Knowing my penchant for summer sabbaticals, my editor suggested that for this issue I write a “travel column.” What, after all, is architecture without travel? Buildings don’t travel to you, you have to go to them. And yet, a grand tour of iconic edifices was not really part of my itinerary. I was in search not of momentous monuments but monumental moments to structure my sightseeing story.
My journey starts in Maine. After a long drive, I power down my Prius at the edge of a pond in sprawling Baxter State Park. My friend Lucy, whose family owns the small island out ahead (the holding predates the creation of the park), is waiting in an aluminum dinghy. She dutifully ferries me to one of the rustic cabins built by her forebears. There is no service and no Wi-Fi, just shelves and shelves of dusty books.
Discussing local points of interest, Lucy tells me about a beaver dam at one end of the pond. “You know, beavers are my favorite animal,” I say. At home on land and in the water, these diligent rodents build large and intricate contemporary compounds that would merit coverage in Architectural Digest and Log alike. Their skills as architects are outmatched only by their skills as engineers, something few of their two-legged counterparts can claim. The grandest of beaver works, in northern Alberta, shores up a seventeen-acre lake and is visible from space. Also, they’re cute.
I set out for the dam on a paddleboard. Sergio, a broodingly handsome Basque physics professor at UCLA who is also a guest of Lucy’s, swims alongside me like a seductive loon. (These beguiling aquatic birds summer in the area.) Approaching the shore, we spy a magical sight: a body of water appearing to float several feet above the surface of the pond. This pool, it turns out, is buttressed by a mass of mud and logs that fills the gap between two natural sand berms; standing on the latter, we make out the conical outline of a beaver lodge.
What we don’t see are beavers. Back on the islet, I thumb through a copy of the Guide to Animal Tracking and Behavior (1987) by Donald and Lillian Stokes, who suggest that the bucktooth builders prefer to work at dusk. But I’m more interested in the domesticity the Stokeses go on to describe: The critters are evidently monogamous, paired off in single-family households. Their offspring—“yearlings”—stick around into their “teens” (around two and a half, the point when they become sexually active) and help their parents keep house. Instead of a dam, I imagine a white picket fence.
Sergio, a self-described “non-monogamous queer,” gags in response and alleges that Donald and Lillian may be projecting their own heterosexual monogamy onto the mammals they have been examining. Under the influence of two novels I imported to the Wi-Fi-less island—Miranda July’s polyamory-pilled perimenopausal All Fours (2024) and Henry Hoke’s Open Throat (2023), written from the perspective of a mountain lion that uses they/them pronouns—I begin to queer this narrative of binary beasts building unwitting monuments to the nuclear family.
Perhaps the picture-perfect beaver duo working hard to get on the cover of Architectural Digest is hiding something. What if behind the façade of industriousness beavers were more hedonistic, horny, hardly working? In other words, what if my favorite animal were more like me—a hairy, hungry little rodent that skips Beavertown and jets off on the back of a lusty loon?
I picture myself metamorphizing into a hybrid animal—a loover, a boon—that conveniently can’t be held responsible for my bestial behavior.
A few days later, I am lighter than a loon, my beaver brain broken after a weekend of dancing and dissociating at a queer rave festival two hours south of Berlin. Did I get here by hitching a ride on a bird of passage or a Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by Norse Air? Loons, which are also found in Germany and Norway, have been known to fly hundreds of miles in a single day. Their name might actually come from the Old Norse word for lament, due to the birds’ characteristically lonely call. (Yet they too have been observed to be “serially monogamous.” Let’s talk about that.)
I recover my strength and take the train to Hamburg for a gay tennis tournament. (I contain multitudes.) Germany’s second city happens to be the seat of my ancestors—specifically, Finkenwerder Island, a once rural patch turned landing strip downriver from Herzog & de Meuron’s peacocking Elbphilharmonie performing arts complex. (I didn’t visit.) I email some questions about the island to my aunt Kay, the family historian, who replies that “the original Schwartau farm was called ‘Nesshof’ and was on the site of the Airbus plant and runways.” And that decades after our forebear, Carsten, immigrated to the US, “the land was taken over by the government in the 1930s for the Luftwaffe.”
Kay shares a relevant chapter from the Schwartau Family Chronicle, compiled by a distant relative, Bertha Detels, in 1976. I linger on a couple passages that detail the building practices of my progenitors:
As the land was very low, only about one yard over water level, people who wanted to live on the island had to make artificial mounds to build their houses on. These mounds had to be higher than any high water.... After that, the inhabitants of the island began to build dikes, at first small ones and then higher ones. As the land was very low and wet, the farmers had to dig ditches which were connected through sluices with the Elbe.
Suddenly, the beaver cosplay is feeling very real. I picture myself metamorphizing into a hybrid animal—a loover, a boon—that conveniently can’t be held responsible for my bestial behavior. I concoct a creation myth that a deviant dam dweller traveled to the Western Hemisphere on the back of a wily waterfowl. A beaver with a bird’s-eye view, a worldly, winged mammal. Now I’ve returned to the family turf, this Frankenstein creature, writing a column somewhere between the gnawed beaver’s log and the loon’s lament.
I don’t actually step foot on the island, but I want to. On an evening cruise down the Elbe, over blaring gay anthems like the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” the organizer of the tennis tournament sidles up next to me and, gesturing toward the river isle, explains, “This is Finkenwerder.” I know, I say. I had been carefully examining the shore, but it’s not much to look at. You can’t see the low-lying farms behind the dike. But I do see the giant Airbus facility that used to be a Nazi airfield and point it out to some tennis gays sipping Aperol spritzes who don’t seem to understand that I’m trying to make this into a moment.
Dusk sets over the German lowlands, but I don’t find myself innately drawn toward projects of damming or mound making. Instead, I surrender to the call of a familiar song—“Young man, there’s no need to feel down / Young man, get yourself off the ground”—and instinctively flap my arms in unison as we cruise back to town. This is my architecture tour.