Noplace to Go: Remembering the Y2K New Year, 20 years on

Two decades on, it’s difficult to remember how obsessively the media was fixated with the 1999-to-2000 New Year (and, in particular, “Y2K glitch” worries about computer data). I was writing my “Vagabonding” column for Salon Travel at the time, and the editor there requested that all regular contributors write a short meditation on where they would ring in the New Millennium. This round-up has long-since disappeared from Salon’s virtual archives, but, in the interest of posterity (and because, in retrospect, I enjoy the logic of my fin de siècle reasoning), I will share it here:

In the fall of 1992, back before Y2K was known by its current hipster-alarmist acronym, Time Magazine speculated on which world travel destination would host the grandest Year 2000 party. The Great Pyramids at Giza (supposedly slated to host a $10,000 a head celebrity bash) were mentioned, along with Stonehenge, the Acropolis, and the Great Wall of China. “Those who don’t start planning now,” the article read, “may find themselves, on the night of nights, all dressed up with no place to go.”

Seven years after this farsighted warning, I confess that I have yet to start planning my own New Year’s revelry.

Fortunately, the best option when faced with “no place to go” is to go Noplace. That, I am proud to say, is where I’m headed this year: Noplace. And — considering that so many other people seem to be suffering from an overload of information about information-overload — I suspect I’ll have lots of company.

Late in the pages of Cannery Row, John Steinbeck points out that over-planned, over-anticipated fetes often become “slave parties,” whipped and dominated by the very gravity of their own expectations. “These are not parties at all,” he writes, “but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.” Hype and circumstances considered, Y2K threatens to be the biggest ‘slave party’ in human history.

The good news is that the celebration of New Year’s — Y2K or otherwise — has never really been about history. New Year’s, rather, is about joy — and that’s why Noplace is such a good place to go.

By Noplace, of course, I mean Someplace. And by Someplace I mean Anyplace — be it Timbuktu, the Gobi Desert, or Novi, Michigan. Technically, Anyplace could even include the Grand Pyramids of Giza, — although any party with a $10,000 entrance fee is probably less an expression of joy than an expression of status. But wherever Noplace is, the point of going (or staying) there has very little to do the place itself. Information society too often tempts us to idealize the Other, to know where we want to be instead of knowing where we are. Thus, to realize that Noplace is the only place is a spiritual victory of sorts.

For me, the trailhead to Noplace will begin a few days before 2000, in a northern Italian village called Cimone. There, I will escort my friend Valentina to the wedding of her 60-year-old uncle. Once the vows have been spoken, Valentina and I will not go to Rome or Prague or Vienna — even though those destinations are all very fashionable, and well within striking distance.

Instead, we will just go — and hopefully joy will follow.

Postscript: Valentina and I ended up spending the first moments of 2000 in Venice. I can’t recall why (apart from relative proximity to Cimone) we decided to go, but I do know that our last-minute planning meant that there was noplace for us to sleep. We celebrated the new millennium until just short of dawn, then took a wee-hours train back to Trento and Cimone. Below is a picture of me, along one of Venice’s famous canals, on the final day of the 20th century.

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