I’m at an arts center in Brussels, waiting to see a movie and trying to look Belgian. Or at least not American. Or at least not like an American who’s here without purpose, floating through this city for a few days because, for the first time in many years, she happens to be in Europe. Because I know almost nothing about actually beingBelgian, though, my strategy is basically just to look bored. As if, like the other theatergoers, I’m here simply to support the arts festival that’s taking place, not cataloguing the hip crowd of people chattering around me in French and Dutch, nor analyzing their sensibly edgy way of dressing, nor contemplating the drizzling rain outside the wall of windows that covers the tourist pubs and designer clothing boutiques with a faint gray haze. As if everything is vaguely pleasing but ordinary. There’s something childlike both in my desire to hide and the belief that it is necessary and possible to do so, and I find myself wondering if the skittishness that comes over me when I travel is a version of what everyone feels when she is alone and in a foreign place, or if this feeling speaks to some larger weakness specific to me.

That Friday, in preparation for the storm, we leave work in the middle of the day. We fill our cars with gasoline, stock up on coffee and alcohol, check out books from the library, and then come home to peer out our windows and stare up at the sky. This is just snow—thin gray streaks of ordinary snow—but I can’t help it: I’m transfixed.

All night on the local news, the broadcasters glimmer with anticipation. More than a foot, they predict, maybe two. They roll through the highways in news vans while warning us to stay inside. They spend several minutes interviewing a woman about the plastic shovel she is standing in line to purchase. They have the happy unhurried look about them that newscasters often do in the days right before Christmas when they have been granted a reprieve from the stories of gunshots and house fires in order to report on Santa Claus and Christmas lights—a momentary pause in which none of us are asked to care about anything larger than what a child would see.

My sister lives in southern Illinois in a town of about 15,000 people called Mt. Vernon, a small town surrounded by acres of empty fields, harvested and shaved bare for the winter. In the villages on either side of the town, mini oil drills bob up and down in the front lawns of small houses and most of the bars have posters tacked to their doors that say “Hunters Welcome” in safety-vest orange. Mt. Vernon itself, though, sits at the intersection of highway 64 and highway 57, and the scenery is often what you’d expect to find at any other small-town stop on a road trip across the middle of the country: hotels, gas stations, fast food, two Mexican restaurants, a Kroger grocery store with a solemn pledge of good service stenciled on the glass window above the shopping carts.  

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I keep wondering what is strange and what is merely unfamiliar—what is truly inexplicable and what I simply don’t yet understand. For instance, for months, airships from the Aberdeen Proving Ground have floated on the edge of the skyline—two fish-shaped blimps invisibly tethered to the ground, wobbling the way a balloon would travel if it were tied to a post and caught up in the wind. They belong to a military surveillance project being developed by Raytheon to scan the Eastern Seaboard for cruise missiles. For months, I told almost everyone I met about the airships, trying to shock someone, but they almost always shrugged. “I saw those,” they said. “I thought they were weather balloons.”

It’s a small boat with no ladder and so we board by wading into the water, grabbing hold of the edge and pulling ourselves up. Passengers help each other heave themselves forward; a couple older women get lifted like children. Unlike the boat that brought us here, there is no manifest, no recording of passport numbers, no printed tickets—but there is space—kind of—and life jackets, and the men who work on this boat have agreed to take us back to the main port for a reasonable price. The other boats—the one that brought us here and the larger, shinier ones that look more like the ones that brought us here—are full, and it is three thirty, a half hour past the time we have been told all of the boats will be gone.