No matter how small a town, no matter how much time you bring or take there, you can never know a place fully. Even some remote dimensions of your hometown will forever be as out of reach as they are out of sight with your view all skewed by individual experience, socio-economic surroundings, mindset matters, and the people you (don't) interact with. When you talk about what it's like to live there, you're talking about what it's like for you.
Of course, your familiarity with your hometown is a bond the passer-through visitor won’t be able to cultivate. And while a stranger’s outside perspective might carry unbiased information that is inaccessible to the perpetual resident, they can hardly experience the inhabitant’s insider angle. That’s why immersion is the traveler’s key to unlocking a widened understanding of a place.
"Few souls have been passed down through the soil of these towns, but in my head they have plenty of stories to tell, all of them really..."
I’m all for immersive travel, and then some. That said, there is a beautiful illusion that I welcome from time to time, between here and there, when I only scratch a place's surface without digging deeper. For imagination lives in the unknown, and in the foreigner’s head any town can tell any story.
Passing though these unsung towns hidden in the hinterlands, they become materializations of unknown dreams I’ve never had. When I catch a fleeting glimpse of a roadside village or a far-off town, I see a million lives lived. Not actual lives, but possible ones. Few souls have been passed down through the soil of these towns, but in my head they have plenty of stories to tell, all of them really, fat plots and blue plots and salty plots, and there is always space for me in them: suddenly I'm a boy on a swing in this here garden, then a carpenter building that fence over there. Someone has sat on the old pier with a fishing rod and his crush lived in the yellow house on top of the little hill – I know that because I have been them, both. Beers at the local brewery have been had. I was there.
