Travels & Tribulations

Plattsburgh, New York: A foreign land

Emma Tucker

Many people exaggerate the perils and dwell on a single woman’s vulnerability when she is travelling alone. Often, I find, this doom-ridden response is just an excuse for the speaker’s own timid spirit. Travelling alone does require a certain amount of courage, and nearly all the people I spoke with found that at one point on a long journey they have hit a roadblock where you want to turn around and go home. However, soon after this you come across another realization – you are not going home, you are going somewhere new, undiscovered and unseen by your eyes. So you push on.

I smile now when I recall the pictures I drew in my mind of Plattsburgh before I arrived. I was so overcome with the anxiety of leaving all I knew that I forgot the pleasure and adventure of travel. After three days of planes, hotels and homesickness, Plattsburgh felt like an old friend you’ve not seen in a while.

It was so green, misty from rain, somehow already comforting. Plattsburgh is what I imagine as "classic", north-country America, where people know each other in the corner store and give strangers lifts home from Wal-Mart. Now I watch the leaves turn red all around me, and feel that chill like I’ve not felt in a long time, yet somehow I am warm because I’m in my new home.

Lake Champlain, that splits this part of New York from Vermont, is a personal favorite place of mine. A group of friends and I spent almost an entire weekend lying on its shores and soaking up the sunlight and heat while it lasted. We went there as a group of people tossed together by circumstance, and came away with exceptional bonds; that lake gave me friends who I will cherish for a long time. The cold has ushered people away from its chilled waters now; I wonder if it will freeze in the coldest months. Different parts of Plattsburgh will always remind me of different days I have spent here, a little bit of my life irrevocably tied to a piece of this town. I can remember a moment that sticks out in my memory when two of my new friends and I went to New York City. We were, as English people are wont to do, discussing the weather. “It’s not nearly this warm at home,” said Hannah. “Home?” I asked, and she responded, “I mean Plattsburgh.” Lindsay added, “I call it home too.”

I found myself asking, what makes somewhere feel like home? Essentially, as I am discovering, a group of people you love, and with whom you do things that connect you to the uniqueness of a place. My days at the lake and downtown, or our first evening here when we ate huge slices of New York Pizza in a street café, all tie me to this place called Plattsburgh. A place where, for the moment, I call home.