Why some places stay with us

I have been to a number of places famous for being unforgettable, and I have forgotten most of them. There was a cathedral, I think, with a ceiling people lie on the floor to look at. There was a gorge with a railing and a coin-operated telescope. I have photographs proving I stood in front of both. What I remember with real clarity, on the other hand, is a bus station in a river town where I waited four hours in the rain for a connection that never came, and a woman behind the ticket window peeling an orange in a single unbroken spiral.

I have thought about this for years, mostly while walking, which is when I do most of my thinking and all of my getting lost. My conclusion, for what it is worth, is that the places that stay with us are not chosen on merit. Beauty helps, but it is not decisive. What decides is something closer to timing.

Begin with the hour of arrival. Places are not constant; they have moods that run on a clock, and the mood you meet first tends to be the one you keep. Arrive in a town at noon and you meet its public face — shops open, square full, everyone doing what the guidebook says they do. Arrive at five in the morning off a night train, legs stiff, coffee not yet found, and you meet the town before it has put its face on. Shutters half up. A man hosing down the sidewalk outside a café, the water sliding in a sheet toward the gutter. Delivery vans double-parked with their hazard lights blinking. The town is not performing for you yet, and you are not yet performing as a visitor. For an hour or so you are just two strangers who happen to be awake.

I would trade almost any midday view for that hour. It is why I take the inconvenient train whenever I can, and why my traveling companions have, over the years, grown fewer.

Then there is weather, which we treat as an obstacle to travel and which is in fact most of what we bring home. Weather is the thing that makes a place physical. Sunshine flattens; it is lovely but generic, and one sunlit terrace in memory blurs easily into the next. Rain, wind, fog, the heaviness of air before a storm — these press a place onto the skin. I remember a hill town in the south almost entirely as the clatter of a loose shutter and the smell of wet stone on the stairs up to my room. I could not tell you what the main square looked like. I could tell you exactly how cold the banister was.

This is an awkward argument for anyone who sells holidays. Nobody books a week away hoping for a gale. But the evidence of my own memory is stubborn. The places I return to in my head are the ones that made me slightly uncomfortable — that required a coat I had not packed, or a doorway to shelter in, or a long conversation with a stranger about whether it would ever stop.

The third thing is the hardest to discuss without sounding sentimental, so I will be brief. Who you were when you arrived matters more than where you arrived. A place met at a hinge in your life — the first trip alone, the week after a funeral, the summer before a move you had not yet admitted to — absorbs some of that moment. It becomes a container for a version of you that no longer exists anywhere else.

I was twenty-three when I waited in that bus station. I had very little money and a strong opinion about nearly everything, and I had just understood, somewhere around the third hour, that the plan I had made for my life was not going to survive contact with it. The woman with the orange knew none of this. She slid a segment to me through the gap under the glass, and I took it, and that is the whole story. But I cannot think of that town without being, briefly, twenty-three again, which is more than any cathedral has managed.

This is also why going back so often disappoints. We return expecting the place, and find the place was only half of it. The other half was us, at a particular hour, in a particular weather, and that half did not wait around. The bus station, I am told, is now a supermarket. I have not checked. I would rather not.

If there is any advice in this — and I am suspicious of travel writing that ends in advice — it is to stop trying so hard to make places memorable. You cannot schedule an imprint. You can only make room for one. Arrive at odd hours. Go out in the weather instead of waiting for it to clear. Walk without a fixed destination, and leave enough slack in the day for something unplanned to happen. Then pay attention to what you are feeling as well as what you are seeing. The place will do the rest.

Or it won’t, and you will remember the train home instead. That happens too. I have a very clear memory of a vending machine on a platform somewhere in the north that sold only soup.