Three hours later, we walk through the front door, and I toss bags of leftover Lego kits and multicolored pens on the bed and close the door. I empty my bag from the craft store on the dining table and call out, “Kids! Come here!” I spread out the construction paper, markers, and painter’s tape.
“What’s this for?” Tate asks.
“We’re going to decorate the house. Starting with giving ourselves a Christmas tree,” I answer.
The kids slice green paper at sawtooth angles, cut out mismatched circles of red and blue baubles, a janky yellow star. I return to the bedroom and wrap the gifts, then set them under our two-dimensional tree, which Kyle has taped to the wall in an outline of green tape.
We watch A Christmas Story tonight, eat popcorn for dinner, and cover cereal boxes with the remaining construction paper to transform them into makeshift stockings. The kids tuck into bed, each in his or her own bedroom—a luxury. Kyle and I sip late-night cups of tea in the backyard under the stars. The neighbor’s sprinkler comes to life, sputters its cadence. A nearby kookaburra laughs. It is summer solstice: the longest day of the year.
O holy night, indeed.
Australia, like the United States, is a country of natives overtaken by its European immigrants. Its origin as a penal colony is widely known, having started as a dumping ground for Britain’s worst of the worst (meaning, typically, nine-year-old chimney sweeps and Irish women caught stealing butter), and the original Aborigines have struggled to reclaim—and maintain—their identity. Sydney is where this British colony began, and until 1971 the government restricted immigration to white settlers only in order to preserve a British ethnic identity. Since 2005, however, it’s estimated that 40 percent of the population has at least one parent born overseas, and as of a few years ago, over a quarter of Australians were born overseas, most likely in Africa or Asia. It is still a country of immigrants, living among the 3 percent of the population hailing from Aboriginal tribes.
If you weren’t born here, statistically you were most likely born in Britain, New Zealand, China, Italy, or Vietnam. But around ninety thousand immigrants are from the United States. This includes my friend, Adriel, who lives in Sydney. She is a native Bendite, which means she hails from the small Oregon town from which we left, and married an Aussie several years ago. I met her months ago when they were in the Pacific Northwest visiting her hometown while we were packing up our life to begin our trek.
Here, they live in a ninety-five-square-foot travel trailer with their two small boys. We invite them to come see us and to park their home in the driveway for a few days.
They have recently relocated to Sydney from Queensland, and with this decision they have taken on a sizable increase in expenses. Sydney has the fourth highest living expenses in the world, and they have channeled their limited funds into a thirty-year-old renovated trailer. With a few refresher coats of paint and a spark of creativity, they have made a tiny home. Two days before the New Year, Adriel and her husband, Ryan, pull an orange extension cord out from the side of their home and plug it into the McAlarys’. (We asked first; they gave hearty permission. See, supra, the Westbrook Effect.)
Their two boys scamper to the backyard to meet the chickens and trampoline, and Adriel invites me into her home for the grand tour. To the left of the door are folding bunk beds for the kids; to the right is a bijou swath of kitchen counter space with a miniature stove and fridge. There is a dining table, which also serves as office, art station, and living room, and behind a kitschy sliding door, their master bedroom miraculously houses a queen-sized bed and corner closet. I flash back to our first guesthouse in Beijing.
We sit in the dining room/living room/office, and Adriel confesses, “Just a few months here and I’ve learned so much about myself. I know what I’m like when I don’t have a place to call home, how I feel out of sorts. And yet I have a liberation and freedom from the burden of those things that come from a real house. They sometimes get in the way.”
Like me, she is in her late thirties and feels misplaced. She is a fellow nomad; her travel trailer is the same as my backpack. I tell her about Kate, a fellow American mother I met in Thailand, who with her husband is taking her ten-year-old son to every continent this school year, including Antarctica. Kate also confessed that stripping away the idea of home feels like swinging midair on a trapeze with no net.
Without a foundation underneath four walls, we identify with everywhere and nowhere. We notice with razor-sharp clarity that grass is generally the same across the planet, and yet each country has its own variety of green turf, its own type of light switch, its own method for storing knives. Adriel calls Sydney home, but she perambulates with her walls every few weeks. My walls change every few weeks too. So do Kate’s. So do thousands of other earthlings, scurrying like ants across grass to movable homes, to tents and nomadic dwellings. Some of us have chosen this temporarily; others choose it indefinitely. Many don’t have a choice.
I feel at home in the world, and I feel like Alice falling down a rabbit hole. I cannot push a thumbtack in a map and say, “There. That is where I’m from.” There is nothing to grab onto, no anchor. A vagabond life provides stopgaps but no permanence. Our friends who have traveled the world before us suggested we keep our house during our voyage; we decided instead to sell. I think of them now and wonder if their wisdom would have insulated me from my sense of free-falling.
Because there is no escape hatch for dwelling on the possibility of home, I wonder if instead I have been given the gift of noticing. Are my senses enhanced, sharpened? Have I honed my discerning spirit, learned to take keen note of the differences in how prices are labeled in markets, how beer tastes on different continents? I feel as though I can smell the exhaust from a car in New Zealand, how it mingles with air molecules in a different formation than in Hong Kong. The Thai speak an octave higher than anyone else I’ve yet encountered. Australians elongate the cadence of their e’s. Finn’s left eyebrow arches higher than his right when he’s surprised. The southern Chinese have a different accent to their Mandarin than their northern counterparts, though I couldn’t pinpoint specifics. I just know they do.
Poet Mary Oliver writes, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”1 Perhaps I have been given this as a work assignment on our travels.
“Tea?” asks Adriel. “Or beer? We have both. Have you tried Beez Neez? It’s wonderful.”
Ryan and Adriel are staying with us through the New Year, which means traipsing our five kids to the fireworks display over Sydney Harbor. They know of a good spot, where we will fight crowds, yes, but where we can spread out a picnic blanket or two. Several days ago, they took us to Sydney proper, where Reed splashed in the hot summer waves of Manly Beach for his late December birthday, and where we took a ferryboat down the harbor and witnessed the sun set fire to the top of the Sydney Opera House. It was a relief, a lightness, to sightsee with locals. Sydney is pleasurable, but she is not easy to navigate.
The morning of December 31, a friend of Adriel’s calls from our anticipated spot for the evening festivities.
“She got there by ten this morning, and it’s already filled to the gills,” Adriel whispers with her hand over the phone. “She’s saving us a few feet of space, but she says we need to be there by three so she can take a break.”
My eyes widen; my heart heaves with the thought of five children parked on a blanket for nine hours until fireworks.
“Still want to?” she asks. I make a face. I mentally replay the Internet video we watched yesterday of last year’s harbor fireworks display and debate the merits of wedging the lot of us in three square feet and no bathrooms.
Tonight—the nine of our bodies bedecked with pajamas and glow sticks—we fire up the backyard grill and queue eighties music from our laptops. We cavort on the trampoline and laugh as our neon-glowing heads of pink, blue, and yellow swirl and jostle up and down. The kids giggle, and I bathe in the sound. I sing along loudly to songs from my childhoo
d. We watch the display of fireworks from the comfort of the McAlarys’ couch, and we fall asleep at a reasonable hour.
There was a global phenomenon an arm’s reach away, and we chose instead to soak in the ordinariness of home, be it a temporary one. Tonight, I log in a day’s work of paying attention.
A new year has arrived, and we are squarely in the suburbs to welcome it.
Australia is didgeridoos and dingoes, deadly rain forest weeds and millions of endemic creatures. It is also Santa at the mall and commonplace lawn grass. It, along with New Zealand, is so distant from my native country and my daily awareness that it’s easy to forget about this corner of the world. They welcome the day first here, before the rest of us on the planet. They have given us refrigeration, Wi-Fi, and bungee jumping. Australia’s citizens primarily speak English, yet they christen places with names like Bong Bong, Boing Boing, Bungle Bungles, Bubble Bubble, Humpty Doo, Headbutts, Tittybong, and Nowhere Else. New Zealand sheep outnumber people six to one and adorn the rest of us with merino wool. Yet the people remind me of Texas, my birthplace—neighborly, proud of their heritage, salt of the earth. They are familiar faces, at home nine thousand miles away from my own.
The citizens of this corner of the world cherish their land. They love their waters. They cultivate both well, carve lightly into the topography, and delight in the natural world’s pleasures with aplomb. Representatives of the human race are sparse. Trees that once played with dinosaurs still run wild. Wildflowers frolic in abandon with livestock. People plow the dark soil and paint with earth’s rocks.
Asia forces me into the unknown; Australia and New Zealand give me the gift of retreat. Asia taps my Americanness on the shoulder and plays a new song with a novel beat, asks me for a dance. Australia hands me a glass of wine and invites me to take a load off in the chair on the back deck. My wayfaring half has been resurrected, yet my other half, the homebody, still exists among night market stalls and grass tucked at the base of the Southern Alps.
My full body, I realize, was always in my Oregon neighborhood, reading stories on the couch to my kids about faraway lands. I savor mango sticky rice from dubious food stalls in Chiang Mai, and I relish grilled cheese and tomato soup on my dining room table. Our last ordinary days in Australia whisper to me a secret: going into the unknown means returning to the known is a bewitching sweetness. Adventure doesn’t always require a sturdy backpack.
We feed chickens; we make soup; we go to the movies. We catch up on work and school. We spot kangaroos crossing the neighborhood road as deer do in Texas. We pay attention for two more weeks. And then, we fold our laundry, repack our bags, and replenish our deodorant stash. It is time to reengage with the planet in a new year.
Summertime Christmastide
Snows of seasonal cotton lie dormant till wind swirls its spell
Kisses ankles of children with ready walking sticks,
Tufts flit down, down, downward again.
Juvenile milky puffs emancipate from its mother branch,
Maypole-dancing down the bole.
December tides of late spring hearken new birth.
Leaves raise hands as celebrants of new life,
A nativity brought for all.
It is summer. Glad tidings to all.
INTERMISSION
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
—C. S. Lewis
9
SRI LANKA
Sri Lanka is chaos. Before we leave the Colombo airport, we partake in an unplanned appointment with a uniformed man (military? airport employee?) who has led us to his office and has not spoken for half an hour. The kids are goofing around on office chairs, sitting upside down and swinging their legs; Kyle and I are employing our official everything’s-all-right travel faces. We are clueless. Turns out we got bad advice about our visas before our arrival here; they should have either been purchased more than twenty-four hours in advance or at the airport counter in person, instead of what we did—buy them online mere hours beforehand, during a layover in Kuala Lumpur. Crisp American bills suffice as collateral for necessary passport stamps and stickers, and so with a stack high enough on the man’s desk and a conniving smile to prevent our eyes from rolling with annoyance, we are allowed into the country, this pear-shaped island southeast of India.
I have never before seen an airport like this. Past the baggage claim, we push our stack of bags on a trolley and walk through a gauntlet of furniture and appliance stores. We are now in a mall. Vacuum cleaners, reclining chairs, dishwashers, electric teakettles—the price is right on household goods in the airport. Who buys a washing machine after a transoceanic international flight? I wonder. There really are decent prices on Maytags. Too bad I don’t have a house to put one in.
We hail a taxi and have it take us from the airport appliance outlet to the commotion of the train station. We don’t know what to expect and we don’t exactly have a plan, other than to find a way to our guesthouse. We were told the train is the cheapest and most efficient means of traveling from the capital city of Colombo to our guesthouse in the town of Kandy. We were also told we wouldn’t need passport visas in advance.
Turns out it’s fine to buy train tickets at the station gate; there’s plenty of space in first class at five bucks a seat. There is no place in the station to store our bags while we wait for the train, however, and we are starving after our marathon journey from Sydney. A day ago, we left Australia’s capital city at ten o’clock in the evening and arrived in Kuala Lumpur at three the next morning. There, we piled together like bears in a den and slept on the dingy Malaysian airport floor until our flight to Colombo at 10 a.m. I think we’ve been traveling for nineteen hours, but Sri Lankan time is four hours, thirty minutes behind Australia’s, so who’s to say?
We keep the weight on our backs and search for food to take on the train.
Outside the station, men sit on curbs munching on corn on the cob and oranges; they stop midbite and stare at us, as if we’ve stepped out of a sitcom. Toddlers hold hands with grandmothers and uniformed schoolchildren run past us, rushing to a bus stop. Motorized rickshaw taxis slow down and walk with us, honk their childlike horns to announce their availability. Women in vibrant saris of green and gold flash against the sunlight, intermingling with men’s plaid wraparound sarongs and polo shirts. The sky is yellow-gray with pollution again; the air smells of factory smoke, curry, and sweat. Passing crowds slow down and stare once more at our flaxen-haired children. Vendors thrust fried samosas, oranges, brochures for grand tours of the capital city, and fake Rolex watches toward us.
The five of us circle back to the train station, find a tiny attached bakery swarming with customers vying for next in line, and push our way forward for sesame-covered rolls and a variety of samosas. For the kids, I hope at least one of the triangle pastries isn’t spicy. We load up on bottled water and pray that they weren’t refilled under the tap.
We trudge through the train station, wave at the ticket vendor who recognizes us, toss our bags on the ground, and sit on them. I open the bakery bag and pass out pastries. The kids nibble a feeble corner off their samosas, pass them to Kyle and me.
“No thanks,” they each say.
“Aren’t you starving?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I sigh and reluctantly give them the plain sesame-dotted rolls, and Reed picks off the seeds. Kyle and I eat the five samosas. The garam masala potato filling dissolves in my mouth; Kyle groans with pleasure. They are divine.
Looking at a map, this is an odd stop on our journey. Sri Lanka isn’t near anywhere else we are visiting, and neither Kyle nor I know anyone here. We don’t know that much about it, either, but when we planned our trip months ago, we noticed it was an even stop between the Australian and African continents, and huh—I wonder what it’s like? That seemed like a good enough reason to stop, and so, we are here because it’s here. It exists. It floats in the Indian
Ocean, a teardrop southeast of India, and there probably won’t be another time we’ll fly across it.
It has not yet been a full day since we were in Australia, where highways felt familiar and smells were commonplace. Now we are surrounded by mystery.
A train pulls into the station and we strap on our packs. First class proffers padded velvet seats, a spitting window-unit air conditioner, and a movie without sound or subtitles, starring B-list American teenage actors. The screen wobbles above the emergency exit, and a few minutes later, the sluggish train departs the station. We pass graffitied concrete walls and piles of trash, a few boys playing dangerously close to the tracks. I see some of Colombo’s skyscrapers and the coastline in the distance. The scenery gradually transfigures to stubby shrubs with giant leaves, towering banyan trees, rusted corrugated tin roofs, old women hanging brightly colored laundry, and young men on bicycles. As the train gains speed, it begins to gallop. Our bodies start to wave forward and back, our heads wobble; I feel like I’m on a high-speed carousel horse. My velvet seat begins to shift sideways.
“Mom, I don’t feel very good,” Finn moans.
“Me neither. You can lay down and close your eyes.” He curls up next to me.
Tate looks up from her book. “I don’t think I can do any school right now,” she says. Reed laughs at the roller coaster ride, sways with the rhythm, and bounces in his seat. He sits by himself and the rest of us close our eyes. I hear Finn snoring. Towns and villages bobble up and down, and I keep my head straight as I pray for a vomit-free journey. Nameless teenagers fight on the screen and shout silent obscenities.
I don’t know how we’ll find dinner tonight, and I hope for a corner store near our house for eggs and a few veggies—we are nutrient depleted and pastry bloated. It’s dark when we arrive in Kandy, and we hail a taxi. He speaks some English and offers a price that sounds extortionate. Kyle texts the German homeowner, who is currently in Europe, to verify the price.
At Home in the World Page 10
