This Is Me Before

I do this weird thing before I go somewhere I’ve never been.

Actually, I do it before a lot of things. Before I read a book I’ve been looking forward to. Before I watch a movie I suspect might stay with me. Before I have some new experience I’ve been anticipating for a long time.

I stop and take a mental picture of myself.

Not literally. There is no ceremonial moment where I stare thoughtfully out a window while inspirational music plays. Usually I’m packing something I should have packed three days earlier, looking for a charger I know I just had, or wondering whether I’ve brought enough of something that can absolutely be purchased wherever I’m going.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, I think about who I am right then. This is me before. And I wonder who I’ll be afterward.

I realize that’s an unreasonable amount of pressure to put on a vacation.

I’ve wondered where this habit came from, and I think music may have something to do with it.

I spent a lot of years as a musician performing music written by people I would never meet, sometimes centuries before I was born. Different composers. Different eras. Different styles. Different audiences. My job was to take all of that and somehow carry something across the distance between the person who created it and the people sitting in front of me.

When it worked, something crossed that distance.

That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about music. Something created in another place and another time could arrive in a room full of strangers and make someone feel something they weren’t feeling five minutes earlier.

At some point, I think I flipped that around.

What happens when I’m the audience? What happens when a book or a movie or a piece of music or a person or a place reaches me? What gets rearranged? What stays? What do I know afterward that I didn’t know before?

Which is probably why, before we left for Alaska, I was already wondering who would come home.

Alaska had been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. It was one of those places that existed in my imagination long before it became an actual destination. Mountains. Glaciers. Wildlife. Miles and miles of wilderness that seemed almost impossible from my very Midwestern corner of the world.

I knew it would be beautiful.

This turned out to be like saying the ocean is a little damp.

There are places where scale makes language feel particularly useless, and Alaska is apparently one of them. At one point, we watched a piece of glacier floating through the water that was roughly the size of a bus above the surface.

A bus.

Just floating by.

And the part we could see wasn’t even most of it.

I remember looking at it and trying to make my brain understand what I was seeing. It had broken away from something ancient and enormous and was simply continuing whatever came next.

The mountains did the same thing to me. So did the water, shifting from nearly black ocean to icy blues and greens. So did the stretches of forest that seemed to keep going long after I had run out of ways to describe green.

Everything felt bigger than my ability to comprehend it, and I felt very small there.

I don’t mean insignificant. That’s different.

Small can be useful.

There is something clarifying about standing in front of a landscape that has been doing its thing for centuries without consulting you. Mountains don’t particularly care about your schedule. Glaciers have never once checked their email. The forest is not interested in the thing you’ve been worrying about since Tuesday.

For a little while, you aren’t the center of anything.

I think I needed that.

But the moment I keep returning to happened at night.

We were sailing between Juneau and Ketchikan, and my wife and I were standing together on the verandah when the northern lights appeared.

Even writing that sentence feels inadequate.

We watched the sky become something I had seen in photographs and videos but had never really understood because I had never stood underneath it. We took pictures, of course. Lots of pictures. There are moments when you want proof that something really happened, even though the photograph is never quite the same as having been there.

Mostly, though, I remember standing beside my wife and looking up. There wasn’t anything to accomplish. Nothing to check off. Nowhere else we needed to be.

We were just there together under a sky doing something amazing beyond words.

When I think about that night now, I think that’s what stays with me most about the trip. Not simply seeing Alaska, but sharing space with it.

And not just with my wife.

Travel creates these strange little communities that exist for reasons nobody would ever use to build a community on purpose.

Airports are one of them. Put hundreds of strangers in a building, give everyone a different destination, take away a few electrical outlets, and suddenly an entire temporary civilization appears. People who will never see each other again share charging stations, gate changes, weather delays, overpriced coffee and the collective understanding that nobody wants to hear someone else’s phone conversation on speaker.

Then you get on the plane and that community disappears. Another one forms.

A cruise ship takes the experiment even further. For a week, a collection of strangers becomes a tiny floating neighborhood because we all made the same peculiar decision to get on a ship and point ourselves toward Alaska.

We were going to the same places, but none of us would experience them in exactly the same way.

I love that.

Community doesn’t require identical experience.

That thought followed me off the ship and into the places we visited.

The port communities fascinated me because they contained contradictions I hadn’t really considered before I arrived. There were shops clearly connected to the enormous economy created by cruise travel, including plenty of opportunities to buy jewelry expensive enough that I would apparently need to develop an entirely different vacation personality.

And then there were local and Indigenous artists creating work rooted specifically in that place, its history and its culture. There were coffee shops, restaurants, regional foods, handmade things, tourist things, beautiful things and things I absolutely did not need but briefly became convinced might fundamentally improve my life.

Travel does that to a person.

But the longer I walked around those places, the more aware I became of something embarrassingly obvious.

People live there.

Our destination was somebody else’s Tuesday.

We arrived with cameras and excursion times and plans for what we wanted to see. A few hours later, we went back to the ship and moved on.

They stayed.

There isn’t an easy conclusion to draw from that. Tourism supports people and businesses, and it also changes places. These communities have histories, cultures and rhythms completely separate from the few hours we spend there.

And I was part of that contradiction.

I wanted to experience Alaska, but my presence was also part of something that inevitably affects the Alaska I had come to experience. That’s uncomfortable to sit with, which is probably why I should.

The wilderness was quietly complicating things too.

For once, we were the visitors.

The wildlife wasn’t there for us. The forests weren’t scenery placed behind our vacation photographs. The mountains didn’t become meaningful because I finally saw them. The glaciers had been shaping that landscape long before I arrived and, I desperately hope, will continue doing their work long after I’m gone.

Life was happening everywhere without us.

Somewhere in all of that, my definition of community started getting bigger.

I’ve always thought of community primarily in terms of people. The people who show up. The people who make room for each other. The communities we build around neighborhoods, music, fandom, friendship, work, shared experiences and the million other things that somehow turn strangers into people who recognize one another.

Alaska made that definition feel too small.

Maybe belonging somewhere also means understanding that we belong to something.

The communities we visited don’t exist separately from the land and water around them. The artists we met don’t create separately from the cultures and histories that shaped them. The people on our ship couldn’t experience Alaska without the communities that welcomed us. And none of us get those mountains, forests, oceans, glaciers and wildlife without accepting that what happens to them matters.

Maybe that’s what feeling small was trying to teach me.

Not that I don’t matter.

That I’m not the only thing that does.

I’ve been thinking about travel differently since we came home.

I know travel is a privilege. It takes money and time, and both can be painfully difficult to find. Not everyone can get on a plane, board a ship and go see Alaska. I don’t want to turn “go see the world” into another thing people are supposed to accomplish in order to have lived correctly.

Besides, I’m beginning to think I misunderstood what seeing the world means.

I’ve lived in Indiana for most of my life, and there is still so much of it I haven’t seen. There are orchards I’ve never visited, art fairs I’ve driven past, small towns I’ve never stopped in, parks and trails I’ve never walked, local artists creating things I don’t know about yet, businesses trying to stay open and histories I’ve never heard.

Some of those places are close enough that I could leave after breakfast and be home before dinner.

Maybe experiencing the world doesn’t always require going very far.

Maybe it requires paying attention.

And that brings me back to the weird thing I do.

Before Alaska, I wondered who I would be when I came home.

I still think that’s a good question. I’m just not sure it’s the only one anymore.

A place can change you. A book can change you. Music can change you. Another person can certainly change you. I’ve spent most of my life wondering what some new experience might leave behind in me.

Alaska left plenty behind.

I brought home photographs of mountains and glaciers and water in colors I still don’t quite know how to describe. I brought home pictures of the northern lights and the memory of standing on a verandah beside my wife while the sky did something neither of us could put into words.

I brought home a different understanding of what it means to feel small and a much bigger idea of community.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the other half of that exchange.

For years, before something new, I’ve stopped and wondered what it might do to me. I don’t want to stop asking that.

I just think I want to start asking one more thing.

I know what I brought home from Alaska.

I’m still thinking about what having been there asks me to carry forward.

Ready for your own adventure?

If this has you thinking about your next adventure, vacation, road trip, or maybe finally taking that trip that’s been sitting on your bucket list, I have a recommendation.

Mickey Guru Travel Co. books all of my travel experiences, and I truly can’t recommend them enough. Whether you’re dreaming about somewhere far away or figuring out where the road might take you next, reach out to them and tell them Jodi sent you.

https://mickeyguru.com

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.