At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  The land is special here; a dance of God’s divinity with dirt. We are here to witness it.

  As we start our walk with John, I recognize the good fortune that I’m a lax, germs-won’t-kill-you sort of parent. Even with this child-rearing tenet, it takes all my strength here in the Daintree to resist strapping a child or two to my body with duct tape. We’re a family of hikers, of natural-water swimmers, a tribe that romps in the dirt—a walk in the woods should be innocuous enough. But this is the Daintree. It is boundless and wild.

  We bend around a curve of a well-trodden path, and John points to an innocent-looking fern and says with cheer, “See that? Don’t touch it—it’ll paralyze you from the neck down.”

  There are prehistoric leaves that mimic paper accordion fans; idiot fruit, the seeds of which produce a poison similar to strychnine; and six types of wild ginger, some of which provide water for desperate vagabonds while the rest contain poison. There is an innocent-looking willowy shoot waving through the breeze, about four feet out of the ground, with transparent cilia along its body.

  “When I was about—oh, this guy’s age,” John said, pointing to Reed, then back to the plant, “I touched this. Nightmares and shakes every night for years. Strange ones too. To this day, about once or twice a year, that part-a my body’ll go numb for no apparent reason. Or it’ll tingle this way and that. And then that night, sure enough—psychotic dreams. Yeah. So kids—don’t go touching it.”

  I glance at my six-year-old, who wouldn’t have been tempted to touch the plant ten seconds ago. John says, “Onward—this next tree’s a doozy that’ll put hair on yer back.”

  I pull the three kids to me. “You guys, do not go ten feet near that plant, do you hear me? Or you will not go to college because of the inevitable medical bills and psychiatric care for which you will be forever indebted to your father and me.” This is the whispered voice I reserve for waiting in unpredictable passport control lines or visiting their great-grandma’s house-of-breakable-tchotchkes.

  “But Mom,” Tate says, “the path is only a foot wide. Kinda impossible.”

  “You’ll figure out a way,” I reply.

  John points to plants and trees used as combat weapons during World War II and in ancient Aboriginal homeopathic remedies and beverages. More than twelve thousand species of insects dwell among this dirt and trees, symbiotic with the white-lipped tree frog, colossal blue Ulysses butterfly, and cassowary. There are stories about every single tree we pass, myths about trees inhabited by ancestral spirits or childhood tales passed down from John’s great-grandfather.

  As our hike ends, he gathers the five of us around a cluster of rocks. Here, he explains, are the mothers of the artistic tools used in indigenous artwork; paints concocted through years of sediment infused with iron oxide; clay and ochres in shades of brown, red, yellow, white. John’s ancestors have dabbled in this medium for thirty thousand years. He taps the rocks on a flat boulder, crushes bits into rock powder, dips his fingers in a nearby stream, mixes the powder and water with his fingers into varicolored paste, and swathes our arms with dots of burnt sienna and white.

  “It’s a blessing and honor that the rain forest welcomes us here,” John says reverently, holding his palms upward. “Let us remember to tread lightly on her and all her family, and to go forth in peace.”

  He is a friar in hiking boots, a deacon of the forest.

  We come to a picnic table under a thatched-roof awning, where a friend of John’s is percolating traditional bush tea over a campfire.

  “Come, sit down for a bit of tea and damper!” his friend says.

  “What’s a damper?” Tate asks.

  John and his friend look at each other. “Well . . . it’s a damper. You know, like a biscuit.”

  The kids look at me.

  “Cookie,” I say.

  Their eyes brighten and they run to the table, then stop at the rounded mounds of baked flour. Tate picks one up, takes a timid bite, gives a polite smile and nod.

  “Well,” says John’s friend, “it’s more like bread.”

  “I’m okay for now,” Reed says, not touching his damper. Finn devours his and eats Reed’s. I take a few dutiful sips of tea and swallow the taste of steeped twigs and leaves, breathe in its smoky aroma. Kyle chugs his tea and takes seconds.

  I have just taken my children on a walk in the forest, an outing we partake in weekly in the Pacific Northwest. There, we brush past ponderosa pines. Here, we plod through prehistoric plants. The Oregon soil we cross is ripe with our familial ancestry, yet here the rain forest dirt percolates with our cradle, our origin. These roots spread wide and deep. I watch as the leaves swirl humbly in my cup.

  We say thanks and good-bye to John, then head back to the park entrance and hop on a bus for a five-minute ride to a more modern path through the rain forest: a suspension bridge through trees to a swimming hole called Mossman Gorge. We dip our bodies and float in bone-chilling freshwater, buried in the veins of the world’s oldest patch of creation. Underwater stones scrape John’s painted dots off our arms, flecks of rock powder dissolving into the gentle waves that make room for us this afternoon.

  I glide on the water’s surface and watch goose bumps rise on my legs, then submerge my ears and hear the gurgling life underneath. I listen to my kids squeal at the thrill of the gentle current pulling them where it wants. I gaze at the sheer splendor of the leaves above me, leaves seen nowhere else on this planet.

  Sometimes, even when I’m standing on a remarkable slice of terra firma, I’m besotted with wanderlust, my heart thumping for the next unknown place and my mind wondering what’s next. But right now, in this rain forest, floating in crystal waters after a walk on ancient, sacred soil with my flesh and blood, I want to be nowhere else. Nowhere. This, right now, is home. I can hear God through the rustling of the prehistoric fan-shaped leaves, the scurry of alien insects on the bark, the familiar laughter of my children slipping on stones in the water. Everything here is unfamiliar, but it’s familiar. We are transient, vagabonds, and yet we’re tethered.

  About Australia, travel writer Bill Bryson says, “This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained.” The Daintree Rainforest has one more unique quality: it’s the only natural UNESCO Heritage Site that bleeds seamlessly right into another one next door. Packed with stuff, indeed.

  Today, we will snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef next door. The kids have been eagerly waiting for this day since before we left for China, and while they’re passable swimmers, they’ve never snorkeled. I’m confident they’ll love the boat ride out to the reef, but I’m curious how they’ll fare with the wet suits, unwieldy fins, suffocating masks, and tiresome snorkels.

  A wet suit is the most unattractive, unflattering garb ever invented, which I’m reminded of because the kids roll with laughter at Kyle and me when we hand them their assigned suits. A few minutes ago we arrived at a platform out in Agincourt Reef, one of the 2,900 complex systems that make up the entire 1,400-mile reef. As soon as the boat parked, there was a mad rush to get in line for wet suits, so Kyle and I ran to the line while the kids waited at a picnic table on the platform.

  We demonstrate the process of squeezing our adult bodies into still-damp wet suits, and I feel like I’m stuffing a watermelon into a pair of girl’s panty hose. The kids find this uproarious.

  “We look like spies!” Finn says when we’re all dressed.

  “Yeah! Let’s go look for a hidden jewel and plan a heist!” Tate replies.

  Kyle takes a photo of them with devilish spy glares, finger guns poised. They continue their imagined life as spies while I gather our handful of masks and fins and look out into the rippling aquamarine waves. The sky and water are monochromatic. It is a canvas of blue, textured by shadowy-small waves.

  An expert snorkeler I am not, but I know enough to show the kids how to spit in their masks to keep them from fogging, to violently puff
when water splashes into their snorkels, and to walk backward in the water so as not to trip on their fins. I check that their life vests are tightly secured, and that the younger two have pool noodles to keep them floating on the surface. Our platform has a floating fence around the permissible snorkeling area, and there are lifeguards at every corner. Still, it feels daunting to release my four- and six-year-olds out into the Great Barrier Reef. This is the constant parental challenge, to push our fledglings out the tree, into the liminal void, a maturing exercise that’s exacerbated during travel, when everything is new and nothing is predictable.

  I ease into the water with Tate, while Kyle swims in with Reed and Finn. It amazes me that no matter how exotic the location, how one-of-a-kind the experience, the act of swimming always remains the same. During my childhood summers, I woke at the crack of dawn and met my friend who lived on my block for a sunrise bike ride to the neighborhood pool; that early-morning dip involved the same stroke, stroke, stroke as it does now, on the largest reef on the planet. The percussive pulse from submerging my ears into water echoes back the same muffled sounds as my childhood trips to lakes and rivers in Texas. The earth’s surface is over 70 percent covered in water, and sometimes I wonder about a drop of water resting on my shoulder, whether it’s been to Antarctica or the South China Sea, or perhaps, miraculously, even out my childhood kitchen sink.

  This water is cold and clear as glass, and the current allows for simple breaststrokes as I dip my head into another planet. Above the water’s surface, it is sun’s reflection and waves. Two inches underneath, and I am floating above a kingdom of coral, some four hundred different types in shades of orange, yellow, green, purple. There are staghorn coral, resembling a deer’s antlers, clustered in bouquets and offering protection from prey to the smaller fishes. Brain coral, with its folded ridges and grooves. Thousands of minuscule fish swim in a thousand different directions, an aquatic rush hour of scurried dancing. An eggplant-purple giant clam, four feet in diameter, has taken his place on the shallow sea floor, resting vertically, his upward-facing mouth opening and closing with the current. He is the old man of this particular reef, sitting in his favorite recliner, retelling a slow story. I find Nemo scampering through sea lettuce algae.

  I resurface every couple of minutes, a mother hen counting her chicks. Tate sometimes comes up to clean out her mask at the same time, grin wide and eyes gaping. She looks at me knowingly, as if we share the secret to the unseen world below us.

  “Mom, did you see Nemo? I saw Dory too,” she says.

  “Did you see the brain coral?” I ask.

  “Yeah, that was weird. It looks like a dozen brains were emptied out here from a science lab.”

  The five of us reconvene for lunch on the platform, plastic plates piled high with shrimp and fish. We are exhausted and exhilarated, cheeks pink and hair matted to our foreheads.

  “Mom, did you see the purple and blue and yellow fish?” Finn asks in his high-pitched preschool voice.

  “Yes! What did you think?”

  Finn shrugs. “Cool.”

  “This is the best day ever!” Reed says.

  “Oh yeah? Why is that?” Kyle asks.

  “Because I’ve never, never, never seen this before. Well, except on TV,” he answers.

  I think of my childhood: hardly leaving central Texas, content to swim in my neighborhood pool and cruise suburban lanes on my bike. I’m grateful and in awe my children have now seen the Great Barrier Reef. I whisper a prayer that they will still be gleeful over Slip’N Slides and sno-cones.

  Hours later, on the boat ride back to land, Finn sleeps on the seat next to me, wiped out from happy exertion. Reed scrolls through the day’s photos on Kyle’s phone, and Tate reads on her Kindle. I stare out the window. This water holds magic, gives birth to creation where most days nary a human eye is witness. Water is familiar; it is front-yard sprinklers and nearby creeks. And it is exotic, unknown, bearing secrets to worlds beneath worlds.

  Our remaining days in Queensland are this: we board a plodding train from World War II upward to an arts village, high in the ancient rain forest; we watch locals hang out laundry and take children to school under the Daintree fan-palm leaves; we examine tiny, chalky Anglican churches nestled in a canopy of rain forest vines next to ice cream stands.

  We camp in the countryside near the small town of Port Douglas and swim under stars in a rock-encrusted pool. We hold koalas, pet kangaroos, touch dingoes through fences, ogle wombats, cassowaries, crocodiles. We cross a street, and the tree in the crosswalk’s center screeches with rainbow lorikeets, and we watch them darken the sky as they leave in a synchronized dance, a flurry of green, blue, and red feathers. They are Australia’s pigeon, and they are breathtaking.

  We drive for hours along the Queensland coastline, and the kids call out their holiday wish lists from the back seat. Bing Crosby joins us through speakers. We pull over to a roadside stand for mangoes and a picnic at a beachside rest stop, and Kyle and the kids scurry on boulders along the rocky beach, mindful of the deadly box jellyfish. Tate chats with a young girl about the pet rainbow lorikeet on her shoulder, a nonchalant redhead who might as well have been walking a mutt on a leash. We float on a military-issue duck boat through crocodile-ridden swamps.

  Quite surprisingly, we find a Target, and buy new flip-flops for the boys, a new swimsuit for Tate, a few chocolates for St. Nicholas Day. I spot artwork from an Oregon friend splayed on a book’s cover in a bookshop in the middle of nowhere. We eat more ice cream and sip flat whites, Australia’s contribution to coffee. On the evening before St. Nicholas Day, we toss Kinder Eggs into the kids’ sweaty flip-flops at our rustic campsite.

  One final afternoon, I unfold a cheap plastic chair under the awning of the campsite’s general store, tap into their spotty Wi-Fi, and cross my fingers that a Skype call to our American travel agent won’t disconnect halfway through a major credit card transaction. A chorus of kookaburras laugh in the nearby trees, serenading as my hold music. I book our second chunk of flights, to Casablanca, Nairobi, Nice. I recall those vaguely familiar place-names, but they feel a lifetime away.

  As I power down my laptop, Kyle pulls up with the rental car, kids in the back seat. “Are you done? We want to drive into town and walk around.”

  7

  NEW ZEALAND

  After Queensland, we knew we wanted to visit friends in Melbourne and Sydney, and also make a little jaunt to New Zealand—but the holidays mean outrageous holiday airfare. When frugality is one of your chief traveling considerations, you sometimes have to leave the country, then come back again.

  From Cairns, we fly seventeen hundred miles south to Melbourne for a long weekend with friends. This is the first time on our travels that we connect with people we already know, and it is a melding of two worlds—our previous, “normal” life with our current itinerant one. We know Darren and Vanessa because we share fields of work; in fact, Darren is the one who brought me out to Australia on my previous work trips. They are native Melburnians, and their city is so much like our Portland—moody weather but brilliant when it’s behaving, indie coffee shops on every corner, bearded hipsters everywhere—that it feels like home. I adore it. We are here only for a weekend, but in every hour I inhale familiarity.

  Our friends take us to their kids’ favorite playgrounds and to their favorite winery, we crack open a bottle in their backyard while the six children jump on a trampoline, and we join their company holiday party at a city park, where we meet their employees and share a potluck lunch. It would be the equivalent of the Fourth of July in America were it not for the impromptu pickup game of cricket, the Christmas music on the speakers, and the pavlova served on the picnic table (a fruit and meringue-based dessert controversial in these parts, based on the argument concerning whether it hails from Oz or the nearby Kiwis).

  We are with people we already know, and right now I’m unaware that we are reaping the benefit from the simple act of befriending people regardless of
where they live. Continual good-byes have been a staple in our family. Kyle and I met in Kosovo, and we are used to the risk of hurt. The curse from this is a growing hole in our hearts because friends are always continents away, no matter our geography. The blessing is, well, friends. Wherever we are.

  We watch our children play at the park, and Vanessa asks, “So you love being around your kids all the time, then?”

  I laugh. “Good gosh, no. Why? Does it seem like it?”

  “Well, I would assume you’d have to, to take on a trip like this. Plus, you homeschool. I could never do either of those things.”

  “This is the hardest part of the trip so far, honest to God,” I admit. “I love my kids. But I have been around them for three months solid with no break. I’ve even been around Kyle that whole time.”

  Vanessa laughs. “That’s veritable sainthood right there.”

  We fly to New Zealand.

  It is nearly midnight when we land, and for the first time on the trip, I pull out my socks. It is biting cold compared to the tropics, where we’ve mostly been thus far. This is the first time on our trip that the temperature has dipped below eighty degrees, and it’s the first time in our lives we dip below the 45th parallel south, halfway between the equator and the South Pole. This week will be the southernmost point on our journey.

  We walk out of the airport, and the wind and drizzling rain shock the breath out of me. My teeth chatter. The driver tosses our backpacks into the shuttle van, looks at our paper-thin windbreakers and says, “I hope you’ve got more than that in your backpacks, mates! We’re expecting a cold front this week.”

  Tonight, we wash our socks and underwear, then dry them overnight in the heat billowing from our guesthouse radiators. It is one week until the summer solstice.

  Our plan is to drive southward from Christchurch, the south island’s capital, and meander down to Queenstown. We will avoid highways at all costs, and we will stop for wildflowers, well-painted street signs, and hobbit sightings. The drive is three hundred miles, which means we calculate about five hours till our arrival at the next guesthouse. The south island’s population is only one million people, yet it’s roughly the size of Illinois, which has a population of thirteen million. Surely the traffic here is nil.