The outside world

There was a book nearly 20 years ago, where Bernard-Henri Lévy travelled American in the spirit of Tocqueville. Unfortunately, like most books I read that long ago. I mention it because it’s a genre: swoop through a country, see a bit of this, a bit of that, and come home to write a book explaining it. There’s a cousin subgenre, namely you visit a place on study abroad or vacation or a layover and are suddenly its self-declared expert. Like the time I, a person who has effectively never been to Switzerland, had to travel through Switzerland, spending a couple hours in the Zurich (?) train station, where I bought a bottle of water so expensive I remember Switzerland as ‘the country with the expensive bottle of water’ all these years later. The incident in question would have been not long after the publication of BHL’s American Vertigo, but was evidently more memorable.

I’m writing this at the end of a brief trip to Austin, Texas for a fun intellectual event Kat was organizing. I have spent most of this time at a hotel conference center, some of it in local restaurants, and maybe four hours total (though about to add another) walking around. I am therefore your expert in all things Texan (I hear Austin is fully representative) as well as Austinian (?) as well as in all that’s true of 2026 America.

The reason I use the above photo, a not very attractive selfie, is to demonstrate with as much confidence as one can in this age of artificial intelligence that I absolutely and positively left the house. The country, even. Did I mention that I am in America?

While I was plenty excited about it, I was also mega-anxious about this trip. Some of it is that while I used to house-leave, including alone, for a variety of reasons it had been ages since I had, so I’m rusty. Trips that don’t involve a Presto card and a familiar route throw me off, like I was staring at Google Maps to get to a bagel place that required a bus I don’t normally take in west Toronto.

Some was the apart-from-kids thing, although this is more about missing my family than any sort of anxiety.

Some was the simple reason that it was a blizzard when I left Toronto. I had to trudge in knee-deep snow in the wrong footwear (boots, but not high enough, I had not realized) to the airport train rather than take a taxi because the blizzard had shut down the taxi service. I have the usual reaction to hearing that the first attempt at de-icing the plane failed. I’m not generally afraid of flying but this time yeah, a bit.

But the big’un was that I have been spending possibly unhealthy amounts of time on Bluesky. This provides a not necessarily inaccurate but distorted impression of what’s happening in America these days. Basically, you’d imagine it’s full-scale civil war, when it is in fact not that. This is almost too trite to say but: even if only in my own mind, I had been centering myself in stories that are not about me.

The day-to-day urban menaces/inconveniences (you never know which) of Austin appear to be the same as those of Toronto, but with a slightly different accent. One such man was yelling a slur against gay people, which I can’t say I’ve seen among Toronto’s equivalent population. If I were in the business of cancelling homeless people, I’d have pursued it further, but as I’m very much not, I simply kept walking, to the sound of a man saying he was with the Austin Police Department and was there a problem? That you might get less of in Toronto.

A different police sighting. They’re also sometimes on horseback in Toronto BUT no cowboy hats.

There is also a consensus among Canadians against visiting the States, even for work… except at a certain point I was picking up on the fact that the Canadians who’ve made this vow are strangers on the internet, while the people I know irl in Toronto, who cannot possibly all be MAGA (few if any, of the people I’m thinking about), are going to the States for this or that all the time. Also, I AM AMERICAN. Canadian as well. I’m both! It started to seem like I was feeling guilty for letting down some entirely theoretical and possibly anime-avatar-bot fellow Canadian as some kind of displaced guilt over spending one (1) weekend talking about ideas and hanging out with journalist friends (some I’d known for maybe 15 years, some I’d never met in person, others barely) rather than being home trying to get my kids to their weekend activities in snowsuit season.

It does occur to me, being in America among my fellow Americans, that I am extremely American, that I’m giving ‘American who lives in Canada’ and not ‘Canadian mystified by your American ways.’ I’m basically the reverse of my own grandmother, who moved from Canada to the States as an adult and had I think the equivalent experience.

What mainly separates my trajectory from hers is is not that I got my Canadian citizenship whereas my grandmother stayed on-paper Canadian despite being in the States for most of her life. It’s the times themselves, and globalization, and the fact that downtown Austin and downtown Toronto could be stand-ins for each other. Drawls and y’alls are about as common here as aboots are there. There are differences in how the sort of women who care what they look like present themselves, with more athleisure here than I see in Toronto, but not much more, like it’s pretty similar. I was thinking, women really dress up here at night, then I remembered I don’t go outside at night at home, and that the rare times I have, Torontonian women? Also dressed up.

The biggest difference is possibly the hour at which you can get a taco here (breakfast options abound). That, and there does seem to be more of an emphasis here on beef (because Texas) and whole milk (because RFK?). Whole milk is my usual for when I have milk in coffee so this is not a problem for my coffee orders,* it’s that it seems to be A Thing, like if this is your choice, you are to be congratulated on your choice. Which… the vegans probably have the moral high ground here, nutritional who knows. And one of my kids had a milk allergy as a baby so I’m plenty aware that faux milks are not some kind of conspiracy of Big Woke, or of people making their coffee order their entire personalities.

Another thing I learned on this trip is that cowboy boots are, even used, extremely expensive. Not an issue for me** as I am not in the market for cowboy boots, and they seem like they’d be expensive to manufacture so I have no principled objections either. It’s just not something I’d ever thought about, that these were $700 USD boots. Live and learn!

Another thing, and another: Austin is sort of posh, or the posh parts are, or Toronto is destitute even in the posh-er parts. (I still have not seen the Bridle Path area.) I dragged my writer-friends to a ‘vintage store’ that turned out to be a museum of hypercurated vintage items plus some I think just straight-up new (but also mega-curated) leather goods.

A different, and far more my speed, vintage establishment near the overly precious one. They had the PERFECT skirt, this muted green wool pleated midi skirt, apart from it was too small in the waist.*** I may not have found anything but if I were there for 4 solid hours I’m sure I would.

My assumption had been that I’d return from this trip having to explain at the border why I was carrying ten tote bags filled with vintage Westernwear, as opposed to the reality, which is that I did not find anything of this nature. I did however take a prepper-type approach to food for the flight back, a buffet including onigiri and seaweed salad, a chocolate croissant, a bag of local (or, non-Toronto) jalapeño potato chips AND a bag of backup (familiar) potato chips for if those potato chips disappoint. I am both on-brand and, it’s fair to say, American.

*I am not mad.

**Still serene, unbothered.

***Nope, not upset, all good.