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"Loneliness is solitude with a problem,” writes Maggie Nelson in Bluets. Anyone who has traveled alone for great lengths of time knows how quickly the sweetest solitude—sought and celebrated on the open road—can turn melancholy for the solo traveler. 

Sebastian Modak, "52 Places" travel columnist for the New York Times, knows the mechanics of solo travel intimately. For today’s “Letter to a Stranger” (the last of 2020!), he takes us behind the scenes of an assignment in Lake Baikal, during which he set off across a remote island in already remote Siberia—
utterly alone.

Until a stranger approached, inspiring this letter. As you savor it, consider making a year-end gift to Off Assignment, to keep journalists and writers like Sebastian “going off assignment” and divulging the human stories behind the front-page news articles. 

Donations are not only tax-deductible—
they will be doubled, thanks to a generous matching offer from an OA Board member. 

The OA Editors

"It appeared most households on Olkhon Island, a crescent of land in Lake Baikal, had a dog, and that the pets were left to roam free. It made sense. How far could they—you—even go, surrounded as we were by the deepest lake in the world? Could you really get lost, on an island of fewer than 2,000 people?" 

Sebastian Modak, "To My Siberian Hiking Companion"

OA: During your year as the 52 Places Traveler, what is the place you would have written about that wasn't on the list?

The first that comes to mind is in the middle of the Negev Desert. On my way down to Eilat, on the southern tip of Israel, I spent a night hiking through and camping in Makhtesh Ramon, a giant crater-like formation in the desert. It was unbelievable and—sorry for the shade to Eilat—completely overshadowed my visit to the town that was actually on the 52 Places list. It’s an overused cliché, but it really felt like I had landed on another planet. That feeling was confirmed when I woke up the next morning and realized my campsite was right next to a facility that astronauts used to simulate conditions on Mars. The surrealness of it all was heightened by the fact that I was accompanied by a local family who treated me like I was one of their own. I’ll never forget sitting around a fireplace, jamming on a doumbek drum accompanied by a flute and a violin under a night sky completely blanketed in stars. 

 

OA: What’s the first thing you do when you’re in a new place? 

No matter how tired I am, I always try to start my experience in a new place with a long, aimless walk. I put my phone away, leave the front door of my hotel and just…walk. I figure that once I’m ready to head back, I can pull out my phone and figure out where the hell I am. If the spirit moves me, I’ll stop in a place for a beer or a cup of coffee and watch the place play out in front of me. The key, I think, is keeping that phone—encyclopedia of everything and social crutch that it is—in my pocket. While I don’t think first impressions are ever accurate, I do want to be completely soaked in them by the time I get back to my hotel.

 

OA: When traveling to report a storywhich inevitably requires solitudedoes it often graduate to loneliness? How do you negotiate those competing gravities: towards company, towards aloneness?

It’s interesting that you ask whether the solitude graduates to loneliness, as I think it more often is the opposite. It took me a long time to be comfortable being alone on the road. I’m a fairly social person and, on my first solo trips, I found it hard to be spending so much time with my own thoughts. When I’d see a beautiful sunset or a particularly interesting street scene, my gut instinct would be disappointment that there was no one around for me to share it with. That’s when loneliness hit. Soon, I learned how to see it coming and I even learned to appreciate it: knowing what loneliness feels like means I’m able to fully appreciate when that loneliness suddenly dissipates because I’ve found peace in solitude. Or, even better, if it gets dashed to pieces by meeting someone new and forging a connection across cultures. 

 

OA: In your travels, to what extent does native and local knowledge of the land inform your reading of your own experiences in those places, even if you don’t share the same religion or tradition? How have your travels influenced your own sense of spirituality or lack thereof? 

This is a tricky question, because there is a fine line between letting local customs and knowledge shape your understanding of a place, and projecting stereotypes or clichés based on your surface-level understanding of those customs. I hope I mostly do the former. I am not a spiritual person in the conventional definition of the word and, while I understand the instinct, I think there is something problematic about all the tropes involving people traveling east to “find themselves.” That said, there are feelings I’ve experienced in various corners of the world—alone on a fjord in Norway, sinking my teeth into a sliver of just-roasted pork in Puerto Rico, or, yes, going for a walk with a dog in Siberia—that are hard to explain through my usual vocabulary of emotions. If you define spiritual as the unexplainable, then yes, I’ve had many spiritual experiences. But no, I don’t think my experience in Siberia was “spiritual” simply because I was in a place that is considered spiritual to a specific group of people.

 

OA: How do you navigate the legacy of colonialism in contemporary travel writing? What helps you (texts, mentors, rules of thumb)? 

This is a VERY big question... The first step is acknowledging that travel writing as it exists in most of the world’s publishing industry has its roots in colonialism. Some of the first “travel writers” (at least in the way they are most often understood) were people coming from the metropole to the colonies and writing about their experience. With that came all the tropes of exoticism and “the other” that, unfortunately, continue to this day. It’s why it’s so easy to see descriptors of India as “chaotic” and “colorful;” or anywhere east of the Caucasus as “spiritual.”

For me, it is important to put identity front and center in travel writing, to make it transparent whose lens is being put on a place. That’s because colonialism colors so much of how we tend to describe things that come up in travel writing so often: “culture shock,” safety, whether a place is friendly or not... (As if an entire country or population can be “unfriendly.”) So much depends on who you are and, because travel writing is so dominated by white voices, a white perspective far too often becomes the default. I try to navigate that by putting my identity—a cisgender, straight man who is a bit ethnically ambiguous because of my mixed heritage—front and center. It’s important for me to say “this is what my experience is based on who I am,” not “here is what you should think, no matter who you are.” There will be things that people can learn from my story, even if they don’t share the same identity and hopefully some universalities about human nature and our place in the world that they can derive from my storytelling. But I’m not going to go out and say an entire country is unsafe, or an entire experience is “authentic” as an objective, blanket statement because it is assuming a lot about the identity of the reader. Those assumptions are what is wrong with travel writing, and it’s so important to be aware of that and try to disrupt it. It is encouraging that travel writers and travel publications are realizing that—and talking about it. 

 

OA: What have you been reading lately?

I’ve been very encouraged by the organizations that have formed lately committed to spotlighting more diverse voices in travel writing. For starters, I’d recommend people follow the Black Travel Alliance and Travel Is Better in Color to get tuned into the conversations happening around diversity in the travel industry—and acquainted with the people who are leading the charge in making travel writing more inclusive and more reflective of the real world. 

 
"More Ham," by OA contributor Greg Marshall, Joyland Magazine

"What If You Could Do It All Over," Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker


"Proofs of Gravity," Richard Hague, Nowhere

"The Social Life of Forests," Ferris Jabr, New York Times Magazine
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