I

On the subject of the genre: Mohsin Hamid asserts that Jorge Luis Borges is unique among modernist writers because he locates the exotic everywhere in the everyday, rather than an exaggerated image of the Other. Marilynn Robinson asserts that words like myth and Western and American cannot be used with precision. Gary Paul Nabhan asserts the irony that a central symbol of the American West is the tumbleweed, a Ukrainian weed brought by white colonists that literally created deserts in its wake. Howard Zinn asserts that in history, the oppressor often begins as a victim, and that victims often turn on other victims in their search for liberation. Edward Said asserts that there never developed an American Orientalist tradition because the thirteen colonies exoticized the western frontier as their targeted Other.

Now here is a travel narrative:

After the prophet was martyred, my ancestors traveled from Illinois to the northernmost frontier of Mexico, leaving the United States behind them for good while searching for the Promised Land. Their journey was an escapism. They settled down in the vermillion weedlands between the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake, carving up the grainy strands of basalt to build a town for themselves way out west. Brigham Young raised the blue and white flag of their new country over the town square and women sang “Hail to the Chief” and my ancestors celebrated their independence. They drove out or slaughtered indigenous Timpanago families and married their own cousins. They made a holiday of it, July 24, Pioneer Day, and walled themselves into their self-proclaimed home. Paradise on Earth, a new Zion, the City on the Hill.

Wallace Stegner wrote of the Salt Lake Valley that its “destiny was plain on its face, its contempt of man and his history and his theological immortality, his Millennium, his Heaven on Earth.” Brigham Young called on my ancestors to ignore this contempt, and so they abused the place they occupied, the Native communities already there, the Gentile gold prospectors stopping for water on their way to Sutter’s Mill, the refugees from the Mexican-American War as the land changed hands overnight with 13,000 dead in the US and 25,000 dead in Mexico.

It started with my great, great, great grandfather Ira Rice, born in Massachusetts in 1793. The Rices later moved to Michigan, where Ira met two Mormon missionaries in 1840. My grandmother says that Ira “was convinced” and made his family convert, uprooting them to join Joseph Smith and the Mormons in Illinois. Four years after the Rices settled in with the Saints, Joseph Smith was killed in a riot, and Brigham Young became the prophet.

With Young, Ira helped build Salt Lake City and became a polygamist like most other prominent Mormon men. Sometime after 1900, my great grandmother and Ira’s granddaughter Dollie Rice moved to southern Idaho, where my grandmother and father were born. Now free from the stronghold of Salt Lake, Dollie became a jack Mormon, distancing herself from the Promised Land, its promises. With her freedom, she found whiskey, tobacco, and the comfort of multiple men, as her fathers had built their comfort in multiple wives. My grandmother was the last in my family to be raised with the Saints, untethering my father from the pull of the Promised Land for good.

My ancestors turned their travels into a mythology, retroactively casting themselves as the victims in a story of persecution to justify their occupation of another place. First, they exoticized the place, then they mythologized it, then transplanted the locals and called themselves the original occupants of the land. They were even ready to destroy their newfound paradise when too many non-Mormon outsiders, whom they called Gentiles, moved in. Some Mormons made a profit from them, even distilling liquor to sell to visiting prospectors despite the church’s strict ban on alcohol. Though they had lived there only ten years, most Salt Lake Mormons were suspicious of other newcomers. In 1857, when the US military finally dispatched troops to the territory to protect the newcomers from Mormon militia violence, Brigham Young was ready to scorch the earth.

It was called the move south. Brigham Young declared martial law and ordered Mormon families to be prepared to burn Salt Lake City to the ground and leave within an hour’s notice so that invading federal troops would only find ash and rubble. But, at the last minute, Young reached an agreement with the military and called off the burn. The Rices were among those ready to destroy Salt Lake, a would-be ghost town. If they couldn’t own it, nobody could.

Most nineteenth century frontier towns eventually faced destruction. Mines went bust, wells ran dry, forests were logged to exhaustion. My parents left southern Idaho two years after I was born and went to Flagstaff, still locked in the Mormon Corridor in northern Arizona but farther away from the cultural influence of Salt Lake. Flagstaff might also have become a ghost town were it not for John Wesley Powell’s description of the Grand Canyon in 1869. His Report on the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries has shaped Flagstaff’s economy and the surrounding geography more than any other piece of travel writing in the region’s history.

By the time logging in Flagstaff came to a standstill, there was enough interest in the surrounding canyons and plateaus—academic, scientific, recreational—that people found continual use for this small frontier town. Now, Flagstaff sees five million tourists every year, most of them in summer. We talk about our hometown with nostalgia, how it used to be before the tourists, how we want to leave this place because it’s no longer the Flagstaff we remember. But we’re not zealots about it. We’re not like Brigham Young. You come to town, you pay your money, take photographs, go on walking tours, clog the traffic, and we sell you liquor and food and talk about you behind your back. Sometimes when you’re looking right at us.

II

I should fess up: My favorite town in Arizona is a tourist trap, a former ghost town called Jerome. I’ve only visited a few times, all recently, each time doing all the usual tourist things. The locals say the entire town is sliding downhill approximately one inch a year. They’ll point to the sliding jail, an old prison built on the town’s edge. The ground beneath it crumbled, slipped downward, and the prison broke open. Inmates were relocated before it collapsed, but the jail has been on the run for a while. Other buildings have also lurched forward. The post office, the school, some houses.

The town was built on Cleopatra Hill in the late 1800s, and like many mining towns, it experienced an economic boom and gradual decay, which can now be measured in inches. Press the locals for more and they will say no, it’s not a metaphor for ghost towns, it’s not symbolic of anything. The town is literally sliding downhill one inch a year.

The locals tell tourists to stop in the middle of town, maybe at night when it’s quiet, when it’s cold, and to stand perfectly still. They tell tourists that if they stay there for a year, they will move an inch closer to Clarkdale at the hill’s sturdier basin. The locals tell this to every tourist who drops by, and sooner or later most tourists stand in the middle of town, and the locals chuckle as they walk away from them, turn to the saloon, and saunter through the swinging doors while newcomers pause in the street, their bodies stuck in time.

The first time I went to Jerome was on a road trip across Arizona a month before I moved to Nebraska for grad school. It was a goodbye trip with a dear friend, briefly then a partner, before I dropped her off at the train station for Oregon. We mostly camped around Prescott and the Verde Valley. She told me ghost stories over a campfire and I played the violin next to a river, wearing only a necklace. It was in Jerome, though, where we lingered.

When we visited, it was easy for us to cast the locals as hipsters and beatniks, doing to Jerome what I secretly resented her for doing to Flagstaff after moving there from Phoenix. Only about 400 people live in Jerome now. After its initial mining boom at the turn of the century and a decades-long decline, Jerome attracted counterculturalists from the 1960s—environmental activists, folk singers, avant-garde sculptors—who resettled the town as an artists’ colony. It was easy for us to see in Jerome only the stories that reinforced what we already fantasized about: to retire early, to become artists in the desert, to live apart from the world.

We relaxed on a hand-made quilt in a grassy park overlooking the town and drank wine from a metal water bottle. We spent the afternoon wandering the sloping switchbacks of Jerome while pointing out houses we would want to live in, the plants and pets we would have, the types of flowers we’d grow in the window.

One Tuesday night during our stay, we went to the saloon when the town was dead empty and the sun fell away over the hill. There was only one other patron, who had been drinking long before we got to the bar. We sat at a table near the window and watched the sunset, the sky dissolving into hazy blues and purples. By the time night had fallen completely, the other patron joined us after the bartender went into the kitchen. He was a local meeting the tourists. He was tall, middle-aged, tanned in uneven places. He spoke with short, choppy phrases, cutting himself off sometimes mid-thought.

He asked us if we were together, what our plan was, if we intended to marry. He said that if I didn’t, then he would marry my friend, as if she didn’t have a say in the matter, but she only laughed at his 19th century threat. The exchange only gets stranger when I recall it. When he asked me where I was going to graduate school, I told him Lincoln, Nebraska, which he immediately called stinkin’ Lincoln, “the penis of the prairie.” We laughed, shared a drink together, talked about road trips, motorcycles, his dog, the town, the highways. He told us about the gradual collapse of the town. It was good for tourists to see this place before it’s too late, was what he suggested.

Hours later, the local decided he’d had enough and left. We talked for a little longer, letting the dizziness dissipate. Before we left, I started toward the restroom but turned around halfway there, standing in the middle of the saloon. The floorboards stopped creaking when I paused, stood still, and said half-jokingly, What if, though? She also laughed; told me I didn’t even have a ring. I said, I have a necklace.

Specifically, it was a nub of a pencil with a hole drilled through its side and a string of hemp strung through the hole. I handed it to her, and she hung it around her neck while I went to the bathroom, smiling, warm from the beer and the desert evening spell. We made it back to our hotel room on creaky wooden floors, ate popcorn, watched Ghost Adventures, and fell asleep in each other’s arms on top of the sheets while the Arizona summer heat smoldered us. When we left Jerome the next day, as planned, we traveled to the train station and put hundreds of miles between us.

III

Let’s put this tourist/local dichotomy to the test: Two recent trips to Portland, Oregon, two months apart, one for a conference and one for family (my mom’s side) and friends (originally from Flagstaff) made me realize that I’ve been away from my hometown long enough that I no longer qualify as a local. But who gets to own the title of local, anyway? I was born in Salt Lake City, but my parents were living in southern Idaho at the time, then relocated to northern Arizona. Can I be a local of the Colorado Plateau? Can I be a local of the Mormon Corridor? Locality suggests precision, which the land and history both adamantly resist. Maybe this is the conclusion I want to avoid: that there is no ethical form of travel.

On the first trip to Portland: I saw writer and librarian Nabil Kashyap lead a panel on the fraught history of travelogues. Of the notes I recorded from his talk, one stands out to me: “travel writing is inherently colonial.” He explained that “travel was a duty of empire,” a means for the Center to receive dispatches from the frontier about the strength of their regime. He said this as a reckoning with his own recent collection of travelogues, The Obvious Earth. To reckon, or wrestle with, or maybe play with might be a better term. He plays with the genre. I think about play a lot these days as a way of deactivating the power of something, what Giorgio Agamben prescribes for the deactivation of law as it appropriates and dominates bare life. Travelogues, by their nature, appropriate and dominate people, casting them as extras, turning communities into Disneyland and locals into Goofy. Perhaps playing with the genre can force it to reach its aesthetic limits, empty it of its power. One of Kashyap’s essays, after all, is a study of staycations, in which the author sits on a couch during the entire span of the story.

Kashyap also described in some detail the 14th century scholar Ibn Khaldun, considered one of the first historians, certainly the first sociologist. He set out to write a study of world history and world societies, comparing and contrasting the ways people live and work, looking at individual crafts, the fall of empires and the commercial lives of their citizens, 500 years before Marx. For this work, The Muqaddimah, he drew heavily on his own travels throughout North Africa and the Arab world. Ibn Khaldun was a central figure when I studied history in college, back when I thought I would become a historian. For Ibn Khaldun and for many of the Islamic scholars before and during his time, who made up the bulk of my reading material for so long, travel was elevated as a means of education, and travel writing was considered rigorous and necessary scholarship. Kashyap’s final word on a way out of the travelogue’s inherent colonialism is to foreground the agency of the place visited, or as he put it: “Let me tell you what the place was like. The people.”

I am a hypocrite. Back when I was a local, I objectified the tourists just as much. Tourists came to Flagstaff and called it their home away from home and went to ski on the mountain at Snowbowl and I hated them. Rent spiked across the city, like it always does in tourism economies. More people got involved with Airbnb, buying off the inexpensive homes and reducing the number of affordable places for long-term living, for real life. Climate change had caused drier and drier winters, so to prolong the ski season, Snowbowl started using artificial snow from reclaimed water, against the wishes of the Hopi Tribe, who argued that the ski resort "would not be able to contain the reclaimed wastewater to the ski area because the runoff would enter the water supply and winds would carry the artificial snow beyond the application area" which would "interfere with its cultural and religious practices," according to a 2018 court of appeals decision. Despite decades of legal battles and despite warnings from environmentalists and consumer advocates about health risks from the artificial snow, Snowbowl has continued this practice. To this day I have difficulty not resenting people who ski, if only when they talk about it like it has no consequences. I resent the cost of it all, the ski resort’s willingness to enact so much damage to draw in the tourists, the ones who ski.

This hatred of mine is self-indulgent and greedy. I resent the ski resort because I want to show you what Flagstaff used to be like decades ago, the weird, hip space it could have stayed. I want you to have known what it was like, my hometown. I wish I could share my love of this place with you, to see your eyes light up at the number of trees within the city and the way it used to smell like vanilla from all the pine sap, but it’s too late now. One note that I have scribbled from Kashyap’s panel is only a frenzied paraphrase of something he said, or something I thought based on what he said: “a more ethical form of writing—collaborative, consenting testimonies. Travel writing that decenters the visitor/tourist,” a collaborative, all-encompassing approach to place, if at all possible.

On the second trip to Portland: I stayed with my cousins Jace and Harvey and Sherry Keene, who live just outside Camas, Washington, about twenty miles from Portland. Harvey brought out the family archive for a while, and I spent a few hours examining documents tracing the Keene journey from east to west, two decades after Ira Rice traveled from Illinois to Utah.

John Keen, my great, great grandfather on my mom’s side, was born in 1839 just outside Portland, Maine, and joined Company C of the 16th Maine Volunteer Infantry in the Union with his brothers Lyman and Walter, all of whom were captured at Gettysburg, surviving until the end of the war, safe from subsequent battles. In 1870, John Keen went to Minnesota, then South Dakota, then the Yakima Valley. While in the Midwest, he added an E to the end of his surname because there was another John Keen in one of the communities he settled in, who kept receiving his mail. Presumably, Harvey told me, the other John Keen was a relative, but the only John Keens I can find who lived in the same place and time are all listed as having served in the Confederate Army. The records are sketchy, and unlike the Mormon half of my family, there is no tradition among Irish Protestants of rigorous genealogical record-keeping. Most of our stories exist word-of-mouth, a mythology.

The next day I sat next to Jace Keene as he drove into Portland. He explained the difficulty of getting into the city from across the river, describing Portland back before the onslaught of tourists who liked the town, the feel of it, enough to try to live there, without any real plans except simply to find work somehow, anything will do, as long as they get to live in Portland, in the scene. There had been tourists before; the city relied on them as a whole sector of the economy. But then people wanted to flock to Portland for how it reemerged in popular imagination, Jace explained, as a promised land for quirky, eccentric people, as an escapism. Jace used a phrase I heard a lot while I visited: “Portland before Portlandia.” This city, my family repeated again and again, had always had its quirks, but now people travel to Portland looking for those quirks, pointing out the typical Portlandians they encounter, signing leases while clinging to their image of the place. Long-term tourism.

We drove into Portland, picked up Jace’s girlfriend Laura in a neighborhood undergoing gentrification, apartment complexes in the making with high rent and artisanal stores filling up the laundromats and corner stores that used to be a boon to the neighborhood, basic necessities within walking distance now replaced with expensive bagels and trinkets. Jace pointed them out to me as we drove, the way this place used to be, the people.

Outside the city, we stopped at several different waterfall locations so Jace could take shots of them for his website, and Laura kept track of the hours—he can write off this trip as business. We joined dozens of summer tourists also photographing the waterfalls, stealing the light and the mist as the water made impact with arenas of grey rocks.

Jace is an up-and-coming photographer with a large beard and handlebar mustache. His gig works like this: He dresses up in an old suit and a panama hat and sets up shop on the Vancouver waterfront with a digital camera he has fixed inside of a large wooden box on a tripod, a painted tin can as a faux lens where the real lens inside is aimed, facing outward. Inside the box is also a small printer, and Jace has the system connected wirelessly to his phone, hidden by a black cloth he slips under when taking photographs for families, putting on a show, the old timey photographer on the waterfront taking family photos for five dollars each. The dream of the 1890s is alive.

We stopped for lunch at a burger joint in a small riverside town called Cascade Locks. I kept looking at the river outside the window as we drank our ciders and ate our sandwiches, the only customers that hour of the afternoon. We talked to each other about our schemes. Jace plans to eventually take his show to the Portland waterfront, competing with so many other photographers and artists and performers. Laura plans to use her degree in theater to help train people who are about to testify in court but have stage fright. In the exchange, I told them that I was trying my hand at food writing before I dug into the vegetarian sandwich I ordered, all hot greasy vegetables on bread with indistinct cheese. At one point, Jace asked me if I ever felt weird growing up in a tourist town like Flagstaff, cast as a prop in a tourist’s fantasy. I didn’t have a decisive answer and bit into a fry with a lick of ketchup on its side.

In Portland, I walked along Mississippi Street one night in the cool air, passing crowds of people at expensive restaurants. Char, meat, beer, cigarettes. Weekend smells. I found myself in familiar territory. People I know talk about this city like it’s paradise, a place of runaways and freethinkers. What Joan Didion wrote about Las Vegas—that it exists only in the eye of the beholder—is true, I think, of Portland, and Flagstaff, and Salt Lake City, and everywhere, but I also think she was wrong to distinguish such places from other cities behind which there is some historical imperative.

Maybe the only ethical way to travel—and to travel-write—is to start with the historical imperative first. It was easy to find myself in familiar territory, not like I was home, not like I owned the place, but with a sense of confederation, a kind of projected solidarity, but what difference could that have made? A tourist with a guilty conscience is only still and ever can be just a tourist.