The Vanishing Third Place
I closed my computer and went for a walk. (Why did it feel like a radical act of resistance?) There was Yaron, the traveling concert pianist we’d met a couple of days before. There was Ellis, my endearingly moody boyfriend. And there was me. The three of us set out mid-morning for a trek up a nearby trail, on which we hoped for a lot of things: to make it to the lake, to avoid any grizzly encounters, to keep track of the trail—which wove in and out of snow covered hills—and to stay clear of falling trees, whistling as they were.
Every once and while when I think back to Morocco, I mostly remember the colors: beige, white, red, heat. I also remember the men, sitting in chairs on sidewalks outside of coffee shops, from morning until long after dusk. I remember my confusion upon being told, near the beginning of my stay, that nothing ever happens in Fes. Fes? The place was brimming with life, or so it seemed; cafés were open late, and people patronized them, regardless of how good the coffee was. About a month in, it was clear that Fes was full of life. It was just men, mostly, who got to experience it publicly.
Hiking in Montana has been an interesting reflection on public life. Trails are public, of course, but time spent hiking often feels private, sometimes secret (if you go on a weekday or in the rain, especially so). On this particular day, we slogged up the mountain while peppering Yaron with questions about his many past lives. We connected the dots between ours and his: Cleveland, piano, Judaism, old cities we had known—like Fes and Jerusalem—in person, through friends, or in words.
Daily life in Fes had me thinking almost constantly about the idea, coined by a guy named Ray Oldenburg, of the ‘third place.’ Within his framework, there’s the first place (home), the second place (work), and then the third place, where community happens and democracy (yes, democracy) is maintained. While I developed a fondness for Fes and all of its many gifts—constant sunshine, kind people, unforgettable students, my weekly snack of salade de fruits—I always felt that, whether by limitations of language, culture, or gender, I would never fully access its third place: coffee shops wherein patrons (men) bought coffee (barely) and smoked cigars.
And then, right as I was getting comfortable in the ping pong between work and home, work and home—and cherishing the home time all the more—the world stopped. I got a flight home to Montana, where I spent mornings Zooming with my students in Morocco and marveling at the winter that had just begun to thaw outside. Back in America, I felt that COVID had expedited the process of societal self-isolation. So many of the things I spent money on pre-COVID afforded me some sort of social experience: time at the coffee shop, dinner out with friends, paying for parking downtown. It wasn’t until I found myself on the trail that I realized that this was one of the few safe, low-cost things I could be doing.
We almost turned around. There was an older woman who had turned around after sustaining a hit to her shoulder by a falling tree. There was a terrible wind, and overflowing streams still to cross, and yet we continued for no real reason other than that we *needed* to see the lake. Yaron hadn’t yet been. I couldn’t help but feel the importance of this place, to all of us, for reasons I couldn’t quite place. Oldenburg points to the necessity of the third place for its singular ability to exist as a cross-section of class, race, gender, religion, background, etc. It’s also a place where, removed from the strictures of modern society, we might actually find an antidote to the isolation we now all feel (and some empathy for others, too). These places were diminishing before COVID, and I feel that their preservation is all the more vital, now, when places like museums, libraries, and theaters are shuttered indefinitely.
There’s something that gives me pause in posting this picture of this alpine vista and all but saying, this is what we’re missing! Don’t you see! Why are Americans obsessed with living in cities when they could be forming intimate, heterogeneous communities in proximity to places like this? I understand that not *everyone* can access the outdoors—that’s a pretty ableist take—and also that if everyone *were* to live in proximity to these spaces, they’d probably be overrun and not very well taken care of, and that my everyday view is vacation for so many… but still, I wonder if, in the absence of regular meeting grounds, public lands might serve as a respite to the suffocation of a life lived mostly online, or otherwise in self-selecting, insular circles.
By the time we ascended the mountain, we’d lost our words. After snow piles and rock scrambles, we had just one desire: to glimpse the lake, where we would hastily eat lunch and head back down. Near the base of the peak, we came across a small alpine lake. It flowed into a stream that dropped 3,000 feet below, and the grass around it was a surprising yellow-green through which pink flowers burst. “This is it!” Yaron squealed. “Kind of,” we said, and kept climbing through the snow.
Another ten minutes and we were there. But our desires, it turned out, were in vain: by the time we found a smooth rock to sit on, a thick fog had rolled in. The lake was starting to disappear.