I don’t like writing in the first person. I’m more comfortable turning the words on strangers, peeling away the layers and, for better or worse, inevitably finding something familiar.
It’s just that in traveling to Edmonton for a few days of beach volleyball, the stranger I found was me.
In the days before departing for Alberta, I began to doubt the wisdom of going. At least for me, it’s all to easy to confuse travel with time travel. I’m constantly tempted to return places. Part of it is rational. It’s nice to already know where to find a good cup of coffee or a good sunset. Layering exploration atop exploration allows a deeper understanding of a place or people. But part of the urge is distinctly irrational, a hope of returning to a place as it was. And as I was.
I love beach volleyball events. I love the ear-worm melodies that follow the circuit from stop to stop — “monster block” chants and endless snippets of “Fireball.” I love the way an event fits into the landscape, courts stretching along the helpfully built-in sand along the beach in Fort Lauderdale or tucked next to a nearly ice cold mountain stream in the Swiss Alps. Or even in the most recent case, a decidedly less lyrical vacant lot next to the home of the Edmonton Oilers.
A tournament is a world within the wider world, which has always been my favorite kind of story. In books, movies and series, let me sink into a place. Give me a good enough map and let me explore its side streets and history, even if only in my own imagination. Beach volleyball offers all of that, in the literal on-site grid of courts and the figurative side streets, hidden trails and cul-de-sacs of its recurring characters. It’s where I’m happiest, where I feel a purpose to explore, learn, chronicle. Not for any editor or employer. Just because it’s there.
It’s a feeling I’ve missed in the four years since standing on a train platform leaving Gstaad, listening to the crowd roar a short distance away. The few opportunities to catch that feeling in more recent times, mostly involving softball, have been fleeting, rushed and constrained by other commitments. Losing myself in work used to sounds like an oxymoron. The work was me.
These days, while I’m fortunate in many ways, that phrase sounds different to my ear.
It’s never wise to try and travel back in time, but it felt good to encounter that stranger in Edmonton.
Maybe we’ll run into each other again one day.
Graham Hays 