The beginning of my journey with Bookpacking the Big Easy started as all good adventures do: with a disaster. After a sleepless night and a ride cancellation, I arrived at the airport with little time to spare so meeting the people I’d spend countless hours with had to wait in line. The flight, while long, consisted of many power naps and a multitude of movies. Upon touching down in Louisiana, though, the world had changed around me. The second I stepped off the plane, my back and neck were drenched and every inch of my skin was slick with Louisiana’s famously humid air. The waft of heat upon exiting the aircraft, though, was the most notable. As one would be hit with hot, thick, air upon opening an oven, I was hit with the hot, thick air of the Big Easy, except there was no sheet of fresh baked cookies beyond my fogged-up glasses but in its place was the prospect of adventure and of change.
“That summer at Grand Isle she began to loosen the little mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her.”
Our first stop on the journey was Grand Isle, a popular tourist destination now and long ago. With plenty of time to kill and the perfect setting, The Awakening by Kate Chopin inhabited the hands of each bookpacker. Chopin’s novel, set in the late 19th century, follows Edna Pontellier on a journey of self discovery as she realizes that, in her view of the world and of her own place in it, she stands alone. During her vacation on Grand Isle, Edna learns to do something daring, a previously unacquired skill: she learns to swim. In learning to do something she had not been able to, Edna embraces a new sense of self and a flood of empowerment.
Sitting on the beach and gazing out into the water that she would have been essentially baptized in, reborn as a new Edna, was a surreal experience. The sound of the waves crashing to the shore and sinking back in gave a whole new dimension to Edna’s pull towards the water. The push and pull of the waves drew me further into Chopin’s beautiful crafted lines of emotional reality. Edna’s transformation in those waves thus mirrored my transformation on that beach, though mine was admittedly a much less significant change.
As a generally scared and apprehensive person, going on a trip with a group of strangers to an unfamiliar place was nothing short of daunting. There were many times when I was tempted to back out and run away from something so personally unheard of. I simply could not see myself managing to be social for any extensive amount of time, let alone the upcoming three weeks. I, like Edna, needed to make a change and grow past an impediment. So I dove right in.
For a while, I couldn’t even manage to float. Making small talk was torturous at first, as I felt the words rushing back into my lungs, drowning me, but soon enough I grew past this hiccup. Edna and I learned to float together. I made small talk, we both moved forward. Soon we both began to take the lead. I started conversations, Edna kicked her legs. Soon enough, we both fully took control of our fears and cast them aside for the new lives we wished to lead. Edna, growing into somewhat of a feminist icon with her radical (for the time) ideas of what the role of a woman is and what role an intimate relationship should serve, and I, growing into someone who can have multiple conversations with multiple strangers that lead to blossoming friendships, both have had life changing experiences on the shores of Grand Isle.
“She let her mind wander back over her stay at Grand Isle; and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herself-her present self-was in some way different than the other self.”
This summer, I expect, will be like no other. Edna Pontellier’s summer at Grand Isle led her down a path of self-discovery and growth and I expect my bookpacking journey to have much the same effect. Already, I am bearing witness to the fruits of adventure, meeting people of like minds, discovering those of like-minds and of similar interests. From mere days in a house on the beach, I gained an understanding of Edna’s new present self. Grand Isle is a place of change in its very essence, withstanding yet adapting to hurricane after hurricane. Edna, much like the properties of Grand Isle to weather, adapts to her newfound sense of self, with her beams and her flood-born height coming from her desire to be her own person through rejecting the luxuries her life as a Pontellier had gifted her.
In finding a place of her own, Edna becomes, in her mind, self-sufficient and no longer in need of the fiscal support of her husband. Much like the shifting of the architecture from the ground to the air, Edna elevates herself in her own mental standing from a dependent to an independent.
Edna’s means of changing her standing are nothing short of extraordinary either. She, much like myself, is an artist and while our mediums of choice may differ, what we draw from our craft is similar. While she may fall out of love with her passion rather quickly, she draws from it a sense of worth both figuratively and literally with it being her outlet as well as her financial security. While I have yet to make anything of my work in an economic sense, it does remain an outlet through which I express what I feel cannot be expressed. Edna does the same, expressing her anger towards the era in which she was born and the role she was forced to fill as well as her inability to conform to social standards in her makeshift artist’s loft, painting the days away.
My present self, much like Edna’s in her moments of self-sustainability, have already drifted from my past self and become another. This new self is one that would talk to and befriend eleven strangers and one who would sign up for a bookpacking trip in the first place. While my personal growth is nowhere near as drastic as Edna’s, it is just as empowering. The soft sands of Grand Isle, the silt-clouded waves that brush the shore, they have served as stepping stones and as guiding forces for both Edna and I in our journeys of self-discovery. I can only dream of a change so drastic, but, as far as summers come, this is sure to be one I never forget, full of personal growth and hopefully a lot more diving right in and learning to swim.
