You Are a Tourist
Rites of passage, Death Cab for Cutie, checking your ego, bad vegan food
I didn’t even know they had vegan restaurants in Harrisburg. They sure didn’t when I was growing up. Or maybe they did, and I just wasn’t paying attention.
They definitely didn’t have Death Cab for Cutie concerts in town. Front Street, along the Susquehanna River, was basically reserved for holiday parades, arts festivals and maybe getting mugged after wandering away from the bars on 2nd. Or maybe they did, and I just wasn’t paying attention to that, either.
When they did host a Death Cab concert, I was already almost 10 years removed from living there. I parked the car in Midtown, a few blocks from the Capitol complex, and probably remarked about how much easier it was to find parking here than it was in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. I looked on Yelp to see what was nearby, and saw there was this vegan spot a couple of blocks away. We decided to check it out, having gotten into town a while before the show was supposed to start.
I had seen Death Cab a few times at this point, always in Philadelphia. It’s not a surprise when a band comes to Philadelphia. They have to come through Philadelphia. The surprise was seeing they were playing in Harrisburg, the city I grew up in (well, next to), a city where cool bands did not frequently stop. There was the DIY punk venue, there was Hersheypark Stadium (home of Dave Matthews every year), and there were the few little bar/venues mentioned on local butt rock radio stations, like the one attached to a Holiday Inn where my friends and I saw CKY one time.
I don’t know if it was the desire to see Death Cab one more time that made us buy tickets, or the curiosity of just what it would be like to see them in Harrisburg. Were there even people there who wanted to see them?
That’s the thing about moving away from your small hometown to a bigger city. People often become huge assholes about it
Despite the copious amounts of 2000s pop punk about getting out of this town on my iPod throughout high school, I wasn’t really that guy. I didn’t have that hatred toward or burning desire to leave my hometown when I lived there.
But, even if you swear you’re not going to be that person, you might still have these moments of being an insufferable snob. Without knowing, you get to a point where you are reluctant to admit that the place you’re from has any redeeming cultural qualities beyond maybe a good burrito place and a minor league baseball team.
So we walked the few blocks to the vegan restaurant, which was sort of an a-la-carte setup with goofy shit all over the walls like David Bowie cardboard cutouts, drawings from local artists, album covers from the ‘70s. It was populated and staffed by a class of hipster kids that looked like the ones at my Philadelphia college when I had arrived there nine years prior. Those kids weren’t here when I was growing up, were they? Maybe they were, but I wasn’t paying attention to them, either. But I definitely remarked about how it reminded me of places in cool neighborhoods of Philadelphia in 2010, insinuating that culture has just reached Harrisburg after traveling from the hub that I now called home.
The food wasn’t any good.
It started to rain as we made our way up 2nd Street toward the bridge that collapsed in 1996, where there was a stage set up in the grass overlooking the river.
Once we were in, I joked how much room there was around me in the crowd. This being Harrisburg, there weren’t millions of indie kids foaming at the mouth to get close to one of their deities, Ben Gibbard. There were a few – now no longer kids, like us. There were plenty of jam band kids lured in by the promise of live music, and there was more than a good handful of people approaching (or well past) retirement age who set up folding chairs in the grass for themselves. No doubt they were also excited about the prospect of a concert in the park. Who cares who the band is.
Having seen Death Cab a few times at this point, even once before on this same tour, I knew what songs to expect. I knew what songs I wanted to hear. They played one of my favorite songs by them (“Long Division”), they played the songs from the newer albums that I enjoyed, they played the hits. I couldn’t complain. Not the best setlist I’ve seen from them, but this was just Harrisburg, right?
A lot of Death Cab fans would argue that “Codes and Keys” is the album you can skip most easily. But that night on the river, the line in “You are a Tourist” stuck with me as they played it during the encore.
And if you feel just like a tourist in the city you were born
Then it's time to go
And define your destination
There's so many different places to call home
It smacked me in the face.
I felt like a tourist in Harrisburg that day.
I had to use Google Maps to remind myself which exits to take for certain things. I had to look up where to eat. I didn’t see any friends or family - I was in town for a concert, and that was it.
“You Are a Tourist” is more about realizing that your potential lies elsewhere, and that if you feel like you’re starting to outgrow the place you live, or if it doesn’t feel like home anymore, you can move, restart, try a new location on and maybe even a bit of a new identity. You can create as many homes as you want. On paper, it’s about how I might’ve felt as a teenager, eager to escape the place I grew up in favor of more excitement and adventure and culture.
But in the moment, it felt like it was just cementing the fact that the place I had called home was truly no longer my home, and that was partially because of my own attitude, for better or worse. At this point, I hadn’t referred to Harrisburg as “home” for a while, but there was always the tether anchored there. That tether snapped at some point before tonight, but I was acutely aware of it there in the crowd.
I have this ability to fully cut ties with whatever apartment or house I previously lived in the second I close up the moving truck. It’s uncharacteristic of me, really. I’m sentimental as hell, and I have a healthy fear of change. But, every time I’ve moved, whenever I’ve returned to the place I lived for years, I feel nothing. I’ve even walked down my old blocks to see if it stirs anything up, but my house is just another random door I pass now.
So, even though the song says you can call many places home, without knowing I had erased this one from the list.
Through pouring rain that made me consider pulling over, I drove back to Philadelphia and thought about how I just wanted to get home. Gibbard’s voice kept echoing in my head.
“You Are A Tourist” is more about that active feeling of wanting to leave, or realizing you can leave, and the hopefulness that comes with the discomfort of your current surroundings. One day, you realize the place where you are isn’t where you want to be anymore, and you decide you can leave. For me, that day, it just informed me that I had passed through a threshold without really realizing it. Those moments often feel good and bad and weird all at once. Growing up is full of those moments. You realize your best friends who would be your best friends forever haven’t been in the same room for a while. The things you used to love to do aren’t giving you that same spark anymore. You feel bad for the loss it brings, but hopeful about the new possibilities in life.
I also felt like a bit of an ass for my attitude going into the day, because I never set out to be one of those cliche young adults who leaves their small town for the city and shits on it all the time. You’re not as much of a hot shot as you really think you are if you have to continually talk down on a place (or person). If you care so little about it, why does it occupy so much space in your head? That place is still operating without you. Harrisburg sure was. It might even be better off without you. You’re never really as pivotal to your surroundings as you think, despite what your young ego tells you.
People change. They grow. Their tastes evolve.
It recently dawned on me, too, that the first time I heard Death Cab for Cutie was in my small suburban town. My older next-door neighbor had “Transatlanticism” on CD. She played “The Sound of Settling.” I was probably 12 or 13.
I thought it was the worst shit I’d ever heard.
PS - that photo at the top is apparently the only photo I have from that show.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Bill Callahan.