Some Tour Guides I Have Known

I'm a historian, so I naturally spend a lot of time taking tours of old stuff. Houses, prisons, libraries, castles, palaces, battlefields, forts, churches, meeting houses - chances are, if it's old and you can string one backward-walking guide and ten to twenty be-fannypacked tourists through it, I've toured it. I've also toured non-historical things - ice cream factories, chocolate factories, creameries, breweries, distilleries, caves - and it is, I believe, due to this vast touring experience that a pattern has slowly started to make itself clear to me, like one of those magic eye paintings that were all the rage about 10 years ago. A pattern that I hope, by sharing, might enable others to gird themselves for what's to come the next time they find themselves standing in a semi-circle, surrounded by strangers, staring at another stranger, in a place where they would not normally be allowed to go.


First, I should say this. I do not, as a rule, enjoy tours of this sort. Partly this is because, as Sarah Vowell points out in her wonderful book Assassination Vacation, tour guides - and the people who listen to tour guides - are often obsessed with "the thingness of things", to the detriment of anything truly interesting or provocative about the items they're displaying. Thus, for instance, if you tour Independence Hall in Philadelphia, you are likely to have it pointed out to you which quill was the quill used to pen this old document, which chair was the chair this famous patriot sat in, which desks were actually in this room when the Constitutional Convention sat, etc. Your fellow tourists, moreover, are likely to pump your guide for even more information regarding which of these items is authentic, what happened to them in the years between the events in which they are implicated and their current location, and all sorts of other irrelevant and frankly rather dull nonsense that enhances your own understanding of the period, people, or issues at stake during these events not at all. Is this really the pillow on which Lincoln's blood spilled after he was shot? Who cares! How did his assassination impact the course of postwar Reconstruction and the social/political conditions of the postbellum South? What did America's first presidential assassination do to the political culture of the country generally? How has Lincoln's legacy been contested, reinterpreted, and revised over the years? Why, for that matter, was this pillow saved? That's what I want to know.


I realize that I'm being supremely unfair to all the people out there who are not professional historians - and, let's face it, there are quite a few non-historians on this planet. After all, most people are taught that "history" is simply a story about things that happened in the past, and that all they have to do to understand this "history" is to memorize the story and spit it back on the test. Once you've got the story, you've got all you need. There's no sense that the story might be incomplete, its meanings contestable, its purposes ideological. This sort of thing can be quite pernicious - in America the dominant historical narrative we receive about our country's relentless march of progress and freedom has led directly to a widespread belief in American exceptionalism and indirectly to all sorts of terrible things in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan - and it is reinforced by the way history is presented on historical tours. But I realize I'm fighting a losing battle here, so I'll move on.


Another reason I dislike tours of this sort is that they go against my very strong desire, while traveling, to take things at my own pace and to explore what I want to explore. This is also why just thinking about package vacations, resorts, bus tours, or cruises makes me break out in shingles. If I wanted my time to be managed by others I'd move into an assisted living community. If I wanted someone else to decide what I should be seeing and what I should be thinking about what I should be seeing, I'd stay home and watch the Travel Channel. Granted, often a tour guide (or, more frequently, a handheld audio guide) will tell me things that I wouldn't otherwise know, and sometimes that bit of knowledge will actually enhance my experience of a place, but all too often I find myself moping around at the back of the group, staring listlessly at a fireplace or a Louis XIV chair, while some half-literate hayseed asks the guide if she could explain one more time just how short a person would have to be to fit in a bed that size.


It should be obvious by now that another of my objections to guided tours has to do with the people one often finds oneself forced to share a tour with. There seems to be something about guided tours that attracts the gormless, the corny, the chatty, and the elderly. The sorts of people one encounters on guided tours are what I envision the whole of Jay Leno's audience to be like: impervious to irony, none too sharp, and - above all - easily amused. I have been astounded by the glee with which my fellow tourists invariably greet even the cheesiest and most threadbare of tour-guide jokes (which all come, I am convinced, from the same handbook), as if our civilization were still bogged down on our path of comedic development somewhere between Bob Hope and Jonathan Winters. But then again, maybe I'm just revealing how little time I spend around average Americans in non-guided-tour contexts.


Anyway, the pattern. Here's what I've discovered. There are essentially two types of tour guides: Professionals and Enthusiasts. Professionals are, of course, people who are getting paid for giving the tours. They may or may not have any real interest in or knowledge about the places/people/things they're discussing - they're there to draw a paycheck, and their continued ability to draw a paycheck is often dependent on the feedback their bosses receive about their performance. Often a Professional's presentation will be smoothly polished, his timing impeccable, his jokes well-practiced and well-placed. If the Professional happens to be Irish, he will often have an exaggerated accent calculated to meet the expectations of American tourists whose knowledge about Ireland comes chiefly from Riverdance and Darby O'Gill and the Little People. If the Professional happens to be working at Independence National Park, he will often look like Benjamin Franklin.


For all the slickness of their presentations, however, there are several severe drawbacks to having a Professional show you around. First, they are often the worst offenders when it comes to retailing some master narrative about the significance of a place or a person - there's little you can do to get them to deviate from their script. Second, they will often lie to you - because they often have no real interest in the matter they're discussing, they will have no qualms about spouting off the most preposterous nonsense that will often be revealed as such should one ever take that same tour with a different guide. Third, they are often incable of improvising - any question that diverts them from their script will throw the whole performance off kilter. Fourth, they are often mean.


As an illustration of this last point, I'd point to my recent tour of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT. It's a beautiful place that I recommend you all visit, but be aware that there are very strict rules that at least one of the guides will enforce with a ruthlessness approaching the Hitlerian. From our initial interaction with her, in which she very condescendingly asked my father if there was something she might be able to help us with (we had inadvertantly wandered past the cash register and were straying dangerously close to the forbidden, paid-customer-only area), it was clear that she had a chip on her shoulder. Throughout the tour, she reminded us several times how carefully security was watching us (I pictured small gray men crouched behind walls with DDR-style listening devices fixed to their ears) and explained how her bosses would hold her accountable if any of us - heaven forbid! - strayed too far from the group or lingered too long in a particular room. She got exasperated when one of the tourists had to leave early (and therefore had to be escorted back to the visitor center), exasperated again when another tourist proved too corpulent to make it up the stairs (therefore requiring another escort), and downright hostile when a little old lady began unwrapping a cough drop on the last leg of the tour.



Mean Tour Guide: "I'm sorry, ma'am, you're not allowed to have food on the tour."


Harmless Little Old Lady: "But I'm going to cough."


MTG: "I'm sorry, but it's not allowed. And security is watching us, so those of you that are lingering behind in the other room are going to get me in trouble."


HLOL: "..."


The other type of tour guide is the Enthusiast. This will often be a volunteer, usually a retiree, who has decided to spend her time learning as much as she can about a place or person and giving tours while the people who get paid to look after the historic site do whatever else it is that they do. Enthusiasts are the most flexible and least dogmatic guides you can have, happy to travel down even the most tangential path if prompted to do so by a question from the crowd. They usually know their stuff and are truly excited to be sharing what they know with others. At their best they can impart great enthusiasm for whatever they're discussing; at their worst they can be completely incoherent, senile, and dreadfully dull.


A recent visit to Arrowhead, Herman Melville's house outside of Pittsfield, MA, was an example of an Enthusiast's tour at its best. Although we arrived 40 minutes after the last tour of the day, the guy running the place agreed to take us on an unofficial, private tour without us even asking him to do so. Would a Professional do that? No chance. He was genial, knowledgeable, and clearly excited about telling us things we didn't know about Herman Melville.



Touring Arrowhead


A recent example of an Enthusiast's tour at its worst, on the other hand, took place at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, which I visited with Meagan this past summer. The guide was an older, talkative lady who had clearly spent her golden years reading everything and anything she could about the library, the founders of the library, the founders' families, and the historical context surrounding key dates in the library's history. Indeed, so much information had she accumulated, and so little had she managed to process, that the tour was nothing more than a ceaseless torrent of words and phrases that may have been related to one another, and to the library, via some flickering synapse in our guide's mind, but whose connection to one another was completely lost on us. We did manage to ascertain, through repeated statements to this effect, that "World War I beggared Europe" and that "gloves destroy books", but what relationship these undoubtedly true statements had to the library we were touring was and is a complete mystery. By the end of the tour we were exhausted, bewildered, and probably slightly stupider than we had been an hour earlier. But then we managed to explore, on our own, a special exhibit devoted to Maurice Sendak and to learn what a strange, strange man he is - and that (almost) made it all better.


In sum, it's best to be able to gauge whether you're in for a Professional or an Enthusiast tour, and then to prepare yourself for what's in store. Better still, perhaps, to sneak into these places after hours and enjoy a completely unmediated experience.