THE WHOLE LOAF

On my third day of solo travel, I realized I had been subconsciously ceding the right of way to pigeons as they pecked by in their search for crumbs.

I’m a traveler by nature, and a relatively brave one at that—I’d lived abroad for a year after college, ridden in tuk-tuks through massive cities halfway across the world, and traveled solo for much of my twenties. But over the course of the previous two years, along with everyone else, I’d watched helplessly as the pandemic shrunk my world until it was made up of just me, my husband, and our dog, hiding in our basement and binge-watching really dumb TV. Those early days of quarantine and fear and sadness were awful enough, but as time wore on, things just became harder as the virus took more and more away from us all. 

In October of 2021, after less than a week of illness, it took my dad. And my world began to do more than shrink—it came to a full stop. When a family member passes away, you’re immediately confronted with a parade of terrible things, and from your new home at the bottom of a mountain of grief, you’re expected to do more than watch the parade; you have to participate in it, writing back to a barrage of really lovely, well-intentioned messages, and sorting through possessions, and making countless impossible decisions. A ray of hope existed in the fact that for months before my dad’s death, my husband and I had been planning our first trip overseas since the pandemic began—and because my dear dad loved travel more than anyone I know, it felt important and even necessary to go and complete the trip as planned. Just as my dad would have wanted, I slowly began to come back to life on that first trip. Little by little, our world began to expand again, and regained more of its color with each foray back out to explore.

But I hadn’t traveled solo in over ten years, and when I received a grant from the Alexa Rose Foundation to go to Lyon, France to work for a month in spring 2022, it came as an enormous, magnificent gift that felt at once like a desperately needed lifeline and the most terrifying thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t—but it certainly felt that way after the previous two years. I was incredibly thrilled, and equally grateful to have the chance to go; but as the trip approached, I felt myself balancing a large measure of excitement with a small measure of dread, convincing myself of that ratio afresh each time it came up. And as I pictured myself traveling alone for an entire month, feeling my stomach flip with both thrill and anxiety, I realized that it wasn’t just my world that had shrunk since the start of the pandemic years; I had shrunk too. 

There was ample evidence of this at the start of the trip. On my first day, while taking the train from the Paris airport to Lyon—the last leg of my long, masked journey to begin my great adventure—I had just settled in when a very polite Frenchwoman informed me that I was in her seat. My stuff was spread out all over the place, and in the hundred years it took me to move, I thought I would die of embarrassment. On the next day, I was navigating through a crowd in the streets of my new city when I passed a digital billboard. It suddenly changed to the next ad in its lineup while I was walking by at close range, and I actually flinched, cringing as I walked away.

Then there was this business with the pigeons, and if realizing you’re prioritizing the whims of pigeons over your own doesn’t make you stop and have a serious moment with yourself, I’m not sure what will. I stopped short at one of the corners of the Place Bellecoeur, watching the pigeon I’d just moved out of the way for change its mind and begin head-bobbing away in entirely the other direction—a clear sign that my subconscious generosity had been for naught—and felt myself reeling, but also feeling like I’d just unlocked the key to something. Coming to, I put one leg in front of the other, and then the other leg in front of the first, and the crowd of pigeons in front of me flapped up and made a great show of moving out of the way before resuming their activities as if nothing had happened. Damn straight, I thought. That’s how this is going to go moving forward.

Over the course of the next few days, I grew and grew. I successfully bought a fat slice of cheese that was exactly the size I had intended it to be from a farmer’s market vendor, who cut it off of a wheel huge enough to have powered a bus with three of its pals. I figured out my bizarre French shower head, and which ones among the vast array of identical buttons I needed to push to turn up the heat in my apartment when it unexpectedly snowed, sending gorgeous fat flakes sifting down onto the spring’s best daffodils and tulips. 

It’s been about ten days now, and little by little, I’ve been remembering that solo travel is so much less scary than I thought. The rustling in the bushes is just the tiny lizards; the billboard is just a billboard, rotating through to its next advertisement for incomprehensible streetwear. Abiding by some basic rules of safety, I can exist here alone, in a world that is far friendlier than I remembered.

It’s a bit ironic, given my beautiful apartment’s pint-sized bathtub and the fact that I have to crouch to get dressed every day in its hilariously low-ceilinged loft; but I find myself feeling like I’m unshrinking more each day, which is both wonderful and entirely unsurprising. It’s unsurprising because this is exactly what travel does (and perhaps solo travel best of all)—it simultaneously expands our world and makes it so much more accessible, all at the same time, and it does the very same thing to our sense of self.

And to my delight, this unshrinking I’m experiencing has already led to so many wonderful things. It’s led to a lovely new dress bought on a sunny day, to a bottle of Beaujolais so explosively, richly flavored it seemed to taste of life itself, and to both daily croissants and the practice of occasionally giving the daily croissant a buddy so it won’t be alone until the next morning. It’s led to the courage to dine alone without a second thought, and this itself has led to fat oysters paired with cider on sunny terraces, to gorgeously rich, traditional Lyonnais dishes that seriously threatened my ability to get back up the stairs to my apartment, and to the best duck confit I’ve ever had, featuring the dual miracle of both shatteringly crispy skin and fall-apart, fork-tender duck underneath—a favorite of my dad’s, which makes it all the more special. It’s led to looking out over the city on a sunny morning, clutching a tote bag full of brioche and Comte and strawberries and feeling so much good cheer I thought I might burst. It’s led to an unquenchable thirst to explore, and a determination to use my voice, and a truly profound sense of gratitude for the privilege of being here and the funding to make it happen. Perhaps most wonderfully of all, it’s led to a sense that the best is yet to come. And after the doom and gloom of the past two years, that feels really huge, and really, really good. 

Two and a half weeks remain of my solo adventure to Lyon, and I know little about what they will contain besides as many pastries, market trips, and glasses of wine as I can stuff into them, not to mention blissfully chipping away at the work projects I came here to dream up. I do, however, know what they won’t contain. No more pigeon-forward detours for me. After all, I’m out here in search of crumbs myself, and not just crumbs. Bring on the whole loaf.

Cheers,

Kate