OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019 125How a season of magical landscapes and
unpronounceable words inspired a life in travelBY AMY ALIPIO
ILLUSTRATION BY
GRACIA LAMI
n a few weeks I’ll be traveling to Wales to attend the
hundredth birthday celebration of my uncle, who
lives in a village on the Gower Peninsula, overlooking
a wide sandy bay. The first time I visited him and
my aunt there, I was 14. That summer, I developed
a serious crush on Wales.
The place appealed to a bookish introvert like
me. I was deep into my King Arthur phase (to be
replaced by my current Harry Potter phase), and the legendary
ruler had connections throughout Wales. Caerleon is the sup-
posed site of Camelot. Merlin is said to have come from the town
of Carmarthen. One day, my aunt and uncle took me and my
younger brother pony trekking on Cefn Bryn Common, a windy
heath of bracken and gorse flanking the
sandstone backbone of Gower. There
we came across Arthur’s Stone, said to
have grown from a pebble tossed out of
the king’s shoe.
Wales’s biggest national gathering
is the annual Eisteddfod, a festival of
poetry and music. Bardic tradition is a
point of official pride. Literary celebrity
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, the
gateway city for Gower. (He called it an
“ugly, lovely town.”)
My uncle introduced me to the Welsh
alphabet, with its unusual characters
such as ll, which appears in everyday
nouns like llan (church) and names like Llewellyn. A Welshman
later told me the sound is pronounced “like the engine of your
car starting.”
That summer was the first time this suburban girl began
to think about words to describe the natural world. Wales is a
landscape of imagination, writ with magic and chivalry. From
the Gower Peninsula’s Worm’s Head, a serpentine headland
that is the perfect spot for a sunset stroll, to misty Tal-y-llyn
Lake in Snowdonia National Park in the north, this is scenery to
stock a dictionary with. Each new word I unearthed—cairn, tor,
marsh mallow, oystercatcher—led to more words—bryn, cwm,
dyffryn—until it was a landslide of language. Name it and the
world seemed brighter, more knowable, but at the same time
profoundly mysterious.
The fact that my uncle was as bookish as I was cemented
my attachment to a country that celebrates poets. Althoughhe was of English heritage, he had grown up in Wales. He and
my Filipina aunt, my father’s sister, still live in his book-filled
family home. Many afternoons, we’d sit reading in their small
glass-enclosed porch overlooking the garden. Usually the proper
British gentleman, soft-spoken and witty, he’d let out some mild
expletive while commenting about some national politician.
He wasn’t the type to reminisce about his years serving in the
Royal Air Force during World War II, but he would talk about
playing the organ at Cambridge or why he didn’t buy tickets
for an all-tuba concert at the Gower chamber music festival he
and my aunt patronize every year: “I couldn’t visualize that. It
was a whole evening, wasn’t it, of tuba?” In 2016 his most recent
book, a history of maritime trade in Australia, was published.
I’ve returned to Wales several times
since that summer, but I haven’t gone as
often as I’d like. On my most recent visit, I
came across a heart-shaped piece of inky
black Welsh slate in a gift shop, with the
word hiraeth painted on it. I asked what
it meant and was told it didn’t trans-
late to one equivalent word in English.
Hiraeth conveys nostalgia, yearning for
something lost, homesickness—but not
merely an ache for the four walls of home
but for something bigger, a land-longing,
a people-longing.
I ended up buying the souvenir; it
spoke to the way I feel about Wales and
family when I’m not there. And I like the idea of a word so over-
flowing with meaning that it takes a bunch of other words to
begin to understand it.
Ever since that first Welsh summer of legends and beauty,
words and travel have been inseparable for me. In both leisure
and work—including 18 years at this magazine—I am forever
in search of precisely the right words to illuminate places. I
learned back then that these words, strung together to create
true stories, can forge rock-hard bonds of soulful connection.
So here’s to wheeling a hundred times around the sun, Uncle
Howard! I thank you for giving me Wales—and all the wonder
and words that have followed. Words, especially, such as hiraeth:
remembrance, longing, love, gratitude.Senior editor AMY ALIPIO ( @amytravels) has yet to meet an
afternoon tea in Britain she didn’t like.A Child’s
Summerin
Wales