Homing Instincts Read online

The air when I land at the Columbus airport, at night, and roll down the window as we wind around the parking-garage ramp: In summer, like water from the tap, wet bark, full bloom. In winter, sharp with ice and woodsmoke, a little dagger in the sinuses. The Bath & Body Works ginger perfume I doused myself with during high school as if it were some sort of protective coating against a deadly virus. Cut grass. Clover. The faint mud musk of the fall woods. Sprinklers; wet sidewalks; the bitter, pollen-heavy scent-shock of a dandelion. The thick, sour hops of my niece and nephew’s hair.

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  The hen is not budging. Hell, no. We reach out to touch her and get a long peeved squaaaaaaawk as she settles herself in deeper. Days like this: not eating, not drinking, yanking out her own feathers to insulate her young. “She’s gone broody,” my stepmom tells me and several friends of mine. We’ve come out together from Pittsburgh for a weekend visit to the farm, toting our printed pages of workshop essays.

  Broodiness is the maternal instinct turned pathological: a neurotic self-flagellation not unlike that of today’s supermoms. My parents put the hen in a dog kennel and dump a bucket of cold water over her. That’s it: she is cured of broodiness. What in the hell was I thinking? we ventriloquize in her high clucking hen voice. So much time with those ungrateful little brats? She goes back to merrily plucking up grubs like nothing has happened.

  My friends and I, meanwhile, at the time rooted in graduate school and sensing ourselves on the fulcrum between twenties and thirties, begin using the ominous declaration “She’s gone broody” to announce those periods when we do not move from our desks, when all we want to do is go home and stew over book-babies. It is a joke that on the surface depicts us as overly obsessed with art, but it also connotes a deeper and particularly feminine fear of broodiness: of losing ourselves in the home space, becoming so rooted that we forget we have wings—begin, even, to destroy them.

  We are feeling that tug toward the familiar: the places we’ve been raised, the families we’ve left behind. Within this is a perplexing ambiguity about whether returning home signifies growing up or giving up or both—and if it’s both, what exactly we want to give up in exchange for what. The restlessness of the past decade, our “odyssey years” of reckless border crossings and romancing smelly hippies in Wyoming, has crashed like a wave into our early thirties and dissipated into so much foam. There is nothing clear in its wake, other than the urge, occasional and startling as a craving for cream puffs or the recollection of an aunt’s perfume, to orient ourselves, although how and with what we do not know.

  We seek substance, but fear its heft; seek direction, but fear its constriction; seek the comfort of knowing what we are meant to do and where we belong and also fear the inevitable predictability, the dull familiarity of cycles and days, that this knowledge could engender.

  Our seeking is real as salt on skin, and also utterly vague, blind, the thrumming of hidden devices in our bones. We are driven and heedless as the coiled body inching its way closer and closer to air, light, blood, and milk.

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  The loggerhead turtle, and other turtles, too, and the homing pigeon and the bluefin tuna and the lobster and the mole rat and the cat: all return after their long, wide wanderings to mate and die at home. All have homing instincts.

  The word homing, meaning “the act of going home,” possibly derived from the Old English hamian, “to establish a home,” came into use around 1765 to refer to the homing pigeon, although the pigeon itself is thousands of years old. In the 1920s the term gathered another meaning: “to direct a weapon or signal at a target, to home.”

  The Merriam-Webster’s definition of homing, however, takes distance as a prerequisite, defining homing as “relating to an animal’s ability to return to a place or territory after traveling a distance away from it.” That is, one cannot home until one has left native terrain, soared across the planet, traced complex migratory routes over land and sea. In a neat trick of nature that wanderlusty twenty-year-olds can’t anticipate, the journey activates the instinct to return.

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  In the beginning, I run around the dusty field with the Mexican men and watch the cotton-candy clouds rise over the cerros, and it is pure rhapsody. I know nothing and have everything to learn. Churros are euphoria. The winding road up to the trout farm in the Oaxacan sierra is prickling with sensory details: the woodsmoke, the pine, the forested canyons tumbling down to the hazy valley. And then months go by, and I make friends, and I know at least ten expressions involving huevos and I am sitting in a bar alone on a Saturday afternoon and that restlessness emerges eerie and sure as the green heat before a storm.

  An idea, a reel of flashing possibilities. Shit. I want to move to China.

  And the next week, I have a job, and the Mexican man I’ve fallen in love with—the one named Jorge Luis after a heartthrob doctor on a telenovela, the one who will nurse me through pneumonia in a Macao hospital, the one I’ll go on to marry in a ceremony that involves mariachis and dancing with a turkey—begins to realize just who and what he’s dealing with.

  In the beginning, I run along the canal past the old ladies doing Tai Chi and the men writing calligraphy with fat brushes dipped in water, and it is pure rhapsody. I know nothing and have everything to learn. Dumplings are euphoria. The bike ride from our apartment in Chaoyangmen to Ghost Street is spiked with sensory details: the dozens of handlebars weaving in constant flux, the hutongs crammed with laundry and steam and vendors, the perpetual gray and the smell of factories and soy sauce and spice. And then months go by, and I can order a hot pot with chrysanthemum leaves and lotus root, and my students have managed to imitate a half-decent thesis, and I am riding my bike toward Dongzhimen station counting down the days until I will start again. Trove after trove of knowledge and experiences to master. Each place containing a mini-life, with its own routines and dramas and characters, each ultimately more about me than there. The other is a sort of drug I need more and more of to get high, the new and the sensational the only phenomena worth noting.

  And then suddenly on Sunday morning I am thinking about babies.

  And then suddenly on Sunday morning I am thinking about a house, my family gathered around bubbling cheesy casseroles I have prepared, and outside a city or a town or a plot of land that I know like I know my husband’s body, like I know the well-trodden corridors of my mind.

  And then suddenly on Sunday morning I am thinking of my dad growing old, of his wave from amid the noise and jolt of the tractor, of his drinking three Fitzgeralds that my little brother prepared for him on New Year’s and flying down the sledding hill face-first.

  And then suddenly the idea of waking up to water the snapdragons, to watch a barefoot toddler waddle around the sun-shot yard, has taken on that possible-but-incredible sheen of a new country.

  But one is not cleanly a metaphor for the other, and for a long time I equivocate. I don’t know how to commit to a nontemporary plan, don’t know what this will feel like and what weight it will carry, whereas I know very well the emotional and practical shape of landing in utter unfamiliarity and working my way into understanding, loving and resenting, moving on and missing.

  Throughout my years in Pittsburgh, I wonder if the attraction to rootedness is simply a passing fancy, not so different from my other standby fantasies of becoming a park ranger or diplomat or tour guide on remote South American rivers. Sometimes I think I can shake it off like a dog shedding water in a vigorous spray. I think I should shake it off, lest it entrap me. I know so little about this new type of unknown that I cannot begin to discern the outlines of the knowledge and change it might bring. I look as hard as I can, but no clear picture coheres, and I go back to my stack of musty library books, back to my thesis, back to afternoon walks with the dogs, through which flit familiar visions of future glory.

  During the final stretch of graduate school, I write an email to a friend in which I say that my postgraduation plan involves one of two options: a baby or a yearlong trip
through Africa. In truth I have made zero steps toward either, but the hyperbolic declaration seems right for this moment of ambiguity. It represents the difference between a cycle and novelty I know so well, and one that beguiles, haunts, and repels.

  “Only you,” the friend writes back, “would face that choice.”

  And I feel a little shine of pride, a pleased flutter of the ego, before I remember that my friend, too, and pretty much every woman I know—mostly career travelers, sure, but also the less internationally inclined—is facing this choice. The specifics may vary, but on one side of the scale sits the freewheeling twentysomething intellectual and her creative and aesthetic pursuits, and on the other a chunky toddler proffering a dandelion. The hazard of the former is a growing sense of avoidance, of dodging challenges and questions bigger than any language or custom; the hazard of the latter might just be my entire life and self.

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  Even the spiny lobster—an invertebrate that, in the terms of a researcher dedicated to its study, is essentially a “big ocean insect”—has complex navigational systems for finding its way home. In 2003, biologists Kenneth Lohmann and Larry C. Boles of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published the results of a study showing that spiny lobsters are capable of measuring minute changes in the earth’s magnetic field in order to make their way back toward their dens. Boles caught more than one hundred spiny lobsters off the coasts of the Florida Keys, put them in opaque compartments suspended by ropes, and took them on roving, erratic, unpredictable journeys by boat and car back to laboratories between seven and twenty-three miles from the capture sites. “I was worried about attracting attention from the marine patrol looking for drunken boaters,” Boles told Science.

  Back at the lab, with the absurd, loving devotion of the scientist, Boles fashioned teensy caps out of dental amalgam and used these to blind their protruding lobster eyes. He then set them down in a tank on the floor and found that they invariably scraped their newly landlocked way toward their particular patches of sea. If they’d been taken at 250 degrees north, for example, they aimed at an average of 220 degrees north, no matter how much they’d been shaken and rocked and twisted during their journeys.

  The fact that the lobsters could navigate homeward even after extreme disorientation implies, Boles told National Geographic, “that they somehow know where they are all the time, that something is built-in.”

  Boles and his partner then tested the lobsters’ magnetic navigation by wrapping a magnetic coil around their tanks. Via the coil, they simulated the conditions of magnetic fields far from Florida. The lobsters whose simulated fields were north, walked south; those whose fields were south, walked north.

  The captive lobsters, said Boles in a press release, “acted as if they were at the location that the magnetic field represented and ignored their actual physical location.”

  The lobsters’ navigational systems, their desire to get back to the murky dens of their unique coral reefs, overrode the tumult of their journeys and the facts of the dank laboratory before them in favor of interior signals. They pivoted, scrabbled, and scratched their antediluvian claws on the floor, finessing their naked skeletons and probing antennae back to that one brackish patch, its magnetic symbols emanating from the core of the earth, saying, Here, here.

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  There is a particular feeling around family, like a miasma, background and elusive but ever present. It is the sense that, for as much as we talk—and there is plenty of that, shouted over the rush of small children, tossed back and forth on forest trails, parried over a platter of chargrilled meats—talk is superfluous. The specific nature of the encounter or the conversation is secondary to the fact of simply being with family. With similar cells coursing through our bodies, and having spent some ungodly number of hours together in carpeted old vans and duct-taped tents and small kitchens in the middle of winter, we have to do nothing more than sit and eat baked beans to achieve communion. Family gives us likeness and ease: the tame, antichallenge of literal familiarity.

  But perhaps there comes a time when we are not searching for the same types of challenges, and our priorities shift. The challenges lie not out there, always a little farther, on the bright horizon of independence, but closer to home, deeper and murkier and less immediate. The larger questions that have stewed beneath the definable challenges of education and acculturation and career now become palpable and inescapable. Wherever we go and whatever we seek, we sense them beneath us.

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  In much the same way that a painting or poem seems straightforward until one learns more about painting and poetry (“Yeah, I’ve thought about writing,” a lawyer friend told me once, offhand, as if it were a career path he could’ve taken straight to the Pulitzer if he’d merely indulged his whim), familial ease is simple to shrug off as given until we start paying attention. Then family becomes a dynamic studied and sought, an answer to a question we haven’t quite figured out how to ask.

  To stay home—to home—is to cultivate a different kind of attention. It is to notice more acutely, with an interior radar: the warm and unstudied composure of my sister as she enters her forties and grows into herself; the hint of old Cincinnati in how my dad says “warsh,” just like my grandmother did; the photos of my stepmother Meg’s mother, who died young, framed and set on the marbled wardrobe in Meg’s bedroom; the ways we echo or surprise each other; the places we clash and the places we move easily together; the moment on the gravel driveway watching my nephew Mario take aim with a BB gun at a grizzly Jorge has drawn on a sheet of paper, all of us lined up in a row, sloping in parallel with the trees, arms draped across one another.

  In my twenties it seemed everyone I knew had a gaggle of diverse friends, all of whom were rushing through identities and possibilities and dreams, but as we steady into our ways, become more predictable and singularly focused, many of these connections grow more threadbare, less relevant: they get stuck in the shallows of our deepening and narrowing. Or we simply move away.

  There is not the same push for effervescent conversation or novelty or excitement as there is for someone to talk to for hours about the fear and hope of babies or the problem of writing point of view. We couple up, go to graduate school, launch careers: our interests and lives taper from a delta of options into a directed watercourse. We seek friends who will feel like family. Settled now into ourselves, rooting like a river into its banks, we search for what stays, for familiar cartographies.

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  Herpetologist Archie Carr, a key figure in Caribbean conservation projects and the establishment of Costa Rican national parks, was one of the first to recognize homing instincts in turtles. His book The Windward Road recounts a story he heard from several fishermen, which got him interested in turtle navigation. Green turtles had been captured in their feeding grounds, branded with the fishermen’s initials, and put on a boat headed for Key West. The boat capsized in a storm, and months later, the fishermen discovered the branded turtles back in the same spot off the Nicaraguan coast. Dr. Carr stipulated that green turtles had an “extra sense,” what we now recognize as a homing instinct, “that lets them make long, controlled journeys in trackless seas.”

  The homing instincts of the eponymous pigeon—a crucial historical figure that has announced the results of Roman chariot races; relayed updates throughout Genghis Khan’s empire; spied for the Germans and rescued French battalions in World War I; and today spots shipwrecks from U.S. helicopters and ferries blood samples across Europe—are still not well understood. The pigeons might use the sun or, when it’s cloudy, rely on magnetic navigation; the small deposits of iron in their beaks might act as a compass; they might navigate using sound or smell.

  Then again, they might just take the damn highway. A 2004 Oxford University study, the culmination of ten years of careful tracking of homing pigeons with tiny GPS devices, concluded that the birds aren’t using the mystical powers of magnetoreception but are instead sailing right along th
e road.

  “It is striking to see the pigeons fly straight down the A34 Oxford bypass, and then sharply curve off at the traffic lights before curving off again at the roundabout,” Professor Tim Guilford told the Daily Telegraph. For as much as the scientists sought a complex hidden mechanism, an intricate mystery to be methodically unraveled, the pigeons’ journeys were as simple and straightforward as the well-traveled highway, more common than unique, more ordinary than exceptional.

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  I know I’ve been in the United States too long when, during my last semester of graduate school, I have a wispy, romantic moment in the Target parking lot. I’m gazing at a hazy summer-green hill in the distance, and I daydream of mashing up Cheerios for a baby and sitting around in the warm fading light doing little other than being home.

  That’s when I open the car door for my husband and say, “We should move to Borneo.”

  This yen for the domestic has the swell of a biological urge, like thirst or the pressure to urinate, and thus seems potentially suppressible. But between the billows of fantasy, easily written off, lingers a more complicated longing. It is not related to one particular place but rather to the idea of a place that could be mine. Of a different kind of familiarity and fondness: not the traveler’s ready-made nostalgia, in which each detail of daily routine is exceptional in its temporality, but a rhythmic seasonal understanding, an accumulation of memories like the analogous images that compose a Magic Eye picture and occasionally cohere into a lucid, surprising wholeness. Lately, on these cornflower-blue midwestern evenings, a train shuddering under the pedestrian bridge, I’ve realized how much of the thrill I get from being in a certain place comes from projecting myself into the near future when I will not be there and will instead be looking back. I wonder what it would feel like to have no plans for an elsewhere or a new destination; to be bound and beholden to the rhythms of one place; to accept it as home, now, everyday.