Balancing the Shamed Line Between Tourist and Invisible, Part III

On the blurry morning, photo credit: Lindsay Needels

The Author of this article spent the week of October 14 in Treviso, Venice, Bologna, Rome, and Naples, Italy. In this three part series she will share her reflections on being a solo tourist and learning to define the relation between herself and the greater society around her.

Bologna woke me up like being slapped in the face by ice cold water.

I boarded the only bus that would take me out of town, to where my hostel stood, 16 kilometers away. It was overflowing with bodies, mostly tired and dreaming of home after a long day of work. I felt offensive with my large backpack, pulling on my shoulders. Locals stared at me with disdain.

Somehow I knew I wouldn’t get off the bus. There were children and mothers between me and the door, and by the time I saw the sign for my stop, outside in the night, the bus was driving away. Panic welled up in my throat and the only thought that crossed my mind was that maybe if I stayed on board, the bus would turn around and take me back to Bologna. But the landscape only got darker, and the hour closer to its death.

It occurred to me that the bus wasn’t going to turn around as it pulled into a parking lot somewhere anonymous to my ignorant mind. I knew I was far from lights and people and beds where I might fall asleep. I knew I was in the country and it was quiet with night.

I asked the bus driver: “Scusi, e possible ritornare alla citta?” (Excuse me, is it possible to return to the city?)
All he said was “No.”

I walked off the bus and headed down a dirt road in the direction of the city.

So now, I arrive back to where I began: walking somewhere in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, with a very heavy backpack on my shoulders, late at night when everyone I passed was asleep. There were dogs barking at me as frightened tears fell down my eyes. I wondered how long I would walk and of what might be creeping in the shadows. I remember the distinct feeling that I may never be home again and that as a visitor I had utterly failed. My nervous tongue and ignorance had stranded me somewhere that looked a little like oblivion, and I knew I had brought it upon myself. I wondered earnestly if I should never speak of these days again, if I should let them gather dust as expired thoughts and sights in my memory.

But there is an old song by Fred McDowell in which he asks to travel blind by rail and is told he cannot because it is not his train. It was a lyric I never understood until then (though the way I came to understand it is probably different way than the way it  was intended to be understood).

I, like many before me, was a blind traveler. I had thrown myself into someone else’s home, not enough knowledge under my belt, and had waited for experience to be thrust upon me. I had let my perception and imagination run away with me, and take control. I had assumed that coming to Italy independently for one week would change me, offer me memories no one else would ever have. But these experiences were never my right, the country of Italy does not exist solely in my imagination, which I thought I knew, but clearly I did not. It is a world all its own that I could barely begin to understand.

I passed silent houses and the lights didn’t sense my motion. I was a ghost in this country, expecting my experience to be significant, but realizing that it wasn’t. I was balancing the shamed line between tourist and invisible, traveling wrong. But this was my lesson: I was dwarfed by my assumptions, by the country I was trekking. I was humbled. Though I had come to find that I was wrong, I had learned how not to live, to travel. I had grown, yes, but in a way that I had not expected, for one should never have expectations, which will always be damning.

I walked down the unknown dirt road all night, invisible to the world except to myself, knowing not where I was or where I was going, but just that I would never travel blind again.