Fields & Stations / 6

Can the pleasures, exchanges, and discoveries that constitute travel be experienced in other ways, in other sensory registers? Can we learn to appreciate our home terrains – our locales – as much as we appreciate far-flung destinations? 

 

With memories of the worst of the pandemic still fresh, and with an eye to the climate crisis, we look here at recontextualising home. Three writers explore home on foot: Iana Dreyer walks Grand Paris; Eileen Smith traverses Santiago; and Mike Sowden hoofs it across Orkney.

 

Audrey Gillan resettles on a Portuguese barrier island; Pam Mandel hunkers down in West Seattle after a bridge closure renders her home neighbourhood essentially insular; Jorge Pedro Uribe Llamas trains his cultural microscope on his very mundane local metro station; and Sheila Ngoc Pham ponders her history of carefree travel in a celebration of the dynamism of southwestern Sydney.

 

Elsewhere, Meera Dattani recharges via travel memories and Ruth Terry dips her toes in nanotourism, with mixed results.

 

We close with two extraordinary photo essays by Ramin Mazur and Katerina Shosheva.

 

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Fields & Stations publishes good writing for curious travellers. The magazine is devoted to the magic of both the far-flung and the familiar, balancing the everyday and the remarkable. Fields & Stations focusses on little cultural objects (a shop; a cocktail; a sandwich) to tell big stories.