America’s image abroad could be improved overnight if her tourists were suddenly all as thoughtful, articulate, curious, funny and bright as Colby Works. WORKS ARRIVED in London at the tail end of August, stashed his luggage in a cubby at a local hostel, and set out to explore the city. “One of the best things about London, from a tourist perspective, is that it’s very walkable and easy to navigate because of the Underground.” FROM LONDON, Works traveled north by train to the Peak District, which he described as “a quintessential English countryside — with hedgerows and sheep everywhere and small little towns with brickwork dating back to the 16th century.” WORKS SPENT the bulk of his time in England living with two separate families, in Maldon — a “compact” coastal city of about 20,000 — where he was enrolled at the Plume School. While there, Works observed the finer points of British “secondary school” education and was able to draw comparisons to his time at IHS. WORKS LEFT England in mid-November and joined his older brother — who is studying for his master’s degree in Wellington — in New Zealand, where he spent the last month and a half of his trip. WORKS RETURNED to Kansas on New Year’s Day, the more enriched for having spent the previous months abroad.
And while that’s not going to happen any time soon — we’ll continue to export eager quantities of the loud, garish and entitled — it’s a relief to know that on occasion we comport ourselves with grace or wit.
Last Friday, Works — just a junior — presented a travelogue of his recent semester abroad, which took him to the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
Weaving anecdote and history, Works guided an audience of about 20, mostly Iola High School teachers and administrators, through the highlights of his trip, illustrating his talk with slides and video drawn from his four-months journey.
Works is a member of that generation born with camera phones in their hands, and so he comes by his polished vacation photography naturally. But it was his gift for story — for locating, in the mass of his experience, the fresh detail — which provided the impressive backlighting to his hour-long presentation.
The Iolan found his way to most of the major landmarks in the capital — Piccadilly, Big Ben, Westminster, Wimbledon — but, on Friday, he drew his audience’s attention to an art installation at the Tower of London, whose presence, intended to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, coincided with Works’ visit.
The piece was comprised of nearly one million bright red ceramic poppies, each one standing in for a British soldier who died during the Great War.
Works showed a picture of the castle with a crimson waterfall spilling out of one of the rag-stone windows and onto the grass below.
The piece was being installed, poppy by poppy, during the length of Works’ stay. “By the end of [our time in London] they had hand-planted and hand-made each of these ceramic poppies to where it filled the entire moat.”
What this “amazingly green” upland section of England lacked in actual mountain peaks, Works said, it made up for in rolling, hiker-friendly hills. Works translated his experience of the landscape into terms the room could appreciate: “It’s like the Flint Hills on steroids.”
But Works was as much the object of observation as he was the observer. He described walking into his first English class: “The teacher had no idea I was coming. And I look around and I realize that I’m the only guy. So, I walk up to the teacher and I say ‘Hi, my name is Colby and I’m coming over from the U.S. and Mrs. Clark just assigned me to this classroom. And she said ‘Oh, you have an accent!’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, I’m from the U.S.’ And everybody just goes ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so great.’
“The first thing they did, they said: ‘Someone go grab a book.’ And so they grabbed a book off the shelf and they just flipped to a random page and they said ‘Can you read this for us?’ and so I read it, and they go ‘Oh my gosh, this is so amazing.’
“And one of the other things they always asked me about, they wanted me to say ‘hamburger.’ And I’d be like: ‘OK — hamburger.’ And then they would bust up laughing. And I just thought ‘Well, this is pretty easy entertainment.’”
Sensing that his presence had become a distraction, Works eventually subtracted himself from the class full of English schoolgirls, who seemed more interested in the American in their midst than in their course of study.
“I just told the teacher ‘I think I’m going to drop out of this class for the betterment of you guys,’ and she said ‘Yeah, that’s probably an OK idea.’ And so we went with it.”
Works fell in with a close-knit group of friends while in Maldon, and spent much of his free time running or riding his bike along the coast. He also went on a Harry Potter jag, reading all seven novels in a space of a month, excited to be entering the fantasy series in the country of its original conception.
The last major trip Works took while in Britain was a cross-country road tour to Wales. He showed dramatic pictures of the landscape, and compared the lazy mudflats of coastal of England, which extend out to meet the tide and which his eye had become accustomed to during his time in Maldon, with the rocky, steep-dropping sea cliffs of Wales, which created a coastline that was “more rugged than England’s but prettier overall.”
Outfitted with a rental car, which they put more than 4,000 miles on before his Kiwi adventure was complete, the brothers zipped across the face of the island nation — camping, staying in hostels, hiking up the spine of a dormant volcano, spending a night beside a lake that Works described as “the most turquoise thing I’ve ever seen,” zorbing.
A zorb, for the uninitiated, is a 10-foot tall transparent plastic ball partly filled with water. Zorbing, then, is when you pay someone for the privilege of climbing inside it and having them push you down a hill.
And so, in Rotarua — the home of Zorbing — the brothers crawled inside what looks like a gigantic cat toy and pitched themselves, rolling and bouncing, down a hill 8,000 miles from Iola. Works presented a video taken from inside his zorb, which shows the pair, grins pinned to their faces, slipping frictionlessly around inside their plastic ball for the time it took gravity to whisk them down the hill.
“As you can see,” Works said puckishly, “it wasn’t very much fun — but, you know, we enjoyed it.”
“By the end of the trip I was able to circumnavigate the globe, which is very cool to say by the age of 17. I spent over 50 hours in the air and went all the way around the world…. And so when I arrived in Oklahoma City, my mom, dad, sister, aunt and uncle were all there to greet me, which was a very great moment.
“When you go to a foreign country, you talk different, you look different and everybody thinks that you’re different by the way you act. But you just have to get over it and accept it, because actually people think that you’re unique and that it’s cool — kind of like when you say ‘hamburger.’
“But the major thing I took away was that wherever you are in the world, there are always going to be nice people that will offer to help you — if you’re lost or need directions or if you just need help finding out what to eat or what to see. You can always find these people.”
Works finds himself at home studying abroad
