At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  This is what’s important about New Zealand: its residents, known as Kiwis, are friendly to strangers, the cost of living is startlingly expensive, and the country selfishly holds captive the most staggering creation God has yet brainstormed. We drive away from Christchurch, and everything outside quiets. There is a chill in the air, but I crack down my window to hear the birds. The late morning sun rises above thigh-high golden grass, and our two-lane highway slices through the field. We follow its dotted lines, watch them chase each other beneath our car. They meander to the right and so do we, tucking into a valley and fields of purple lupine.

  “Oh my God,” I utter. I am not swearing.

  Kyle lifts the pressure off the gas pedal and we stare at alien pastures of chiaroscuro shadows, light-carved hills on a flat plain. Clouds dawdle above, their silhouettes below dancing with wildflowers. The scene before us ranks with Tuscany and the Pacific Northwest. I respond the only way I know how—I laugh helplessly.

  Kyle whispers, “What in the world?”

  The kids exclaim, “Whoa!” and return to their books.

  We pull over for roadside lupine again and again, the sun crawling across the sky morphing their colors hourly from iris, lavender, amethyst, lilac, violet, sangria, wine. Cerulean streams and clusters of agapanthus stow away in leggy grass. It smells like sweet spring, tender and hopeful. I take an hour to photograph a stone chapel overlooking the milky green Tekapo Lake, angling to avoid the throngs of Japanese tourists shooting peace signs in the background. The kids impatiently wait in the car. As the sun fades, I force Kyle to pull over so I can capture a local post office’s red clock swinging above its front door.

  We arrive on our next front porch ten hours after leaving Christchurch this morning.

  “Finally!” Tate announces as she heaves her pack through the front door. It is starless outside, pitch-black beyond the cottage’s windows. Tomorrow morning, we will see our surroundings. I swing open our bedroom windows and they entangle with vines outside. The earthy smell of garden barrels through our nostrils—soil, dew, musty compost, wet grass—weaving with stealth through the air and hitting the back of my throat. We brush our teeth, change clothes, stock the fridge with our groceries, collapse into bed.

  The gold of morning rouses us, and I look out our window from bed.

  “Oh my God,” I utter. I am not swearing again.

  We are carved into a rose garden.

  I climb out of bed while Kyle still snores, open the double doors in the living room. I am ensconced by thickets of pinks, yellows, whites; I am standing on a patio thrust into the flowers with a table, chairs, chaise longues. Virescent mountains praise the sky behind the neighbor’s house across the street. I head inside to the kitchen and start the coffee; I find my bag and dig out my current book (At Home, Bill Bryson). The family sleeps; the coffeemaker murmurs awake.

  I have found my elysian fields. I don’t plan to leave.

  We are technically in Arrowtown, a tiny bedroom community of several thousand residents outside Queenstown. After breakfast on the patio, we walk to the town’s main street, a conglomeration of Old West–style storefronts now holding trendy clothing and bespoke home goods. We stop at the post office (its wooden sign: Post and Telegraph) and mail postcards to grandparents. It is a stockpile of stationery and stamps, books by local authors on local places. The standard red mailbox is out front, but inside is a temporary mailbox for letters to Santa. I ask the two women at the desk who in town handles the letters.

  “What do you mean?” one says with a wink. “Santa does.”

  Next door, people dine alfresco at Postmasters, a cottage-turned-café named for its original nineteenth-century inhabitant. On the other side, a man sells ice cream from a stand. I exchange the jacket I was wearing for an apple from my backpack. The weather is warming—not exactly summer to me, but it smacks of spring. I think that airport shuttle driver was wrong.

  We walk to the end of the main street, then to the nearby banks of Bush Creek, a tributary of the Arrow River and home of the derelict Arrowtown Chinese Settlement. Stone huts from the 1860s dot the land, a reminder that the town began during the Otago Gold Rush and swelled to a thriving place of residence. Chinese immigrants made their way here, along with Europeans and Californians, then were dutifully persecuted and heavily taxed until the 1940s (New Zealand formally apologized in 2002). Our kids run in and out of the huts, and we imagine frontier life raising a family with fingers crossed in hopes of striking it rich. I am aware of what little Kiwi history I know.

  Nearby, an original police camp building stands as a graying wood cabin, parked authoritatively along the river in overstated protection from the original foreigners. Cottonwood trees sway in the breeze, towering above the shanty. They shower puffs of cotton with drops of seedpod on the ground, and the grass is blanketed with tufts of spring snow. The kids sing “Jingle Bells” and toss the snow in the air.

  Arrowtown charms, but my mind wanders to our guesthouse. I want to bake in the patio’s sun and imbibe the perfume of roses. My body and soul want to pause the sightseeing, to instead soak in glory. I need to stop and smell the roses. We all do.

  I think of Vanessa’s comment in Melbourne, and I calculate that I have indeed spent more than two thousand hours nonstop with the kids, not counting sleep, spiritual direction sessions with Nora, a few hours at random coffee shops to scramble for work deadlines, and thirty minutes when I had LASIK surgery on my eyes in Chiang Mai. I study my kids’ hairlines, scrutinize the freckles dancing across their noses, and marvel that I played a role in creating their bodies. Their quotidian observations slay, make my brain stand on its head. I vie for their moral resolve.

  Parenting is hard because of diapers and time-outs, the slog of sounding out vowels and the drama of mailboxes missing party invitations. But it is hardest because it is a mirror. It is life staring me down. It is the echoes of my inner childish voice reverberating from my children’s; it is the denial of me going first. It is my flesh and blood unleashed, encased around another personality, another will. It is the continual death of my basal impulses for the exchange of extraordinary. It is fighting traffic for gymnastics class, early-morning sandwich cutting, late-night math drills. It is perpetual togetherness while circumnavigating the globe.

  At the guesthouse, Kyle grills and I make a salad. We eat on the patio, and the kids perform a play they’ve rehearsed in secret. We applaud wildly. Then baths, pajamas, my turn to read a story. The kids climb into bunk beds in the room with blackout shades, hours before the sun sets at ten. I retreat back outside to Kyle, and we open a bottle of wine. I wonder at the sky that resembles early afternoon. We talk about the kids, how they’re doing, marvel at their traveling prowess, comment on Tate’s confusion with fractions, Reed’s challenge with phonics. We laugh at something we read on the Internet. We watch a cat video. I think again about my kids and my mother-heart swells.

  Then the two of us change into our pajamas, open our windows, climb into bed, and start Lord of the Rings on a laptop. The mines of Moria and the river through Rivendell are right outside Arrowtown.

  Three days later, we leave town. It is the first time I sob about leaving a place. We vow to return one day.

  To make our week in New Zealand financially doable, we must spend the next half in a campervan, crawling our way back up the south island. In Queenstown, I found a bargain deal that required schlepping a campervan back to Christchurch, and we could make the trek however we wanted. The only two real options were the east or west coast, which in New Zealand is akin to choosing emeralds or rubies. We opt for west because we are West Coasters, and west is best, as West Coasters are wont to say.

  After we leave, I read the weather forecast: clear skies east, non-stop rain west. We duck through a rain forest, and a torrent of water pours for two days. The kids play with Lego bricks for forty-eight hours in the campervan, and we drive from campsite to campsite. We make meals of cheese and crackers from the kitchenette. Muddy foot
prints stomp up and down our minuscule hallway. I paid extra for an Internet router in the van, but it can’t endure the weather, so I’m unable to work. Kyle steers our mammoth ride around windy wooded corners through peals of water, and through the downpour and windshield patter we shout our thoughts about life post-travel, ideas about where we might relocate, what our work will look like a year from now. We bellow our dreams.

  The native Maori tribes of New Zealand christened the islands with the name Aotearoa, which means “Land of the Long White Cloud.” No one knows the official origin of this name, but it is birthed from beauty, from gazing at its landscape. New Zealand is one of the least densely populated countries on earth. Here, flowers and sheep and cattle crowd out humankind. Creation reigns. A smattering of men, women, and children are graced with the privilege to walk on it.

  This week, we have cheated on Italy and France, on Thailand. Our hearts splinter over a new lover. We board our plane back to Australia with a sigh in our hearts and a promise to rendezvous with her again. Kiwi dirt banked along clouded cerulean water has caked into the tread of my shoes. I choose not to remove it, a souvenir from God’s oeuvre. I will let it depart on its own, where it may.

  8

  AUSTRALIA, AGAIN

  Australia feels like returning home. For three weeks, we have permission to take off our sweaty, itchy vagabonding hats because we are house-sitting for friends currently on vacation in Canada. We will hole up in the Sydney suburbs and take care of chickens. Heading here, I suspect, will be like waking up from a complicated dream, where your surroundings seem familiar but still slightly off-kilter. This is a regular home for a regular family, and yet it isn’t ours.

  The real trick is getting to the house. We’ll deplane; then we need to take a train several hours out to Glenbrook, a western suburb hugging the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and then walk ten blocks uphill to our house with heavy packs on our backs. We’ve held this news as secret from the kids because I know they will be less than thrilled.

  I mentally rehearse my news bomb and warm up my cheerful mom voice, and then I spot a stranger holding a sheet of paper among the welcome crowd, Oxenreider scribbled in black marker. I glance over at Kyle, and his look of confusion verifies he’s seen it too. We have no plans for pickup.

  “Um . . . hi,” I say reluctantly to this unknown woman. “We’re the Oxenreiders?”

  “Hello! I’m Beryl, Brooke’s mum,” the woman replies eagerly, shaking my hand. “But everyone calls me Bez.”

  Brooke is my friend and writing colleague on holiday in Canada, who has given us detailed instructions how to get to her place. We’ll find her parents on the front porch when we arrive, Brooke said, where they would give us the house and car keys.

  “Oh, well. Hello! Brooke told me we’d meet you at her house,” I say sheepishly. I wonder if I’ve missed something in my sleep deprivation, lost in translation in the shuffle of travel plans. Perhaps we were going to meet her mom at the airport after all?

  “Yeah, that’s right. But we thought we’d surprise you anyway with an airport pickup. You’re probably knackered,” she remarks. I am frozen and say nothing, eyes wide. An airport pickup?

  “That’s awfully kind of you,” I say, “but you really didn’t have to.” My brain is still fully operating in game-face mode, seconds away from telling the kids we need to board a train and walk for miles, pushing through exhaustion. I’m aware I’m still staring, mouth agape.

  “Well, we thought about you guys and your kids, and thought you might like a little old-fashioned mum and dad pickup,” Bez says. “We know what it’s like for our kids to travel with their kids, and we hated the thought of you fighting through Sydney.”

  “Thank you, but . . . it’s not cheap to come all the way out here. We know what gas is like in Australia,” I say. (As though she doesn’t know this.) “We can’t ask you to do this. Please let us pay you.”

  “Nonsense,” she says. “Pete is already waiting at the cars in the garage.”

  Bez picks up one of our packs and walks. We follow her, deliriously murmuring thank you until we arrive at the cars.

  “Hello! Welcome to Sydney!” Pete exclaims cheerily. He pulls the packs off our backs, tosses them into his trunk. “Climb in, climb in!”

  They’ve brought not one, but two vehicles to cart us to the westernmost outskirts of Sydney, more than fifty miles and an hour’s drive away. Our eyes are saucers. Kyle climbs into Pete’s car with Reed and Tate, and I clamber into Bez’s, where Finn has a booster seat waiting in the back seat. They won’t let us open our wallets for the parking garage. We pull out on the highway, heading west.

  “This is truly above and beyond,” I slur, fighting travel fatigue sincere with indebtedness. “We haven’t yet had an airport pickup on our trip. It feels . . . nice.” I blush at my tinny, juvenile response and gaze out the passenger window. Finn has slumped over asleep.

  “We’re truly happy to do this,” Bez says. “Not sure if Brooke’s told you, but our family are big fans of something we call the Westbrook Effect.” Brooke has mentioned this, but I can’t recall its meaning. She explained it to me months ago as the reason she wouldn’t let us pay for our extended stay in her house.

  “Years ago, Pete worked for a man named Westbrook. He was from San Diego, and we got to visit him a few times. Every time we did—and it turns out he did this for everyone who came to visit—he’d pull out all the stops. He gave us the master bedroom, the full use of his car, paid for all our meals. He’d clear his schedule to take us all over the city. Westbrook insisted we pay for nothing during our stay, since it was his town and we were his guests. He went above and beyond, making sure we had the absolute best time in San Diego. We loved it so much, his take on hospitality and giving over and above, that we vowed to always do the same as a family. Now, anytime someone comes to Sydney, we pull out all the stops and do what we can to make ’em feel at home. No paying, no feeling weird about asking for something, no tiptoeing around or shushing kids. This is what we always did when our kids were still at home, and now that they’re out of the house with their own families, they’ve kept it up and are still doing it. Westbrook Effect.”

  We pull into Brooke’s driveway behind her car, clean and waiting for our use. Pete and Bez climb out of their cars, open the front door, carry in our packs, give us a quick tour. Pete hands over the keys, insists we make ourselves at home and to not hesitate to call if we need anything; they are just a few minutes away.

  Twenty minutes later, after they’ve left and the kids are entranced with the backyard trampoline, there’s a knock at the door. Kyle answers, and in saunters Pete, with two coffees and a paper bag.

  “We thought you guys might be a bit hungry and in need of some real coffee,” he says. “So this is from the bakery a few blocks away. Hope your kids like grilled cheese.” He sets the bag on the counter, gives a quick good-bye, and shows himself back out the door.

  I glance at Kyle. “Oh. We’re so doing the Westbrook Effect, forever and ever.”

  Three and a half months of nonstop backpacking, and we are giddy at the thought of unpacking. We can buy real groceries without worry whether they’ll stay fresh in a backpack for more than a few hours; we can lounge in a real living room to watch Netflix. The exotic and mundane have switched places.

  It is December 23 the morning we arrive in Sydney, and we want to finally celebrate Christmas. There is little point in setting up a tree or stockings, but we want to schedule a few cookie-baking sessions, watch A Christmas Story with popcorn and cocoa. After a night of sound sleep, we drive to the suburb’s center to buy a few gifts at the mall.

  We hardly recognize ourselves. We aren’t mall people, and we’ve actually already visited malls in both Thailand and China. Needs for a pharmacy, an English bookstore, clean socks kept pulling us magnetically toward malls the past few months. In today’s case, the pull is Christmas shopping, and it is an odd, disorienting dose of reverse culture shock. “Frosty the Sno
wman” pipes through speakers, shoppers wobble with stacks of bags on each shoulder, and Santa perches on his throne parked in cotton-candy snow and surrounded by disgruntled elves. Christmas is in the air, and yet the air-conditioning blasts and the crowd is in shorts. I detest shopping in any season and my feelings on the matter are heightened this time of year, but I am determined to find things I can wrap in paper. They must be lightweight and small enough to cram in our packs. I am limited by our backpacks and by the stores’ ransacked shelves.

  I wander into a department store and am disoriented, like a girl on the wrong aisle who’s lost her mom. My current personal belongings consist of a laptop and a converter for electrical gadgets; my current wardrobe consists of garb fit for washing elephants in Thailand, hiking in the Queensland bush, and, eventually, shopping in a Moroccan medina. Brushing past womenswear while George Michael sings about his last Christmas causes dizzying culture shock. The toy section is completely picked over, so I leave.

  I find a craft store, disheveled from harried shoppers. An idea has hit me. I find everything I need but Scotch tape, and I ask for its whereabouts.

  “Sorry, love, we sold out of Scotch tape weeks ago.” The employee walks off. I shrug and opt for green painter’s tape from a nearby kiosk, and decide this will work even better.

  I find a Target at the end of the mall and shuffle through its remains to unearth a few workable gifts. They’re nothing I would buy in our normal life, but life isn’t normal right now. I add a roll of pink-and-gold wrapping paper and a tin of obscure-brand chocolates.