I was standing at a junction in steady rain, forty minutes into a walk toward a place I had been told nobody goes, and I noticed I was not enjoying any part of it. Not the walk, not the weather, not the destination, which I had not even seen yet. What I was enjoying was the sentence I would get to write afterwards. That is an unpleasant thing to catch yourself doing while cold.
I finished the walk. The place was fine. I have not written about it, and this post is what I got instead.
The scoreboard I did not know I was keeping
Somewhere in the second year of doing this, emptiness stopped being a condition of the places I liked and became the thing I was actually shopping for. I could feel it in how I made decisions. Given two options, I picked the one with fewer mentions online, without asking myself which one I would rather spend a day in.
That is a scoreboard, and it has a score. The score is other people’s absence. Once you are keeping it, a good day can be ruined by the arrival of a second car, and a mediocre day can be rescued by finding out afterwards that almost nobody has been there. Both of those are ridiculous, and both happened to me repeatedly before I noticed the pattern.
What nobody goes there actually measures
It sounds like a measurement of the place. It is not. It is a measurement of infrastructure, distance from an airport, whether there is a bed, whether anybody made a video, and whether the local economy ever needed visitors.
None of those things correlate reliably with whether a day there is any good. Some places are empty because they are hard to reach and quietly extraordinary. Many more are empty because there is nothing there, which is the honest majority. And some genuinely good places are busy for the simple reason that they are good and easy to get to, which is not a mark against them, though I spent a long time treating it as one.
The weekend that broke it
The thing that actually shifted my thinking was not a remote failure. It was a weekend in a small town that gets a moderate number of visitors, where I went because a friend was there and I had no working theory about it at all.
It was one of the best trips I have had. There was a market. There were three places to eat, one of them good. There were people out in the evening, and because there were people, there were conversations, and because the town was used to strangers, nobody found it strange that I was there. I understood more about that region in two days than I had in six separate visits to places where I spoke to no one and photographed a doorway.
The emptiness I had been chasing was, among other things, cutting me off from the only reliable source of information about anywhere, which is people who are willing to talk to a stranger.
The competitive part, said plainly
Under the scoreboard was something less flattering than curiosity. Going where others have not been is a status claim. It says I am a traveller rather than a tourist, that I did the research, that I earned this. Nobody says it out loud because saying it out loud makes it sound as small as it is.
I do not think I was insufferable about it, though I would not be the best judge of that. But I can see it in old drafts. There is a tone that creeps in, a slight lean on the word we, as in most people would not bother coming here. That sentence is not about the place at all. It is about the person writing it.
What I look for instead
The question I ask now is duller and works much better. Is there a reason for this place to exist, and can I see it from the ground.
A market town exists because of the roads that meet in it. A strip of houses along a river exists because of a mill or a crossing or a fish. A village halfway up a slope is there because of where the water comes out of the hill. When I can see the reason, everything else in the place starts making sense, including the parts that are ugly, and I stop needing it to be undiscovered in order to be worth the drive.
Some of those places are busy. Quite a few are not. Emptiness has gone back to being a fact I note on arrival rather than a target I aim at, which has also made the empty places better, because I no longer need them to justify the effort of reaching them.
What I kept
I did not give up the small roads. I still drive up the branch valley to see what is at the end of it, and I still write down half heard names in a notebook, and this section of the blog is still mostly about places with no website and no hours.
What changed is that I no longer feel cheated when I get somewhere and find a car park with four cars in it. Four cars means four other people had the same idea, and on a wet Tuesday that is mildly reassuring rather than a failure. I am not competing with them. I checked, and there was never a prize.