple yet profound act of retelling the journey in prose.

I hope that as you turn the pages of this volume, you’ll find again places that had been lost to the realm of memory-even as you discover here new places for the first time. As T.S. Eliot wrote (again in the Four Quartets): “The end is where we start from.” May you find in these stories an ending that lifts a veil onto some new beginning, opening a doorway to your own return.



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