Nous cherchons les oiseaux.

On May 18, 2002, 12 intrepid birders from the Pacific Northwest boarded a plane for a two-week adventure in France, sponsored by the Audubon Society of Portland. Our trip leaders, Bob Lockett and Adrienne Wolf-Lockett, found themselves trying to "herd cats" as we made our way from Paris to Provence to the Pyrenees and back. Trying to meet the expectations and needs of 12 people without disappointing anyone, and in a foreign language no less, almost proved more than they could handle. Fortunately, they still managed to ensure that each of us had a delightful trip. Indeed, 1 think I can say the trip met every expectation I had for it. These excerpts from my journal of the trip focus on my thoughts about language, image, expectations, and the way people interact with a foreign environment.

And so it begins. As I arrive at the airport, I imagine the people around me going off to mundane destinations like Minneapolis or Memphis. But me? I go to France. No more time to brush up on handy tourist phrases, no more dithering over what to bring and what to leave home. Only a few moments of quiet pensive time to look ahead and behind and indulge in anticipation and speculation.

Anticipation of a thousand new sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, the feel of France under my literal and figurative fingertips. As a study in the ineluctable habit of abstraction and the potential for consequent disappointment, this trip tops the list for me.

Who hasn't fallen under the spell of romantic Paris, city of light? But for me, it goes way beyond the cliches of romance novels. My love affair with the French language began in my teens when I learned to make the eu and oi sounds from Madame Erselchuk in the ninth grade. Her lovely accent and odd European habits of speech sparked my interest in the relationship between language and thought. She "saw" gender in the objects around her! She simply said the French names of large numbers without stopping to puzzle out the cents and milles! When she counted on her fingers, she started with her thumb!

For the first time in my naive life, I realized that people speaking other languages UNDERSTAND what they say and think about situations and objects just as I do, but with sounds that make no sense to me!

Ever since those adolescent exercises and observations, I have kept my acquaintance with French fresh by reading whatever bits of it come my way. I especially like the pamphlets that come with new appliances or electronic equipment. With these, I can validate my understanding and even expand my vocabulary, using the Rosetta stone of juxtaposed instructions in English and French.

These idle studies also reinforce my perceptions about the interaction of language and thought. Sometimes English can say in a few short words what takes fully decked-out clauses in French. Less often, French excels in the economy of phrasing. Even more interesting to me, some phrases just don't translate well at all. Whole sentences get rearranged, paraphrased, or even skipped altogether. And yet, at the end of the paragraph, the same concept emerges -- don't use this near water, insert tab A into slot B, etc.

So French and language tangle up in my head, both closely associated with the very heart of my personal life view -- that meaning occurs in the head and not in the word.

And my mind generates plenty of meaning about France, and Paris in particular. Like many people, I carry around any number of vivid and redolent abstractions, largely triggered by French place names -- Gare de Lazare, Mont St. Michel, Aix-en-Provence and on and on. With only words and pictures to go on, I have crafted magic out of scraps of information. How can the magic stand up to the reality? Then again, given that meaning occurs in the same head that created the magic, how can it not?

Day begins fitfully in a crowded plane -- my first European day. I have received the assignment of documenting this day for the group, for eventual inclusion in a group journal. Nice idea. All night a tiny LCD screen in the seatback ahead of me has offered, on my command, a variety of maps and simulations of our path across the ocean and our position relative to the Earth below. The various statistics, wind speed, arrival time, etc., presented in English, then French, and in miles, then kilometers, provides a nice transition to the moment when we will see only French signs without recourse to a handy translation below.

After an agreeable if understated breakfast, I observe my fellow travelers stirring in preparation for arrival in Paris. We each receive a card of debarkation to fill out, for many the first clear taste of what a different language implies. Even with English translations, this card generates quite a bit of angst and susurration in the plane. People seem bent on misunderstanding, or simply haven't grasped the idea that the concepts persist even when the verbiage varies. The card only asks the most basic of demographic questions, but the unfamiliar phrasing disorients those not already oriented to look for clues to meaning.

Then suddenly France appears below us, a cubist quilt of cultivated fields, dotted with villages, stretching out over rolling hills and plains. The geometry recalls the Midwestern US but with a certain lack of linearity, which gives a hint of the French character so often referred to in guidebooks and travel magazine articles.

Then touchdown. Je suis arrive.

The next few hours blur together. From the airport, we drive on highways that look a lot like US highways except for the names on the signs. Then we catch a glimpse of Sacre Coeur and I know I have arrived in a very different place. I begin to see names I recognize for some reason -- Clichy, rue de la Resistance, Bois de Bologne and so on -- and the reality of my surroundings begins to sink in.

We arrive in tiny rue Cler where we will stay for two nights. The rue is filled with markets -- fruites, fromage, pain, yin, each a little shop devoted to a single type of consumable. I have the first of many small realizations about the daily differences that distinguish our American lives from the lives of the French.

The people in my group have a wide range of French skills and furthermore a wide range of interest in learning more. Eventually all of them decide to learn at least the basics -- bonjour, merci, pardon, and so on. I note that most have an image of something that defines France for them, each looking to match their image with the source. I suspect that part of the measure of the success of a trip like this derives from the extent to which these images match the source, or to which one can accept that they do not.

I discover another interesting aspect of the experience in the presence of "frenchifled" foreign terms. Seeing words like "libonais" or "thailandais" made me realize that I still thought of "Lebanese" or "Thai" as the "real" names for those cultures, when in fact my name for them no more adequately sounds like what they call themselves than do the French terms.

As for France meeting, exceeding, or falling short of my expectations -- well, I find myself thinking that I should feel more conscious of the fact that I am in France, here, that I am in a foreign country. Except for some largely superficial signals, I don't feel constantly conscious of the strangeness of this place, not like I did in Costa Rica for example. One might attribute some of that to the wildly tropical vegetation of Costa Rica, so different from anything I had ever seen, or to the timing of my visit, right after a deep personal loss, which made everything strange and unreal. But I also think that I have spent so much time in my life imagining France that I do not find it as unfamiliar as other places.

However, mindfulness helps keep alive the sense of a different place. While many trees and plants resemble those at home, many do not, and the way the French plant their fields and tend their yards differs quite a bit. And of course, the buildings differ hugely, especially in Paris, where many buildings date from centuries before the US even existed. Even gas stations in some areas attempt to retain the old styles. Outside the city centers, they do have shopping malls, grocery and video stores, and even M. Bricolet (a huge do-it-yourself home remodeling store like Home Depot). But even modern housing developments in Provence use the brick and tile standards of the area, with wooden shutters and deep-set casement windows.

Of course, the signs confound one's feeling of comfort and familiarity. Each action that involves a sign takes longer, runs in slow motion as one translates at least enough to comprehend the concept intended. You might think this would increase mindfulness, and in some ways it does (more on that later). But more often, one leaps to conclusions just as readily as when reading English, maybe even more so, as soon as some bit of information comes to consciousness. Without a frame of reference, one often locks onto the only word of a sign that looks familiar and with a deft bit of folk translation, one extracts totally erroneous meaning without a second thought.

It does increase mindfulness, however, when one takes the time to read and translate the whole sign (or needs to, as with a list of tonight's specials posted outside a restaurant). At that point, several understandings can emerge, if one has some luck. For one, I understand the purpose of the sign -- no parking on Tuesdays, we welcome you to our store, etc. Second, I learn a little bit more about French phrasing or habit. Third, with luck, I get an insight into the differences and similarities between languages. I have discovered new semantic connections I hadn't known before and some divergences as well. Simple things give pleasurable insights. For example, on the TGV bullet train, in the washroom, I read the multilingual sign for Hand Dryer and rediscovered the linguistic maxim that words for common terms like hand will differ more than words adopted for trade or related to later technologies, such as bank or television.

I also note that despite the best efforts of l'Academie Francais to control the language, the French have not only taken many English words for their own, they also adapt words and play with them far more than I knew. In a bank window, I saw a sign for a combination auto loan and insurance policy advertised as "IZI-AUTO." One would say this phonetically as "easy auto," doubly interesting as it uses an English word in a French advertisement, but transliterates it to ensure the French pronunciation.

Most of my fellow travelers attempt now and then to equate, or compare and contrast, this experience with others they have had, a normal human approach to life experiences. In the case of travel, this involves comparing the current place and moment with moments they have had in other foreign countries. If while birding, we see a flamingo, one of the group will say, "Oh, there are three species of flamingoes in Africa." Another might sit down to dinner and relate a story about eating a similar dinner in Bora Bora or London. The less well-traveled either compare the moment to something at home, or, more interesting to me, observe that this is not like anything they have ever experienced.

But we do have much to learn. It seems like every toilet we encounter flushes differently, and ordering food in restaurants involves both translating the menus and understanding the cooking terms. Most people in France have never seen birders before, so we get a lot of stares and uncertain comments. "Nous cherchons les oiseaux," we say, if we can remember the phrase in the pressure of the moment. Fortunately the well-known French civic pride overcomes any suspicions we have generated. Most of the people we meet seem genuinely proud that we had come to France to see their birds, even if they would never have thought to look at such things themselves.

The issues of communication come up constantly. Partly because our leaders have never led a trip before, and partly because of the usual failures of group interaction, we have small crises, confusions, and cacophonies which lead to a variety of resentments and rebellions. Some of us (most? all?) forget that the leaders have planned this entire trip remotely -- via e-mail and the internet -- and that they had no prior knowledge of the various skills and interests of the participants. And, most important, we often forget (or don't think of the fact) that we all communicate using human language, with all its flaws and biases. No wonder misunderstandings occur.

We also forget that we play, or should play, an active role in our conversations, questioning the speaker and our own perceptions of the spoken. Often I hear people recounting an incident, which I too witnessed, and I hear from them quite different details than I noted. Unfortunately, I see little evidence that the other person perceives or understands that our stories differ legitimately, that the differences might stem from something besides an attempt at duplicity.

Suddenly, or so it seems, we arrive back in Paris for our last day of sight-seeing before heading home. Many new topics of interest occur to me -- the notion of sight-seeing and how many people consider that they have "seen" France if they tick off the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Louvre. I feel I have seen some more than that, both geographically and culturally, but I know I have not seen the France that the native knows. However, I also believe that the native does not "know" France either -- many never leave the locale of their birth, and when they do have to move to find work, they often only travel 30 to 100 kilometers to the next big city. Furthermore, most French people never visit their own country's wild areas, which I did visit. In two weeks in some of the best birding areas of Europe, we saw a total of perhaps five or ten birders, and most of those were not French.

As far as I have seen, most French people focus on other people and the works of people, to the near exclusion of the natural world. Even in the wildest places we went, we saw the majority of other visitors at the human-created sites -- Roman ruins, castles, gift shops etc.

Talk about cognitive dissonance -- in the narrow cobbled streets of Arles, ancient Roman city and occasional home of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, one finds every intersection stuffed with shoppers. Glossy, haut-couture shops mold themselves into the irregular stony niches that once housed the natives of Arles. And nearly every one of these shops sells lavender in some form, usually in little sachets of "typical" Provencal fabric. Most shops reverberate with the mechanical chirping of windup toy cicadas, modeled on a local species that one can only actually hear out in the marshes and meadows where no one goes!

So I end my trip as I began it, suspecting that the success of such a trip rests largely on images and how you manage them. Travelers, ask yourself:

1. How many of your starting images come from reliable sources vs. romantic novels, movies, and personal bias? What did you do to verify the accuracy of your images?

2. How hard have you tried to recognize that your images cannot perfectly predict your actual experience?

3. How important do you consider the stability of your images vs. their accuracy? Can you willingly modify your images or do you react emotionally and resent the distance between the actual experience and your image?

4. How much have you tried to adapt your images to what you encounter and how much effort do you put into measuring and understanding the gaps and distances between your ideas and your experiences?

Epilogue 

I have returned home, glad to see my house and my city but missing the glories and delights of France. Herein I note another interesting aspect of image and image management, so to speak -- the way we remember things and edit them as we remember. Already the few uncomfortable moments and disturbing images I encountered on my trip have begun to transform into minor passing thoughts, or into anecdotes to tell at parties or in the office. And now I realize that the wonderful moments go that way as well.

What I experienced as a continuous river of actions, sights, sounds, tastes and so on, slowly disintegrates into a series of remembered frames like a movie simulating action. And then further, into a picture album of still photos, each with a story to tell but lacking so many dimensions that it fails monumentally to deliver the original experience.

So I began with a mental picture book of images borrowed from experience and education, originally from someone else's life. And I end with a new picture book, my own this time but still only fragments. I feel very lucky to have taken the time to mindfully enhance my experiences in France, both because it enhanced the moments themselves, and because I feel I have richer memories, more fully textured than they might have been otherwise.

Indeed I consider these the best souvenirs of all: new insights into the nature of language and human thought, and a new appreciation of travel as a lens for examining how mental imagery affects our experiences.

For pictures, a group journal, and the official bird list for the trip, please visit the unofficial web site for the Audubon France trip at http://home.attbi.com/~millerstwo/audubonfrance.htm.

NORA MILLER *

* Nora Miller, who lives in Portland, Oregon, and works as information systems manager for a small government agency, serves as ISGS VP/Cyberspace, and also edits the new Glimpse column in ETC. English translation of title: We look for birds. The author notes: "I would like to dedicate this article to my sister, Martha McKinney, without whose love and encouragement I might never have made it to France and back. Martha died July 21, 2002, after a short illness."