#lasteuropeansummer

The day the EU announced its impending border closure, we let the news and its implications settle among us, casting a long, dark shadow over our imagined future travel. The middle of the century had been and gone and Europe still hadn’t met its 2050 zero emission targets. We supported Europe’s drastic attempt, of course we did. The planet had surpassed two degrees of warming and we knew what was coming. But which generation was going to suffer most from this long-awaited, drastic attempt to reach net zero? Who always got the shaft? Us Gen Beta twentysomethings, the ones who studied and saved and dodged climate catastrophes all our short adult lives. Growing up outside the EU, we dreamed of the sun-drenched moment we’d finally cast our eyes on the vistas we’d only seen on screens. We dreamed of those narrow alleyways and vast escarpments, ratty overnight trains pulling into Belgrade at six a.m., and white-haired women telling us to scram in a language we couldn’t understand, and a thousand other details we were yet to discover. For the environment, for our wallets, for our safety, we’d put off that iconic, life-defining European summer. Now that seemingly limitless travel window was closing permanently. We only had one summer left.

Wherever outside the EU we came from, we’d absorbed the belief that Europe was the standard-bearer of class, culture, civilization itself. Sure, curricula were updated to acknowledge existence beyond those Continental shores, but the changes weren’t that rapid or radical. Our educations had entitled us to stomp through those castles and forts, traipse among ruins and cobblestones, drink from fountains, photograph the preserved and the collapsing, the ostentatious and the ordinary. Because even the ordinary was spectacular in Europe. That’s what we’d been told.

So we committed to experiencing our very own last European summer—our first, our last, our only. No one knows the true origin of #lasteuropeansummer; too many claimed to have coined our beloved hashtag to pinpoint its first use. The movement that came to be known as #lasteuropeansummer proceeded collectively, enduring on whatever socials crashed and flickered back to life. It represented so many things to so many of us, but in the beginning #lasteuropeansummer only meant this: by any means necessary, we would seize this ultimate chance to pretend we existed in that bygone, oblivious era when European travel was expected and admired. Our lustrous young skin bared to the sizzling sun, we’d wring ourselves free of the tyranny of tomorrow’s weather forecast or the warning pings of our emergency apps. At the very least, we convinced ourselves, this trip was our birthright, a new requisite in our young, disaster-filled lives.

Eventually, #lasteuropeansummer held archives of our smiling faces next to screenshotted tickets—their tiny print, their confirmation of huge sums paid, their unfriendly departure times and durations—but raising those funds was torrential. No matter how hard some of us strived, working impossible hours, existing on pasta and fatigue, some still couldn’t afford it. Disclosing those final, devastating calculations, too many of our brethren posted maudlin goodbye and good luck videos. One played the French national anthem as they relayed their message, laughing through tears as if their heart would break.

Those of us who remained expressed our cognitive dissonance of barely coping financially, alongside the knowledge that our locations and lifestyle, our means and resources, put us within the top ten-percent income bracket worldwide. We were poor and rich at the same time. We could afford this exorbitant rate, but it drained our bank accounts. We bought a plane ticket equivalent to a down payment on a house, all to sit in a sardine can in the sky.

Some of us posted spreadsheets of our itineraries, while others boasted a strategy of winging it. We were young, after all. We dismissed the news and our parents, who said it would be too crowded, the weather too unstable, too many opportunists taking advantage of us unworldly wise. We assured each other that things would work out. Europeans would indulge us like the spoiled brats we were. The skies would not open with their characteristic devastation. The sun would tamp down its punishment, no sizzling bare feet or second degree burns on the backs of our necks. No invasions or coups, blockades or power outages. No supply chain disruption. No heat waves or load-shedding. No raping or pillaging, no violent protests or hazards of any kind to dampen our good time. #lasteuropeansummer was our space for blind ignorance and infinite possibility.

Our morning coffee chats, our Friday afternoon wind downs, our weekend get togethers revolved around #lasteuropeansummer. Who’s going? How are they paying for it? What’s their plan, their route, their reasoning? Our older colleagues and classmates bought us drinks and regaled us with their radiant European travel stories of yore. They played the victors in the competition over the chronological coincidence of birth. Their flared nostrils and unblinking eyes said it all: Europe will never be as good. On #lasteuropeansummer, we relayed these conversations with smirking emojis. But in the moment, we slurped our cappuccino foam, licked the salted rim of our margarita glasses, not even bristling at their false assumptions. For there was no doubt our #lasteuropeansummer would be pure, glistening magic, beyond words incredible. How could it not be? How could anyone not see that it had to be? #lasteuropeansummer was it; for us, nothing came after, the grand finale of a three-thousand-year-old story.

Our classmates and colleagues posed existential questions: What are you really looking for over there? Hoping to find yourself? They chuckled, bit their lips, hands sunk deep into their pockets. Yes, we smoothly replied, we would find ourselves, and more. Whatever there was to find, whatever traces of hope and history, clarity and wisdom there were to gather, we would scoop up in the palms of our hands and examine from every angle, like the sparkling facets of one of those diamonds created in a Latvian lab.

In private, we read several libraries’ worth of old guidebooks and vast histories, biographies and novels, as if, on arrival, we would be handed an entrance exam, as if this cram of knowledge was a matter of life or death. We learned phrases in our chosen European languages with the desperation of someone about to be torn away from their one true love. We made our impossible, necessary decisions, winnowing our options down to one region, one language, one country, building our trip around a theme, a trail, a singular pilgrimage. A name dangled in front of us years ago, a region our favorite aunt wished she could have returned to, a spot on a map we’d stare at as a kid for no good reason. A coast or a mountain range that thrust itself into our brains, pulsing there. It seemed to have been calling to us all this time.

In June, we posted our airport selfies: note our smooth, fresh faces, our bright, ignorant smiles, our gleaming white teeth. As we approached our gates, we remembered all the travelers who had come and gone before us. We carried the weight of being the last, like another item stuffed into our overstuffed, brand-name backpacks. We hoped to make those previous generations proud, but frankly, we aimed higher than that.

We needed blind ignorance to make it this far, but at those gates, as we stepped onto those planes, we suddenly let ourselves recognize that disaster would grasp us by the collars and shake us to the point of collapse, and beyond. This knowledge had been there all along, with our parents’ warnings, our colleagues’ sneers, the articles reporting the risks we’d face. We’d been through our own civil wars and water shortages, our floods and unbreathable air. But this could be worse, because of our own goddamn high expectations and because we were meant to be on holiday for Chrissake.

Other minor tragedies awaited. Some of us were about to fall in love and leave those loves behind forever, some of us would make enemies we’d never forget. We would lose our passports, abandon our friends, vomit in our beds, miss the sight we most wanted to see, learn more about ourselves than we ever wished to know. We knew there would be delays that would set us back for days. We would sweat and reek, and a shower would not be enough to rid us of the effects of that penetrating heat. We knew a flood would mean missing the attractions of one city, and lock-down orders would mean we’d miss another. We would see things—amazing things!—that we knew we could never see again. But at least we could see them once. If we were lucky. We proceeded onto our planes.

We knew that some of us would die.

Then we were gone. We were in the sky.  

Greece was burning. Venice was closed. Berlin was flooded. Food shortages in Romania and Bulgaria. A weevil infestation in France. Swine flu in Spain. Storm surges in Ireland. Rolling blackouts in the UK. The Adriatic turned hypersaline and was closed along the shores from Croatia to Albania. Civil unrest in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway was so severe that travel was not advised.

We learned early and wouldn’t forget: Don’t get invested here. Do not clamp any more catastrophes to your already stricken hearts. Our whole lives had been predicated on our own upheavals back home. #lasteuropeansummer was a salvage mission. Pure and simple. We advised each other to let the sights of those ostentatious main squares, the tinny ringing of those bell towers, the aromas of rose and lavender fields, the taste of silky cheese on flaky baguettes, the sandpaper touch of stone walls, arrange themselves as impenetrable pillars in our minds. We would put our blinkers on and avoid Europe’s unbearable tragedies so that we could return to our own.

We focused on what was right in front of us. We got our heads around walled cities, took in views from towers, genuflected at cathedrals and gawked at palaces. We hiked along mountain lakes, soaked in hot springs, and crossed old bridges. We spent a collective five-hundred thousand hours in museums, taking in stuffy portraits and somber abstracts and pottery shards behind glass cases. And as we viewed those amphitheaters and rounded arches, mosaic tiles and symmetrical columns, ancient stone and colored glass, we detected the Roman influences, the Ottomans, Venetians, and the Austro-Hungarians. We could literally see the blending of empires, the effects deposited layer by layer. We understood that borders were as meaningless now as they always were. Time and space merged, have always been merging, into the singular moment before us. We stared at a castle or a fort or the ancient walls surrounding an Old Town and understood the rise and fall of empires, of merchants and mothers, of young people like us. We came upon the obvious but revelatory conclusion: Europe is all one. We are all one, too. No matter where we come from, no matter if we will ever return. This, we strained to hold onto. For no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t unsee the flood-damaged buildings that crumbled and cracked, forests whose trees were colored in ash, or unhear the blaring air raid siren warning of extreme heat.

Overloaded buses and trains oversold their overpriced seats. There were battles among the tidal wave of travelers, altercations with drivers. Our misplaced aggression dissipated as we learned what awaited us: a crush of people at every border. We were camped in the overflow for days. The AI-controlled checkpoints were meant to be a breeze, but when, weeks before we arrived, hackers took over and opened the gates to tens of thousands of African migrants, the systems reverted to fully human operations, overseen by indifferent Europeans who, to put it mildly, took some measure of glee in our torture.

We bought threadbare sleeping bags and exorbitantly priced tents, half-charged electric fans. For more than the cost of a night at the Hilton, we rented space in the back of a van hooked up to a generator, blasting AC. We crooned the unceasing pop songs of that summer to pass those sticky nights and scalding mornings. No matter our blithe intentions before we got on that plane, now more than ever we grasped the gravity of our situations: this trip was never meant to be a gauzy blur of good times. No, this interminable wait to cross the border and all the other obstacles was integral to #lasteuropeansummer, the lore we would return with. One day, we would proclaim to our astonished grandchildren: We sweltered at the border between Croatia and Montenegro for days! We were trapped in a heat-shelter in Athens! We waded through the back alleys of Berlin in ankle deep water! Our young would beam at us in awe. Each afternoon, we watched placidly as kids from the same countries as us stuck close to their parents, their wide young eyes lighting upon the plastic trinkets offered by the market sellers who’d rushed to establish trade in these newly minted border camps. And we remembered being kids, all the plastic toys and cheap candies we coveted, all that trash. The world was ending back then, too, and it was still ending now. Except not yet. Just Europe, and just for us.

It was so sickeningly hot, we wondered how anyone survived. But this was #lasteuropeansummer, and we’d planned to wear minimal clothes (we’d left our bras at home) and to spend too much on bottled water anyway. Still, only a slim few of us got by without heat stroke, or worse. If we were lucky, we’d already made it through the border and laid in our quiet, dark hostel rooms with the lights off until the pressing in our brains dissipated. If we were unlucky, we were still at the border, heads pounding, vision narrowing to a pinprick, swampy bodies fainting. Wet-bulb heat warnings went off in every country in Southern Europe. We searched the names of our dead, pinning their posts to the top of our feed. People thought the young were indestructible, but no one would have guessed a pair of long-distance running champions would be among the first to collapse and die on their way to a heat-shelter in Bucharest. Survival was only a matter of chance.

Some days brought cooler weather, and we believed this was the turn, the extreme heat had passed and would not return until next year, when we were long gone. Our optimism was incredible. Because at every moment on #lasteuropeansummer, one of us was always waking up somewhere safe, overlooking a view replete with fragile, audacious beauty. Scrolling our posts, it was easy to remember that #lasteuropeansummer meant no day was like the day before or the day after. No day was like any day back home. We rose early and splurged on peaches at a produce market, relished a cliffside vista, a sprawling Austro-Hungarian city block, an old bridge that was blown up in a war and now repaired, the roiling, foamy sea. We met stray cats and avoided stray dogs. We waded in the cool of the Danube. Even places that were crumbling looked stunning. Even the mountains at the border where we were trapped stopped us in our tracks. Even sounds of shouting in other languages sounded melodic, unencumbered.

But we kept needing to do normal things, like eat and sleep and shit, clean our clothes, wash our faces and brush our teeth. (No one bothered to floss.) Multiple trips to the pharmacy for our heat rashes and fungal infections, our blistered sunburns and diarrhea. All this took time when we should have been accumulating experiences. Climbing towers and squinting at the view. Pressing our way through twisting alleyways. Clinging to our packs worn at the front while slogging from one end of the Old Town to the other to dip ourselves in a slice of cool water. But maybe, just like the other setbacks to our careful plans, managing our bodily needs were the experiences to cherish. Shitting in Europe was surely different than shitting back home? The pointless debate emerged, as did #bestplacestoshitineurope.

Whether we were shitting or sauntering among the swells of people in a weathered but unabashedly stunning main square, we tried to glimpse the fleeting, subterranean meaning of our #lasteuropeansummer. We were desperate to return with some profound insight, a lesson to steer the rest of our lives. Not a fact or a story from the past, nothing to impress friends on a trivia night. We wanted something unique to us, this time, that would forever speak to our very core. Was that too much to ask?

In the meantime, we absorbed more contradictory lessons. Among so much that was ancient, where else could we ever feel so young? This place was made for us. When we leave, Europe’s monuments might as well shrivel and dim without our mesmerized awe. Their people would turn sluggish and depleted without our unflinching glee. And also this: We were totally extraneous. When we leave, Europe won’t give a shit about us.

We’d budgeted for souvenirs, but what could possibly memorialize this mammoth experience? When we had wrinkled, downturned mouths and pouches under our eyes, would a magnet cut it? The sentimental among us pocketed pebbles and feathers, or painstakingly dried flowers. Others rinsed shampoo bottles or sturdy disposable coffee cups, a tiny jar that once held raspberry jam. We tore fabric from cheap pillowcases in our cheap hostels, peeled beer labels from their bottles. We stuffed spoons and tiny bars of soap, candy wrappers and meaningless price tags into our backpacks, anything to show our friends back home, our future children, if we had them, who could never come.

Local guides seized this final moment to offer tours at all hours. Gathered in front of their monuments, our guides spun similar tales of their brave who led wars and revolutions; they smiled knowingly while sharing their people’s adorable idiosyncrasies (usually having to do with consuming homemade spirits, ha-ha!). Our guides spoke with such theatrical pride, as if they believed their measly stories would make our sweaty, awe-filled day complete. When they concluded, leaving us at some colossal statue or commemorative park, we stiffed them on a tip. We did not sacrifice so much, come all this way, just to admire these proud young Europeans and their history. We spent double our life savings for the chance to see ourselves in their stories, our own history entwined in theirs. We came to marvel at reflections of ourselves.

So we literally looked in the mirrors of public bathrooms that we’d paid three Euros to enter, four if we wanted a square of toilet paper, and our eyes were shining, twinkling even. We sat on tinder dry grass with the friend we travelled with or a new one we made along the way and stared at a sky littered with stars, the deep shadow of a dramatic mountain and red rooftops in the distance. We’d never be here again. We bought those cheap spirits the tour guides were so pleased with and swaggered into clubs, where the bass was loud enough to purify the depths of our souls. We basked and gyrated. We pressed and roved. We found people to fuck. The gold standard fuck was a European, someone we would never have the chance to fuck again. To our disappointment, most often we found each other.

By the end of our weeks or months, we knew that a walled city, a blue lagoon, a dramatic cliffside or a European fuck just wasn’t enough. And the time it took to get from one place to the next, even if there were miraculously no border issues? It was a lot. The traffic, the heaving teems. The halfway places we tried to avoid, to forget, the indistinct highways, the small, insignificant (to us) towns where no one spoke even the broken English we’d begun to understand. It almost wasn’t worth it, we thought but never posted. That’s when it was time to leave.

As we entered those planes to take us home, we remembered the night we carried a bottle of scotch under one arm and stumbled up Arthur’s Seat to bask in the peach and purple riot of a sunset over Edinburgh Castle. When we sprinted to the station in Ljubljana and just slipped onto the oversubscribed train to Trieste, squeezing into the aisles and contorting ourselves for hours. And when we sat on the steps of Diocletian’s Palace in Split, watching tourists snap selfies and sip at outdoor cafes in the dying light. How young we were, how appreciative, how uncertain that our trip would work out, that we would make it back home. For what? We didn’t know. But that was the night we had everything.