I would not have believed it if I had not seen it over and over; the cliche about vehicles breaking down in small desert towns and holding people hostage until they give up and move in or figure out some karmic mystery that they are stubbornly ignoring. Year round a parade of travelers break down in T or C. They have flat tires, wrecked transmissions or converted school buses that just lost their umph. Those always find their way to our house. I wonder what it is about this blog that makes people think they should live here for a while?What I've Learned About Being a Local in a Tourist Town:
* Every tourist is on vacation. Locals are not. Tourists rarely understand this fact.
* Tourists are seeking "experiences" to have, memories. Locals are not interested in being experiences.
* People have many more needs when they're traveling.
* Guests are announced in advance, they're anticipated. Tourists come at all times without warning.
* There is a natural inequity to the tourist/local relationship. If a local sells something and tourists buy it an even ground is created. Otherwise the relationship will be one sided.
* Tourists can not imagine that they are part of a large parade of tourists that color the world of locals with transient energy.
* There is little to be gained by befriending tourists: they are leaving and will likely never be back. While they want to visit the homes of locals (to add to their experience), the local wont be invited to their home not ever.
* Parking a mobile home (RV, bus or whatever) in someone else's yard IS painfully distracting. Especially when said yard is home to one person writing code and the other writing books.
* We know that if your vehicle gets in our property's gate, it won't be leaving any time soon, even if you swear that it will.
* Tourist towns are loaded with places designed for tourists to stay: hotels, motels and RV parks. Expecting locals to house you, even if you have a lot in common, is not fair. There are too many of you and not enough time between you and the next broken down bus, RV or flat tire for us to recover.
For five years people have bobbed their heads over our fence, climbed it to look in, and waited at our gate to ask for a tour. We've had to sneak in our back ally to avoid what at times is a flood of tourists. We skip getting our mail afraid of who may be waiting outside the gate.
We finally got the locals and store owners to stop telling tourists that they have to check out Wendy & Mikeys place. No they don't. We have nothing to sell. We did not make a life decision to work in tourism.
So many great people come through our town. Many we'd love to have as neighbors or year round friends. If I did not live in a tourist town, the occasional drop in would be fun, a treat.
Not long ago Mikey went out road tripping in our Beetle. Knowing how our own experiences as locals has shaped our view we precooked gumbo, packed home made wine and home made french bread. When we arrived at friend's homes we served dinner immediately then did the dishes. When we are guests we cook multiple meals, walk people's dog and leave them with freezers full of ice cream. Mostly we remember, even if invited, that we are on vacation - they're not. Space, silence, and self reliance is key when staying as a guest in someone's home. Hey we're all tourists sometime. It has taken living in a tourist town for me to understand what it is to be a local.
11 comments:
Doing the dishes and leaving a freezer full of ice cream? Wow. Part of me wants to say whatever neccessary to convince you that our little domestead is a must-see tourist spot.
The price of your popularity I guess. If (When) I visit T. or C. I won't disturb you guys. I wouldn't have before this post either, but if I see you around town I'll say Hello. maybe buy you a coffee, if you have time. Maybe you should start taking appointments for a tour and Charging for it also. or at least post a sign out front stating so. Good Luck!
You guys are funny. It doesnt actually take much to tip the scale and make one feel balanced. For a while we thought that when people wrote or stopped in asking for tours we'd ask them to buy us a pizza at the local restaurant, go pay for it and one day we'll drop in to claim it. We imagined pizza's in cue for us. And this one gesture would actually make the tours just fine. At least there's a balance.
I should add. . . when people write to us and have a lot in common, they do similar things, have homesteads and the like, we're far more interested in meeting. These connections tend also to have balance to them. And some do become friends, we even return the visit.
So friends, should you come to town do drop a line. Maybe pre buy a pizza at our local bella luca. : )
Really good to know all of this, I've always been curious as to what you two are up to down there, and I've always wondered what Holy Scrap Hot springs actually is, outside of a blog. It's good to know what it is not, which is a roadside attraction or a hostel. Thanks for the awesome blog post about the Due Return, by the way!
amen :)
Morgan says you should tell the tourism people to post when you will be available for tours- You can post days and times outside your compound with a sign that people respect your privacy. You can charge for a tour or if you prefer- ask for a donation or gift.
My idea was a "suggested donation" box. Then you can guilt people.
Hm!
Having found myself in a bit of a rare predicament, that is to say, with a thankfully non-usual vehicular situation manifest- I'd say I can agree with some of these things- and can only note the time of its publishing to be incidental with my own circumstance!
Given the date, I think I can safely assume that you're posting this in response to our own reluctantly protracted departure-- if so: please read on...
I think "Tourists & Locals" in your title promotes a bit of a false dichotomy, intentionally or no. It's unfortunate that so many who knock on your door are tour-seekers. Since I know where you stand on it: I want to point out that we never asked for one! :) We wanted neighbors!
As someone who has hosted literally hundreds of passer-through, tour-a-day for weeks on end visitors to our little quirky experiment in activism, action, education, and community in Maine, I feel like I have a tiny bit of a civic résumé to speak from. Before arriving we'd long since had our fill of back-to-the-land, inward-directed post-production projects. I hope pretense or obligation wasn't what had you give us a tour! I think the inherent nature of what you're up to invites engagement and inquisition- a high form of flattery! It must be pretty hard when this comes to be a nuisance and not worth your time. (...cont'd!)
(...cont'd)
People travel, people stick, people stay, people leave, some people get stuck. 'Local' is of course, among the most relative of terms. Sasha and I had the fortune and privilege to contribute to some fantastically amazing happenings in a very teensie Downeast Maine town for the better part of a decade: of course I'd never say I was local in public, in seriousness.
Bear with my excessive, long-winded anecdote here:
Not uniquely, Downeast Maine has a 500 year prerequisite before the use of "from" is to be sanctified. While there, restoring, then re-opening a community heirloom Grange Hall (belonging to the community, not to us) while simultaneously operating an international renowned oddity/force that is the Beehive Design Collective, we came to find ourselves in a unique position of visibility. Even more visible than that: privilege. Those of us who dropped in from elsewhere existed under extremely different circumstances than those who were born there, were forced to be there, or who would love to leave but couldn't.
One of the most evident things about our privilege is that it's most invisible to ourselves, more than we ever truly realize or respond to. Our ability to do the things we find ourselves able to do didn't start yesterday (or necessarily even when we were born!), and it's not been enough of a priority of our culture (even radical culture) to examine this with the depth it deserves. In my stay in Truth or Consequences, we'd no intention of being locals, nor any intention of being a tourists. Our intention was to work-exchange in order to focus on our own personal + political work. And we did. Believe me, when you live in a place that brazenly emblazons Vacationland on the license plates of its residents - you come to acquire a very different perspective on what Domestic Tourrorism does and who a Tourrorist really is.
There, the Collective that Sasha and I were mainstays of attended to some crazy undertakings, like said restoration of the 100+ year old Machias Valley Grange. We got it back to 'snuff, and the Grange Society was actually able to relocated back and continue meeting there. We got it on the Nat'l Historical Registry and won the State's Award for Historic Preservation. Many of the community-minded tasks we took on were not remotely accessible pursuits to many locals who were otherwise occupied with more pressing and less enjoyable day-to-day realities of their economic/educational/financial status. Area organizations were constrained by their ability to fundraise or receive sponsorship for their efforts from the State, which was more focused on the southern extremities.
We were partly looked on as oddly-dressed, dubious transplants looking to assuage our burning need to create something meaningful using the town as our building blocks. Thankfully, after we proved we were giving to Machias more than we were taking, or merely existing in it- I think we achieved some respect and recognition as young-people-that-give-a-shit and recognize the macro/micro overlay of circumstances at play in the region. We leveraged the proceeds of our mass-distributed political work, and our time, to explore these things. Here's something happening there, now: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivecollective/the-beehive-collectives-10th-anniversary-blackfly
(cont'd...)
Places like Machias are stratified, with an upper + small middle class hovering over a burgeoning lower-middle class that has seen the duress of job-loss, youth flight, faltering economic opportunity, and failed attention to a future in a resource-extraction mentality zone. That middle class fragment generally seems extant through some luck-of-the-draw trustfunditude, sheer incumbency, or the twist-in phosphorescence of the adventuring out-of-towner-cum-resident. The lattermost case suggests most of all an optimal convergence of conditions for those equipped to use their knowhow, ability, and of course resources to dwell according to the modest cushion of a feasible plan. Where we're from, many of the folks who did the latter were completely able to back out of their scenario, recoup, reconfigure, or restyle their projects based on the lift given to them be pre-existing money, education, or connections elsewhere.
This is a sort of stylized encore for the Back to the Land crescendo of the late 1950's, 60's (which coincidentally had Maine and the Nearings' The Good Life as its famed centerpieces) replete with a new generation of artist/thrillseeker types who statistically excite gentrification through mitigating adjectives that (where applicable) describe a poor community away from itself, and towards a wacky,
irresistible destination. There's of course an immense list of small/not-so-small urban centers where this isn't just happenstance: it defines the sphere of strategy for today's Main St. economic advisory boards. The same questions arise, but similarly, the bedrock of a scenario is wished away rather than attended to. They hope their Monday MethWatch signs can become Farmer's Market ones by Friday. TorC, like Machias, definitely exemplifies much of what is happening in lesser-populated swaths of the country- and has a desperation lost on many of the passerthroughs, or even residents who are not able to compare it to elsewhere. And for those that grew up there, a whole 'nother ballgame entirely. TorC, to be clear, is not Machias. It is not necessarily subject to gentrification, and this isn't my implication. I don't know enough about the town, but can perceive some similarities. I did, also, perceive a couple neo-locals dropping dodgy insults around the locally born-and-raised "lake trash": dramatic as it sounds, this'd be the epitome of a brushed and bevelled neo-colonialist mindset.
From conversations, you seem to have a kind of punishing, dour take on folks who enter into a realm like TorC and experience the majestic ability of the Land of Entrapment to forestall plans. Most of what I've heard you speak about with these roving bands of help-needers seemed to be an exasperation.
If you posted your above letter thinking we were over-using your doorbell, you might recall this was hardly the case, and that we asked for virtually nothing contrary to what's suggested. I am happy to see you have fulfilled your quota on helping folk: it is wondrous to discover a metric that can really work for you and allows for completion. I say shits to the wind on metrics, though. The adage of "you plan, God laughs" hasn't skipped anyone over that I've known.
ADIOS!
and good luck inside your Wall with that whole keeping-to-yourself revenge of a life-well-lived machination it seems you're up to. May it always be be as lonesome as you'd prefer!
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