Anthropologists believe that one of the critical elements that make us human is our penchant for seeing stories everywhere.  Essentially, we seek patterns around us.  Originally it was seeing where game and gather-able foods were, and that certain activities would be repeated.  From this, humans started creating and telling stories, explaining the world around them.  Storytelling, thus, is basic to our nature and our evolution.

As a traveler, one of the things that becomes very clear is the way we story our worlds.  A place is simply a spot of land without meaning until we tell stories that give it meaning.  “Home” originally was merely a place we moved into.  Yet in selecting it and living in it, we think about it, tell ourselves stories about it, remember the stories we lived in it, and that place—“Home”—becomes more than merely geography.  It means far more.  Visit somebody else’s home, though, and your stories are more restricted, limited.  Over time, they may come to be places in our stories.

When traveling around the nation, say to Washington DC, or New York City, we see other people’s stories—the stories of people who lived there, and who might be related to us, stories of our national past or cultural origins.  We have a small handle on those stories, so we have a slight hold on the place itself.

In Europe, or any place even farther from home, we seek to find stories that allow us to connect.  In Normandy, I connected to D-Day because it is an American story, and because I had taught it in detail over the last few years.  Small towns we passed through going and coming to Omaha Beach meant little or nothing.  They were picturesque, but we had little connection.  We stopped at one, had lunch.  We fumbled with the menu, the waitress did not speak English, we tried to figure things out through a game of charades, the food came—it was not exactly what we expected, but it was good—and then the wind popped up suddenly and flipped one of the placemats, slipping food in my lap.  The waitress was kind as I paid, and we went across the street to get a pastry at the bakery.  Karen got her favorite, Pain du Chocolat, and I got a merange shell, because they reminded me of ones Mom used to make in Kentucky.  And now, with this experience, this small town—L’evenque—suddenly has meaning, a place in our memory, a story that connects us to it.

Places can have stories.  Home, a special cafe, a historical sight.  These tend to invest a point on the land with meaning.  Military campaigns, however, tend to be full stories over a broad landscape.  Looking at the landing beaches and the drop zones around Utah Beach, I can see a landscape that is very similar to what it was on D-Day.  There is the landing beach—I can imagine the landing craft and the men rushing out.  There are the roads they used to move inland.  To the west I can see the hills the roads lead to, the area the paratroopers landed in, to seize the key road junctions and bridges inland, waiting to connect with the soldiers coming inland from the beach.  I know these fields were flooded then, to prevent easy movement.  I know where the Germans waited, and where the battles began, and how they flowed through valleys and around strong points.  Military campaigns tell a story not of a point, but of a region.

Geology is a story under the land, of the land.  Understand the story of how the tectonic plates move, collide, create mountain ranges, read the lines of strata in the hill sides—these are stories too, though on a scale that have fewer human connections, perhaps.  But they are stories to connect to, none the less.

So, here we are freshly arrived in Dublin.  We have no connections—yet.  We went for a walk last night, and found our hotel was only about two blocks from the Post Office building that was at the center of the 1916 Easter Uprising, one of the most important in the history of Modern Ireland.  Over the next few days and weeks we will tour the island, see its geology and history, and make connections to it.  Some of the connections will be through the shaping of the land, some through the history.  They will color much of what we see.  But most of the connections will come from the places we stop to eat, the locals we will talk to, the stories we will live and then remember and retell in the coming years.  Today we have almost no connection here at all.  Before we leave, it will be a place of many rich connections—simply because we will have lived here, and because it is human nature to look for patterns, make stories, and forge connections.

I can hardly wait!