Conclusion

As I sit here, putting the finishing touches on this extensive book of marvelous places I have been, I find myself at a bit of a curious loss.

I have never been very good at languages. For all my traveling, I have constantly relied on locals, guides, and books to communicate with people who don’t speak my language. Translation is a difficult thing for me, and in writing this book I have been made painfully aware that the very act of writing is a kind of translation itself.

There has not been a single section in this entire book that has not felt dry or inept as I wrote it. To describe these places in words is inherently flawed; to call the Yellow Bypass of Borrst “beautiful” is to wipe away all the texture and color of the majestic city. I could spend years writing about a single street in Nottish Ins, and still leave important details out, giving you an imperfect description.

But ultimately, what matters the color of the leaves or the shape of the doorways? One goal I had in writing this book was to give you just a taste of the feelings I have felt as I’ve wandered our fantastical world. Would knowing that windows in Flororenghashst open out and down facilitate the same feeling of majesty I felt when I first saw the Akcriskkap?

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine in a rustic pub along the edge of Roshkana. I had just finished a lovely walk along the coast of the Honey Sea, and had been fortunate enough to see a school of skipper-fish leap out of the green water, dancing across the surface like fairies, their scales glistening in the dusk light. The calls of white boobooks drifted from a nearby crop of trees, mingling with the trills of distant nightjars. The calm hum of chirping beetles and dragonflies gave such a pleasant backdrop to the scene, I found myself quite overcome, and I stopped to watch the sun complete its descent beyond the horizon.

I was not overcome just because of the beauty I had found myself privy to, but because I had by that time thought myself a well traveled individual. Indeed, not two days before, I had found myself becoming nearly bored of travel, wondering if there was anything more worth seeing in this strange and wonderful world of ours. To find such a moment of remarkable beauty, and not thanks to any landmarkers or managed tourist sites, it was invigorating. It renewed my determination in continuing to travel.

I had explained all this to my friend, how this simple walk I had finished not two hours ago had fueled my love for lands unfamiliar, and she simply laughed. “You are such a strange person,” she said. “It’s just a small cliff. We have hundreds of those here.”

“Yes,” I answered, somewhat perturbed at her dismissal of my emotional revelation, “but they are beautiful. I think you’re just used to them because you live here. If you lived somewhere else, you’d realize how beautiful your land truly is.”

She shook her head at me; “This is not how Roshkans think; we understand these things. The land is the land. If you lived here, you would be a toush, a…” she struggled a moment with the translation; “it is like a person who loves that they are a person of the land…”

“A patriot?” I asked.

“No,” she shook her head, “not the country, the land. The trees and coasts and fields. You would be like Roska,” she smiled as she referenced a mutual friend.

“Roska is a field-ranger,” I smiled back. “That’s his job.”

“Yes,” she wagged her finger at me. “You would do it for free.”

I considered this for a moment, and wondered if she was right. “I might,” I admitted, “but I don’t think I could give up traveling. There are so many other places to see.”

“Exactly,” she took a drink as she shrugged. “Because you are a toush.”

For some reason, that conversation stuck with me. I resolved to study the concept of a toush in Nottish culture, and in struggling to translate the idea to one I could recognize, I realized my friend had revealed something to me in her characteristically dismissive way.

Originally, to be a toush was to childishly reject your community and home for the notion that the land itself is your real home. The term has since widened to encompass ex-pats and native Roshkans who ignore their connection to their people. At its most cruel, it is a term used for fools and half-wits who seek “new and therefore better” instead of embracing the wisdom of their family and their ties to their homeland. At best, it is used to describe those who have an unhealthy expectation of belonging in unfamiliar places. The man who enters a pub for the first time and expects he is already friends with everyone inside is a toush. The woman who leaves her home and travels to a new village with the expectation that things will be better is a toush. The person who hops from village to village, never settling down or keeping a job for longer than a few months is a toush. The tourist who takes pictures of “exotic foreigners” who are just going about their day is a toush.

Perhaps the best translation for toush is “root-less.”

Was she right? I had, in my youth, imagined that the world was divided into two parts; the familiar and the exotic. I had somehow believed that beauty — while subjective — was still somehow inherent; that the sight of skipping-fish on the Honey sea would amaze anyone, grabbing them by their hearts and sooth their minds, as it had mine. I had forgotten that in spite of all the differences, someone else’s house was their home.

Had I forsaken my connection with a real country and community, all to chase some always-moving “exotic?” Was I addicted to the feeling of being somewhere new, believing that everything I saw was somehow ab-normal, when it was all simply how the world was? If I had been born in Roshkana, I would not have found the cliffs so beautiful. If I travel enough, see the world enough, visit enough places and learn enough about the people who live there, perhaps nothing will be beautiful anymore. Perhaps everything is simply how it is, and beauty is just a childish concept to disguise familiarity.

The Roshkanan people reject my romantic view of the world, and perhaps they are right to do so. It certainly works for them, or it seems to. For me, however, I have found immeasurable value in the view that the boundaries that separate us from each other are not worth the effort they take to maintain.

I find myself returning to the word “from.” We all have a history that made us what we are. We are “from” our parents, our land, our faith, and our history. We did not choose what made us, but neither are we bound by it. We cannot change the past, but we can influence our future.

There is great beauty in the world, and much of it is right nextdoor to our homes and villages. We may get used to it, so much so that we forget its there, but it is there all the same.

I suppose that is the real reason why I wrote this book, to remind everyone that their familiar world is fantastic to someone. What we find familiar can be bizarre, what is uninteresting can be amazing. You can turn the banal into the majestic with just a simple shift in your worldview; refuse to accept anything as “normal.”

Perhaps that is why I have such a hard time saying where I am “from.” The food I grew up eating, the songs I heard every day, the sunset I saw every night…they are all unfamiliar to me now, as new and exciting as any exotic dish or foreign music. Maybe it makes me a toush, but I disagree that this is a shameful way to live.

I hope that this book has opened your eyes to the possibilities of the world in which we live. It is easy to fear the foreign and unfamiliar, but there can be beauty even in the scary things.