Homing Instincts Page 3
I’ve had many pretend homes, pretend lives. Pretend not in the sense that they weren’t real but rather that they lacked gravitas and always relied on some degree of performance. I stood at a distance from myself, sometimes one hundred feet, sometimes five hundred, sometimes only ten, watching myself navigate the world. Always, I was both the star and the viewer, the traveler and the midwestern girl of suburban provenance admiring the traveler’s pursuits. In rare moments, I sensed the insignificance of my life within the extraordinary silence and din of the world. I developed a hunger for these moments, for this brief intuition of mystery, and for a long time assumed I could only find them via the stimulus of the grand voyage.
After my first two years of traveling, I wrote an ex-boyfriend explaining that there were so many opportunities for travel if people just knew how to find them. This was then the goal: find opportunities like the objects on a scavenger hunt. Once I’d found one, I started in immediately on the next. From a hostel in Mexico City, where greasy-haired Europeans in well-worn sleeping bags told me they were traveling for a year, as if it were a weeklong flit away from home, I saw the possibility of South America open up before me. From a coffee shop in Madison, where I worked after graduation, squirreling away every paycheck for travel, I copied addresses from South America on a Shoestring into a notebook. From a hostel in Buenos Aires, with the help of a Frenchman I met at a rooftop party, I applied to be an English assistant on the island of La Réunion, where my best friend from the University of Wisconsin was teaching. From La Réunion I Googled the TESOL course I would take in Oaxaca, Mexico, where from a one-room apartment painted lime and orange I applied for the position in Beijing.
In South America I learned Spanish, I learned the crunch of an ice pick into a vertical wall of mountain, I learned the rites of a tribe of global travelers swapping stories like baseball cards, I learned the out-of-body solitude of the long-distance bus. On Réunion I learned to wake at 5:00 a.m. in the only cool of the day, I learned to cook swordfish, I learned the lingering tension of colonialism in the alcoholic breath of a Creole man who grabbed me by the neck and whispered “Z’oreille” into my ear. In Mexico I learned “El Pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido!” I learned to drink mezcal, I learned the difference between Zapotecs and Mixtecs and Aztecs, I learned to wisely maneuver my German shepherd to deter any unwanted attention. In China I learned the everyday weight of surveillance, the profundity of the divide between East and West, the depths of my need for coffee, the meaning of personal space.
“What were you doing all that time?” my sister asked me once. It wasn’t accusatory; she just couldn’t conceive of my days. Time was not quantifiable in the way it is in graduate school, when I have class, I write, I make enchiladas, and if my sister calls me at a particular hour I will likely be doing something appropriate to that hour, working or cracking open a beer—not, say, eating noodles at 9:00 a.m. in an empty restaurant while reading Haruki Murakami.
Seeing, I might have answered her. Using myself like a Monopoly piece, moving around the world to acquire experience and knowledge. Discovering, occasionally, the capacity for a self-annihilating humility that would serve me later. Marveling at the sheer possibilities of one life while sitting on the balcony of the half-built villa two friends and I rented at cut-rate prices and carved up with bamboo dividers, watching the ocean fade into blue and the wet heat of the day creep sticky and thick over the island. Stepping out of my tent in Cilaos to discover the moon hanging like a bell above the darkened ranges, the haunted blue of the dawn, the world suspended. Finding that vanilla is brown and spindly and tough. Melting fresh dates into bars, ordering bière à la pêche, waving a silent hello to the old Creole men and women submerged in the early-morning surf.
Sometimes, I blended with the world, I felt myself nearly disappear, I crossed the line from observing and narrating to fading into the moment. Nearly always this happened on mountains. In the Peruvian Andes near the summit of a peak I’d somehow convinced a pudgy British software engineer to tackle with me, I settled in high grasses and watched fog wash over the slope. Huddled amid the watery sound of wind moving through grass, I felt myself a vessel, a presence no more present than rock or air. In Patagonia I sang as loud as I could at the top of a peak in Parque Nacional Los Alerces, the Patagonian wind whisking away my cheesy, tuneless lyrics as soon as they emerged, but instead of an act of assertion it felt like one of erasure, like being so alone and so high up and so far I lost all the markers of self completely.
And yet also, all this time, I yearned for something more, which I found in writing. I wrote horrible blog posts, horrible essays, horrible metaphors, the kind of pieces I cannot even visit now without wanting to evaporate in self-loathing. I was “finding my voice,” as they say, but more than that I was feeling through all the noticing, all the novelty of experience, toward the more nebulous, universal, and personal. Writing drove through the trophy hunt of experience toward bigger questions and themes, and eventually, one morning in Beijing, I announced to Jorge that I wanted to stop seeking the teaching jobs that allowed me to leap from country to country and instead return to Mexico to write. In a trajectory I could not intimate at the time, travel led me to writing, and writing led me home.
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Sitting in the mornings on the cabin porch, glassy eyed before the scramble of words on the page, I envy writers like Joan Didion, who belong so clearly to and are so clearly of a place, who rise like apparitions from it and might later earn a roadside plaque. I don’t yet know how to do or write that kind of relationship. I struggle to see home—the unseen blue screen behind all the travel narratives that have made me a writer—as I’ve seen abroad. Where Mexico offers up its bloody crucifixion scenes and its bawdy teenage clowns in a screaming panorama, Ohio is hard to see at all. I pile my desk with guides to midwestern birds and trees and grasses to help bring the life on these forty acres into relief. My new Lonely Planet is a well-thumbed copy of native wildflowers, dog-eared not at Inner Mongolian hostels but at violet wood sorrel, found on open prairie and rocky creek banks. I try to learn Ohio in the same way I learned to order Chinese noodles, not yet grasping that I need a new paradigm, a new way of noticing and being.
Didion’s relationship with California was wrought, at times as sour and acrid as the burning Santa Ana winds, at others driven by bittersweet and tender longing for those winds. I wonder if part of this complexity stems from the shame of the ambitious young woman at returning to the nest, although I suppose that shame is blunted when the nest is New York or Los Angeles.
Ohio, meanwhile, is a place the ambitious and creative are meant to escape and then look wryly back on from one of the coasts. But regardless of the cultural desirability of one nest or another, it is still the nest, and the singular aim of savvy young women in particular is to flee it. So when the homing instincts kick in, they are bound to come with undertones of capitulation and failure: I didn’t make it far enough, didn’t push or try hard enough. I couldn’t cut it, make myself anew. For as much as we extol women’s hard-won right to choose, we still tend to notice the women who have chosen to live like men: untethered to the domestic, to home, beholden instead to a sense of exploration, discovery, and achievement.
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In Beijing, Jorge and I sometimes left the house at 10:00 a.m. and returned at 10:00 p.m., having spent the entire day walking the streets, stopping for meat kebabs and sesame rolls and beer, watching the city unfold around us. In South America I spent weeks on buses, rolling into one station only to stumble toward the counter for another ticket, buy a few empanadas of enigmatic filling, and roll out southward. Once, on a bus in Colombia, after an unknown stretch dipping and weaving through green mountains, we stopped at a small roadside cafeteria. It was pouring rain. The driver escorted me to and from the restaurant with his umbrella. I remember only that: the bus, the mountains, the rain, the gesture. These years were composed of elements, details, the press of the world onto my skin, my pressing back. Perhaps this experien
ce was the currency I needed to buy the confidence to write, and once I learned to write and to see anew, experience was no longer everything.
As I near graduation in Pittsburgh, I wonder if writing has really come to be enough: if I don’t need Mexican taxis or unmarked Chinese trails as much anymore because the act of putting words on a page before a discerning editor is sufficiently hair-raising and offers my life a deeper quality of noticing than scrambling perpetually up new heights of adventure. When I first began writing, I thought that the experience fed the page, that I would always need to go farther and do more to fill that blank space. Instead, the more I write, the less I need the glaring eccentricities of abroad, the amulets and trains and floodlit beaches.
I am reluctant, however, to let them go. I don’t want to go broody; I still want my curiosity, want to roam. I understand how transforming travel and unfamiliarity can be, how they can challenge a dangerous and stultifying complacency. I don’t want to sink into the antiquated responsibilities that have long prevented women from being seen or heard. But I am newly compelled by these responsibilities. I find in them a dignity and meaningfulness I did not ten, five, two years ago. I find in them, even, the big questions about how I want to see and live. I recognize that interior mechanism pointing back home: its stubborn innateness, the map that defies all maps. I turn back with more regularity, more gratefulness, for longer and longer stretches, letting myself go.
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Dung beetles are highly competitive; when one encounters a pile of dung, it has to roll up a little ball and move that ball away as fast as possible or other dung beetles will come along and swipe it. It’s far easier to swipe someone else’s ball than to roll your own, and courtesy has not been evolutionarily rewarded among dung beetles.
The fastest route away from dung-robbers-in-waiting is a straight line, which the beetles follow while pushing their balls facing backward, eyes always on the receding mound of loot. “If [you] roll back into the dung pile, it’s curtains,” biologist Eric Warrant warns in National Geographic. Scientists, wondering how the beetles could stay such a direct course without seeing it, designed an experiment to test beetle navigation. The scientists built tiny cardboard and plastic hats for the dung beetles, like miniature visors of the type seen on befuddled dads at amusement parks. The beetles with the cardboard hats took far longer to navigate at night than those with the transparent ones, and even under a slightly cloudy or moonless sky the transparent-visored beetles rolled faster. The beetles, the scientists concluded, navigated using the Milky Way.
The scientists also discovered that whenever the beetles hit snags on their routes, they stood atop their balls of poo and “danced” to the stars, turning round and round until they oriented themselves by galactic light.
Unlike other animals, which might simply give up after a certain number of meddlesome scientific intrusions, the dung beetles will keep on trekking even when scientists put them on circular tracks or drop them off ledges.
“They are so tenacious in what they are trying to do. They cannot be distracted, they don’t get frightened, they don’t change their minds, they don’t get stage fright. They are so, so, so determined,” zoologist Marcus Byrne told the New Yorker. For what is at stake is nothing more or less than home: the secure ball will attract a mate, who will lay an egg inside it. When the egg hatches, it eats its way out, emerging from its snug dung home to face the fervent competition of the wider world, and the cycle repeats itself.
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When I was young I used to travel each weekend from Columbus, where I lived with my dad and stepmom, to Cincinnati to visit my mom. The Ohio landscape was a flat canvas outside, sometimes minimalist in Rothko squares of hay and navy, sometimes dramatic Constable-inspired landscapes of clouds: massive ships with violet underbellies sailing against the gunmetal of thunderstorms. These panoramas were interrupted here and there by outlet malls and DQs and reminders that HELL IS REAL. I remember once being in the backseat of the Toyota Tercel in the middle of a summer storm. I don’t remember which way we were going, north or south, toward or away from the Washington Court House exit off I-71, where Dad handed me over to Mom and vice versa, but I remember feeling safe. Not the kind of safe that is pitted against danger, but the kind of safe that is cozy and secure, existentially safe as if nothing else—school or dinner or leaving one parent behind for the other—mattered, because I was in this moving car with someone who loved me and whom I loved and there was a vibrant storm outside.
I feel the same kind of safe again in the Pittsburgh summer in my and Jorge’s boiling apartment, when I go upstairs after I’ve spent the morning writing and open the door to the cool bubble of the bedroom, where the ancient air conditioner throbs with its expulsion of chill, and where Jorge and the dogs lie in a cold mess on the rumpled sheets. It is a sensation that comes only with being closed in, homed in, the boundaries between myself and the world very clearly defined, narrow, containing only me and my family.
I have spent so much of the last decade searching for this sensation’s polar opposite: the sense of vastness, wideness, the enormity and potential for infinite variation of the world. Backpacking alone in Patagonia to feel not safe but free, discovering my small, fleeting insignificance in a huge world of gray stone and pink sky and blue ice. Throwing myself at mountains and rugged shorelines, at the unknowable, in order to sense the tininess of my own existence, in order to blur and render insignificant the intricate roots and details that bind me to the everyday and to home: to feel, in other words, the big picture.
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In the last semester of graduate school, I open the fridge and root around for leftover brownies. I stand by the window drinking a glass of cold water and smelling the sour tang of mulberries finally ripened, I walk in the afternoon with the dogs to the big grassy hill at a nearby university, I sit and watch the same minor duckling dramas in the same small koi pond, I lie in bed all afternoon rereading Lolita and enjoying the whiff of barbecue from a backyard grill nearby, I stand on the pedestrian bridge and watch the trains hurtle by beneath me.
Soon, I will gather up our boxes of books and Ikea dishes and dog toys and move with Jorge into the cabin, built in 1828, smelling of the sturdy wood planks that compose its walls and floors. I will set my desk before the front window and begin to write in the perpetual semidarkness, amid a palimpsest of quaint domestic objects belonging to other times and people: baskets, hand-painted serving platters, quilts, crocks. Everywhere around me dangle the artifacts of women’s work—the churning and the storing and the serving and the healing. I stand on the front porch, barefoot and comically aware of my barefootedness, surveying the land from this small refuge, aware only in the faintest of stirrings that these forty acres will become home in a way no place has ever been.
Adulthood, it seems to me, is about narrowing. The salmon roams the vast Pacific and then, to the thrum of its own programmed brain, begins its journey in a shrinking triangle closer and closer to the river mouth, then up the river, then over the falls, then into the forest to that one tapering stretch that is now its focus, center, and range.
JOURNEY INTO THE ORDINARY
“IF IT HITS, it’ll hit like a ton of bricks,” the ob-gyn advises at my first, five-week appointment. She is talking about nausea and the bundle of unpleasant symptoms that make the first trimester a notorious trial period, but she might as well be speaking of a paradigm shift in my life.
I assume, both when Jorge and I decide to give it a go in September and when we find out I’m pregnant in October, that I’ll continue with my life more or less unaltered for the next nine months, until the baby arrives and brings all the changes we’ve heard so much about: the sleepless nights, the overwhelming love, the schedules and work and relationships turned inside out and upside down. Even in those initial weeks, when we return again and again to the bathroom to raise the stick to the light and stare at its unequivocal YES, when I cannot concentrate on writing a hundred words, cannot read or think st
raight, I somehow maintain this belief. I hold to a pleasant bucolic vision of steadiness, as if I’ll just transition from riding through the Mexican jungle in the back of a pickup to twenty-four-seven childcare in a rustic Ohio cabin like crossing the border from one country to another. It isn’t until I open the fridge one day and want to hurl at the sight of eggs that I begin to understand the change isn’t something neatly prolonged and prepared for but immediate, all-consuming, and violent. It is the kind that wrenches us completely from the stories we have long told about ourselves, and rewrites us.
Earlier that summer, sitting on a boulder in the middle of a creek in the White Mountains, I’d come to the realization that both of my parents changed dramatically at age thirty-one. My little brother, Jackson, a jazz musician with whom I’d long shared grand artistic aspirations and dubious financial prospects, had announced on a whim in June that he was driving across the country, stopping for weeks at a stretch to backpack the national parks, and—as he put it in his earnest and guileless Jack way—“figure some shit out.” He was armed with Dad’s moldering backpacking gear, a copy of the Tao Te Ching, and an industrial quantity of Great Value peanut butter. I immediately latched on to the plan, begging him to let me come for two weeks, which is how I wound up deep in the White Mountains in August, talking Tao and art and life with Jack, eating a lot of ninety-nine-cent pasta singles. In this exhausted satisfaction of hikes and books, I read the insight about my parents as an indication that I should become more attuned to the natural world: not just a weekend worshipper of mountains and woods, but someone who knew the names of the mushrooms and the calls of the birds. This was the kind of change I was familiar with: apply oneself to a new learning curve, develop a new skill set, and voilà: a measurable self-improvement. I missed the arduous transformation my parents had undergone and saw instead the type derived from New Year’s resolutions: me plus French, or me plus extensive knowledge of tree species, or me plus marathon training.