1 October 2018
There’s a canal that begins in the city right outside my flat; it’s called the Union Canal, and it runs for miles — if you wanted, you could follow it all the way out of the city and across to Falkirk. I knew about this canal long before I moved here. In the months when living in Edinburgh was still just something I imagined, I liked to “walk” through the city on Google Maps, following the street names that I knew in the city center and more often than not ending up following the light blue line of the canal, zooming in on the belt of green surrounding it, imagining what it looked like and smelled like and what kinds of people peered into its waters.
I took a run there tonight. It was warm and windy and still light out at half past seven, and walking downstairs to take the recycling out with my flatmates a gust blew up carrying the smell of wet foliage and it made me too restless to go back inside.
The canal itself starts out wide and cobbled, surrounded by city benches and well-groomed grassy plots, high-rise apartment buildings, newly-built secondary schools. This is quickly left behind — soon, the path narrows drastically and the cobbles become irregular and occasionally loose, like a tooth waiting to fall out but refusing to be pulled. The old brownstone houses shuffle in towards the water, the trees grow older and bend as if stretching to touch the surface of the canal; reeds bunch up at the water’s edge and families of ducks nibble at the patchy grass. The bridges become lower, forcing passing runners into a careful hunched jog. An old parish church appears around a corner, a path leading from its front doors to a mossy dock. Rowers glide silently through the water in the near-dark; the moon is out, and looking up over the rooftops I can see its light reflecting on the hills outside the city limits. It’s warm, and quiet, and the air smells of deep woodlands, something so out of place in my mental concept of what should and should not exist in an urban center that I have to stop running — alone on the path, I am so overcome with emotion that all I can do is look up at the sky and let out the choked-up offspring of laughter and tears.
Eventually, worn out, I turn around on the path and head back towards my flat, the warm wind now pushing firmly between my shoulder blades like a friendly hand. Out of seemingly nowhere, a song bubbles up in my head — the voice of my best friend’s mother singing beside a mountain creek in the sunshine. It’s summer and I’m ten years old; the melody is simple and lilting and sweet:
K-K-K-Katie, oh beautiful Katie
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore
And when the m-moon shines
Over the cow shed
I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.
I wasn’t sure at the time what it was about the dark nighttime greenery of the canal that called this song up. Now, I think it might have been a feeling of safety — the feeling of being held and cradled by something older and wiser that both experiences shared. The canal curls out behind my back door, a sleeping green beast with the moon shining on its back, waiting there for me if I ever grow tired and must seek out a soft resting place. Childhood memories, though lacking a tangible form, are perhaps another soft resting place.
When asked what I study, I usually give a brief dictionary definition: anthropology is the study of humans and human culture, in both the past and present. If pressed, I will say that, specifically, I’m interested in something akin to environmental anthropology (the intersection of culture and ecology) as well as kinship, mobility, and diaspora. If pressed even further by an intrigued party (or if I’ve consumed the exact right amount of drinks to willingly subject my drinking companions to my pet interests while still maintaining the linguistic capabilities to express them) I’ll start talking about liminality, the threads of time and memory, animate landscapes, the power of ancient paths, the importance of storytelling, the role of imagination in human movement. These interests are no different than the things on my mind when I first started traveling almost three years ago; I just have the words for them now.
I have always sought out liminal spaces: the forest grove, the airport terminal, the canal. These places are simultaneously still and full of motion, immobile in the physical construction of space but acting as doorways to the flowing undercurrent of time and memory — “the tension between fixity and motion” (Gill et al. 2011, 302). The world is full of stories and pathways, and perhaps those are the same things; the landscape comes alive with them, is written in them, is made of them. We construct our reality in personal and global histories, words, images. Human trafficking routes in the Arabian Peninsula today follow ancient trade routes from centuries past. There is nothing new in this world: we are always brushing up against ourselves in the labyrinth of time. I worked hard to get myself to this place — to this country, to this city, to the stool where I’m sitting in the flat I moved into three weeks ago, listening to the same song on repeat as I write (a cover of Kanye West’s “Heartless” by Dermot Kennedy) — but more than that I imagined myself here, for a thing has to be imagined before it can be done.
When asked why I wanted to come here to study, I usually give a brief and pithy answer: Edinburgh is a beautiful city; the University of Edinburgh is an incredible school with a world-renowned program in social anthropology; it’s an opportunity for me to expand my academic horizons in a place rich with culture and new experiences. If pressed, my answer grows more vague, even in my own mind. It’s just that there’s a pulse here — maybe I unconsciously felt it when I first came here two years ago — that I needed to get my finger on: the nexus of my own personal history, a rich swirling of folklore both real and imagined, and the concrete reality of being in a place that inspires me to think and write in exactly the way I am now, with fevered intensity and an unwillingness to move from my seat for even a moment lest I drop the thread of my own thoughts.
But perhaps it’s even simpler than that. Perhaps, if I take a step back from the ridiculous inner workings of my own brain that desire nothing more than to churn out An Explanation for everything, I can recognize that when I came to Edinburgh, what I felt was just…relief. Perhaps there are just some places that allow you to keep peace with your soul. Perhaps there are places that make it easier for you to remember that, while the grand scales of thought and the depths of intricate concepts are fascinating and important, you’re still just one person in a pretty big world and if you don’t feel the texture of every individual day all the grand-scale shit has nothing to be grounded in. I don’t want to study liminality at all if I don’t also make time for a run along the canal and smell the water and cry at the moon for being big and round and beautiful.
I came home late last night after a long day and opened the kitchen door to find all of my flatmates sprawled on couches and chairs, chatting idly, exchanging jokes, drinking tea, sending Snapchats. I was a little drunk. I dropped a mug of water on the floor, and then I got my socks wet trying to clean it up. Earlier that day, I’d skipped lecture, bought too many cups of tea at a coffee shop near campus, wrote 200 words of an assignment due on Monday, tried and failed to open a bank account, and avoided sending emails. I didn’t want to walk all the way home and back again, so I stopped by a friend’s flat in the city center to freshen up and then went on a date wearing my entire book bag and borrowed deodorant. (It went well — really).
My five flatmates are all at least two years younger than me; the majority are starting their first year at university. Before I met them I was deeply worried about this. I vehemently Did Not want to live with a bunch of eighteen year olds who, I thought, probably didn’t even know how to cook rice. What I forgot in my willingness to discount people that I’d never met, however, was the fact that as old as I sometimes feel I am not actually so far away from eighteen myself. I have some things figured out, but not a lot; I’ve experienced a lot, but not everything. I, too, eat toast for multiple meals each day, and I cried in the laundry room the first time I tried to wash my clothes because I couldn’t figure out the machine. Nor are any of us really so far from what I arbitrarily perceive as “adulthood”: I regularly come home to a kitchen in the full swing of meal prep and bathrooms stocked with toilet paper, and one of my flatmates accompanied me to the local medical practice during my first week so I could register him as my emergency contact. As it turns out, expectations of time (relatively meaningless in most cases) are even more so between the ages of 18-25.
Before this year, I’ve never lived in university housing — I lived at home during community college, and found housing independently while I was in Berkeley. I often felt disconnected, somehow separate from the experience of being in college. Now, in my final year and in my determined efforts to make studying abroad happen, I think I’ve unwittingly given myself the one thing I really needed: the experience of being young in a place overflowing with exuberance and exhilaration. I have spent a lot of time the last couple years being serious about my studies, serious about making enough money to buy groceries, serious about planning ahead. Now, I can allow myself to be irreverent. And if that means skipping lecture, drinking too much gin, talking my date’s ear off about my favorite anthropological concepts (liminality, the threads of time and memory, animate landscapes, the power of ancient paths…), and coming back to a house full of strangers-turned-friends, then I’m all for it — because sitting in my warm kitchen last night, my nose still a little stuffed up from the dregs of a cold, I just felt like a kid. A happy, messy kid.
I suppose that many of the things I’m feeling right now I can’t quite put into words any more than I already have. But I can write this: when I flew to Edinburgh at the beginning of this month, I got to the airport exhausted and feeling grimy after nearly 30 hours of travel which included an overnight layover in Iceland. I waited in line at passport control with droves of other students arriving, just like me, overloaded with luggage and anticipation. I kicked my bag along the dusty floor, trying not to think about how much I wanted a shower, checking my immigration documents excessively, convinced that they would somehow leap out of my bag and scuttle away across the floor and I’d be turned away at the border. When I finally made it to the front of the line, the immigrations officer peered at my passport, the indelibly Scottish MACDONALD in all caps behind the indelibly Californian SIERRA KAI. He flipped to a blank page, stamped it firmly, and handed it back from behind the glass barrier.
“Welcome home,” he said.
SGBRSH 