I sit down at the terrace outside the Etnografski Muzej in stari Beograd.

“Kafe, hvala”

“Turist?”

“Da, Kanadaski.”

The knowing smile. She switches to English. I’m one of the “good ones.” We bombed this city too, you know. 20 years ago beside the Americans. “Shoulder to shoulder” as we’re so fond of saying. But that’s an inconvenient memory, and I have dinar to spend and she looks so young she might not even remember when that happened. Or it’s blurred into the dozen other tragedies that befell her people over the last century that her elders doubtless have imparted on her, each in their own more or less traumatic way. I have no idea what that’s like. I have no idea what any of their lives are like. Je, Turist.

There’s something I love about traveling like this. I discovered something freeing about walking through a world where I don’t speak the language. People go about their business, living their lives and performing their culture, and I am left alone with my thoughts and observations. It’s like a silent meditation retreat but with more stimulation. I’m left alone in my own head. I’m rarely called upon to speak or comment. Silence isn’t my default, but traveling like that it’s almost as though I’m taking a vacation from my gregarious, engaging, talkative self. I get to practice navigating the world with a curt nod, a hand gesture, a fleeting eye contact. That’s actually all you need to get on a bus, eat at a restaurant, frankly even to cross an international border.

And in the meantime, they go about living lives that I will never fathom. I see the hints of difference between our lives while I’m living among them – the loudspeakers at every corner of Hanoi that blare incomprehensible propaganda on the quarter-hour, the uniformed guards milling about on street corners, “Kosovo Je Srpska” scrawled on Balkan walls near the part of town where the mosques are. But I’ll never in all my life understand what’s really going on, what’s being transacted right before my eyes between these people, or how to interact with them or live amongst them in any capacity other than The Tourist.

So when I strolled through Strathcona Park this morning in the glorious sunshine, I was excited for that same silent meditation. I’ve learned to be alone with my thoughts in the forest, or beside the ocean, and I’ve learned that the natural world helps me do my best thinking. Today by the meadow I remarked that it’s not unlike sitting down at a Podgorica terrace with my broken po nashe or at a stall in Quang Tri with no words at all. But what I’m watching as I sit down beside that meadow is a thousand daily transactions between the plants and the animals that are as unfathomable and as Other as the street scene in Belgrade.

This is disconcerting. I am quarantined here on what I like to think of (problematically) as my Island. I was born here, raised here, have returned here with skills and knowledge and stories to share. No other place has felt like home. I spent summers in parks like this one, where I learned about the life cycle of the salmon and how to tell a cedar from a fir. This week I named huckleberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, salal berries, blackberries and cloudberries all without even consulting the internet! And they were all delicious. I’m from here.

But, as Vendana Shiva once pointed out to me from the pages of a book of hers I read in university, a park is not nature. A park is like a bug stored in amber. It’s a boundary on a map that justifies the capitalist, industrialist process on one side, and stores forever an imagined encounter with an unknown, “wild” Other on the obverse. It’s Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist wet dream drawn on the land, and it’s as much a part of suburban North America as the cars we use to drive here. In that sense, in this park, I am at home. But outside the boundary? In the actual forest? No, there I am still a stranger.

John Elliott STOCEL came by the Campbell Bay Music Fest last summer with CECILIE and QUICENIYA and taught us how to harvest the bark from a red cedar. He spoke of how the cedars were known to the Tsartlip as The Generous People, because they give us the skin off their backs. I’ve heard other Indigenous elders talk about The Salmon People or the Orca People as well, and at the risk of romanticizing and recolonizing Indigeneity (something I’m sure I do daily anyway), I think this is an important way to understand the world that surrounds me. It’s a world of distinct peoples, each of whom have their customs, their needs, their gifts. They’re transacting all the time, doing a timeless exchange of gifts and talents that I must admit I’ll never fathom. Do I even know any of their names? Can I speak a phrase of their language? No. Even here in the only place I call home all I can do is observe, silently, the profound complexity of what’s going on around me and wonder what I’m missing. We bombed this place too, you know. Je, Turist.