Reflecting and Continuing

Thank you for reading this far.  Thank you for taking me in when I drove into your town.  Thank you for caring about me, and encouraging me.  You have made a really big difference in my life.

I don’t know how this story ends, of course, because I’m still traveling, still trying to move forward.  And as I write this, almost a year after I got back from 14,000 miles through 32 states and then two weeks in Namibia, I’m still mulling over what I did and what it meant and how it changed me.  I’ve been working on this essay all of that year:  I was that reluctant to name what all this meant, and maybe that full of ideas.  There’s a lot to say, and I’m trying to edit it down to the essential.

It seems important to me that I missed all of New England on my trip, the region where I grew up and that feels most like home to me.  Hmmm.  This, too:  most of the strangers I encountered on my journey seemed much more interested in telling me about themselves than in hearing about me, and my adventure.  Conveniently, I was much more interested in hearing about them than talking about myself.  There’s something significant there.  I also kept thinking about how we’re interconnected, as I traveled massive superhighways that link Amish people to movie stars to migrant farm workers to hedge fund managers, and saw signs about regional waterways that provide disparate people with drinking water, lawn-irrigation, factory power and someplace to dump waste, and shunted onto side roads when the superhighway needed repair or I wanted to reach a small town.

Maybe I’ll write about those ideas sometime.  But what I want to explore now, and try to explain, is how I felt for a moment in Portland.  K.B. asked me why I was traveling to the coast, instead of going straight south, or something like that.  I said, “Because I want to.”  She leaned forward, stared, and said, “Oh, I love that answer.”  It’s not always been the first one to fall out of my mouth – and I love it, too.

When I was in middle school, my mum got several of her kids swimming a bit more seriously than the ocean dog-paddling I’d been doing since infancy.  I earned my junior lifesaving and advanced swimmer certificates, and took a diving class.  Swimming was easy, fun, natural – except underwater; I am just not a good breath holder – diving was not.  Forward dives were okay, because they got me into the water, though always with the slight worry I might miss my aim and smack down too hard.  Then there was the day we were supposed to do backward dives.

I stood at the end of the board, facing the wrong way, and, as instructed, started a back-bend, my hands together over my head.  Then I was supposed to push off, just the littlest bit, with my feet, and trust that my body would obey gravity and physics and cleave smoothly through the water I couldn’t see below me.  I could not do it.

I was pretty flexible, and the instructor was delighted with my back-bend.  “Yes, that’s right,” she called from the tiling.  “Now just let go.”  I straightened up instead.  She offered some more encouragement, and I went into an even deeper back-bend.  “That’s great,” she said, “That’s more than enough.  Now just let yourself go.”  Then I straightened up again, alarmed by how the diving board was wobbling.  And then I tried again: backbend, reassurance from instructor, deep breath, straighten up again.  I have never done a backward dive.

 

I rode my bike no hands, down steep hills.  I didn’t go to gym class for three quarters, and flunked phys ed in my junior year of high school.  Rather than go to summer school, for gym, I dropped out and went straight into college.  I walked home from T.T. the Bear’s at two in the morning, alone.  I loved a Seamus Heaney poem so I worked three years for the money to go to grad school in Ireland, arriving there with two huge suitcases and nowhere to live.  I am not the fraidiest cat in the litter.

And yet...

By my mid-40s I had opted for a long-term relationship with a good guy, a house in the suburbs, and a career that did not engage me fully.  My life was okay, with lots of stress and disappointment, many moments of pure joy, plenty of drudgery and an occasional adventure.  Whenever I read a newspaper, I imagined myself in a different life, with greater engagement – intellectual and emotional – in work and people and places that really excited me.  But I stuck with what I had, until forces apparently outside me ripped it all away.

So my journey is a story of transition, maybe – but everyone’s life is a story of transition; change is constant and change is transition, so transition is constant.  No matter how static you feel, your cells are always dividing, your eyesight is worsening, your bank balance is fluctuating, your patience is waxing and waning.  No one with children can claim to be stuck in place; nor anyone with aging parents, siblings, friends.

This is a story of more dramatic transition than most of us experience in a typical year.  A lot of our transitions – from parents of pre-schoolers to parents of college students to grandparents; from trainee to manager to director to V.P. – are so gradual we may need to pull back from the day-to-day to recognize them.  When I describe the spring of my 49^th year to people, they usually respond with widened eyes and some variation on, “Yowza.”  But we are all living yowza every day.  We just don’t notice, or we’d go into sensory overload.  So some moments, I shall try to notice better, and aim to yowza in the right direction for me.

About that right direction:  since you are reading this, you are probably a friend of mine, and therefore do not look to me for advice or inspiration or grand conclusions.  Good thing, since I have none, and I doubt you would believe or trust them if I did.  I am glad you wouldn’t, because I think that the main thing I – ‘learned’ is the wrong word.  The main thing I knew already but had resisted accepting, and that crystallized for me in the course of this trip, is that I know what is right for me.  I suspect each of us knows what is right, and that the specifics vary widely:  have kids or don’t, run away to join the circus or keep drudging on with the boring job because it allows you to spend weekends perfecting the trapeze routine that is your joy and inspiration, travel the world or spend as much time as you have becoming intimately familiar with one small piece of it, and everything in between.

Some of us, though – I’m a Virgo and an INTP, if that helps – resist that small certainty, because we don’t trust ourselves.  Instead we look to outside sources for advice.  Well, as of today I don’t believe much in general prescriptions.  “Running is good for you.”  “Running is terrible for your joints.”  “Have a career before you have kids.”  “Family comes first.”  “Go west, young man.”  Maybe Emily Dickinson would have been happier if she had left the handsome house in Amherst and ridden all the way to Pittsburgh, but maybe she would have had a nervous breakdown if she had traveled much.  I’m sure there are lots of people who benefit by doing one thing every day that scares them, but I bet Eleanor Roosevelt’s poster-worthy advice is a lousy suggestion for others.

I loved my trip.  It helped my soul to grow and flourish.  I don’t know whether you can tell by looking at me, but I changed for the better, and I hope for good.  Quitting your career and driving all over the place and connecting with stranger-friends might be a lousy choice for you, though.  But I guess I do have some advice, after all.  Do it if the idea sings inside you.  If the idea doesn’t, find a quiet place and wait for a little while, and when something comes into your mind or your feelings that does sing inside you, do that instead.  Maybe this is following your bliss, or seizing the moment; I don’t know.  And maybe the best thing you can do in your life is to drown your own ambitions in sacrifice to your family or your retirement savings.  But you are the only one who knows for sure, and you are the only one whom you should trust absolutely.

A religious friend, listening to me talk about how right events and decisions suddenly felt, how comfortable I was becoming in my changing skin, said enthusiastically, “Oh, He’s got a plan for you!  You’ll be a believer yet!”  But I never felt like I was getting signals from God.  It was always signs from the universe, for me.  And that, for me, is really just a joking shorthand for trusting myself.  I know what I want.  I’m not certain I deserve it, or can have it, or can handle it, but I know what’s right for me.

And that is actually a really hard thing for me to admit in public.  So please don’t ever mention it.

This trip was not a spiritual quest, nor even a psychological one.  It was a celebration, an emotional healing (the old, sick, beloved cat died in that summer of changes, and that ripped my heart apart like no boyfriend, boss or lost home ever could) and an awakening to a golden, glowing, rippling grassland of possibilities.

From the moment it sprang from my brain like Athena, full-grown and armored, the plan for this trip felt right.  The idea resonated in me.  If you’re musical, you know this feeling because it’s what happens when you get the right note in the right key, and resolve to the tonic.  I’m not musical, so it took me a long time, even though I knew from the second I heard them that Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson are designed to harmonize on ‘Roam.’

I sometimes get this when I’m cooking – I sauté shallots and mushrooms and rosemary, and pile them on caramelized onion on a thick slab of rye toast, and eat the sandwich with a glass of St. Emilion, and every separate element of the meal is transformed; exponentially better than fried mushrooms or wine alone.  Harmony.  That’s what it is.  Your true wants, your true needs, your real feelings all line up with what you’re providing yourself, and life becomes the dinner party where the guests haven’t met before but laugh and laugh and laugh.  Or the synchronicity of lavender-green ocean under blue sky with pale gold sand and white-foaming waves, sunshine or moonshine and a light breeze with the scent of honeysuckle.

The certainty I felt about this trip, the liberty and joy I felt while traveling, have modulated a bit.  I bought a cottage in a new town, and I second-guess that choice often.  I’ve volunteered for the Peace Corps, and they’re going to send me to Namibia in the spring of 2015.  I wonder whether I’ll hate being far away from home, living in dirt and dust without enough water or electricity or confidence.  Those feelings go into abeyance, though, when I pick up the Peace Corps fingerprint form for my background check and feel excited all over.  I quit my career, I traveled the country, I chose to move 7,000 miles from home, because I want to.  I know it, and I trust it, and I loved what I’ve done and I’m excited about what’s ahead.  Thank you again – you contributed to this, and I am so grateful.  I wish you joy.

A Brief Overview of Two Weeks in Namibia

November 9-24 2013:  A few kilometers outside Windhoek, Brian (moves like a spring, permanently sunburned, London accent thick as the London fog) announced there were baboons in the road.  I saw a few black-ish lumps that magically became, as we drew closer, actual baboons – and lots of them.  Over the next few hours there were warthogs, eland, goats and sheep and cattle, jackals, steenbok and a mongoose, plus hornbills and various hawks, all surviving in a world of dry riverbeds, dry grasses and thorny bushes.

Sunset spreading to the Waterberg plateau - the view at suppertime at CCF

First impressions set the stage of an experience.  Brian’s energy, Matti’s enthusiasm and the flourishing announcement, to our small van-load, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – the Waterberg,” drew up the curtain on a transformative two weeks.  A few hours later, I was sitting down to dinner, gazing past a twin-peaked termite mound at that Waterberg, a magnificent and mysterious plateau of striated rock, as it reflected the brilliant fire colors of the setting sun.  And it kept getting better from there.

A very small sampling of the critters who visited the Kindergarten waterhole
on Friday 15 November 2013

My volunteer experience at the Cheetah Conservation Fund was mundane and extraordinary, tiring and invigorating, fascinating and even more fascinating.  I raked goat yards and cheetah pens, fed and walked dogs, listened to a ruckus of bird calls every morning, and one day spent twelve-plus hours in a hide, counting zebra, tracking warthogs and trying to determine the ages and sexes of various oryx.

Feeding the kitties

I have fed a lot of dogs in my life, but I’ve never before measured out Ultra Dog Superwoof Ostrich & Rice flavor kibble.  I have fed a few cats, but never before thrown two kilo chunks of donkey meat over a three-meter fence for a cheetah.  Three of these cats, purring together, sound as loud and rumbling as test-time at a Boeing factory – but so much lovelier.

All cats love string toys, I guess.

When they play, they chase a scrap of cloth on a string – but at 50 or 60 kilometers an hour, tails swinging to the side as they take the corners at speed.  They stalk, they wait, they pounce, and when they catch that rag they hold onto it – sometimes carrying it off under a tree, and trading it reluctantly when Juliette or Jenny offers a meat cube on a very long handled spoon.

On my second afternoon at CCF, after the amazement of traveling a country that has scores of deeply-carved rivers without a drop of water, I had the joy of watching the clouds mass, and hoping – seeing them darken, and hoping, hoping – feeling the wind cool and quicken, and crossing fingers – celebrating the first few drops with caught breath – seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling the rain take hold in earnest and exhaling joyfully, arms outstretched, face to the sky.

On my last morning at CCF, I watched the sky lighten above the Waterberg from a dusty, green plastic chair outside my rondavel, and then catch pink fire, radiating molten gold, copper, rose gold as scores of birds chirped, sang, called, cooed and whistled, and a kilometer or two away several small but powerful roosters crowed their heads off.  A tiny duiker – unmarked, narrow ears instead of the steenboks’ oversized, stripey ones – skipped over and nibbled the ground under the acacia tree maybe ten meters from me.

Sunrise over the Waterberg plateau,

Spinning as the rag reverses course.  The rag is pink, on the right of
this photo.  I brought the battered cloth home with me; a great souvenir.

Any one of those experiences would have been worth the 17-hour flight, and I haven’t even mentioned bouncing along in a well-used bush vehicle while Matti spots ostrich 300 meters away, or Chavoux eloquently catalogues causes of human-wildlife conflict, or Rob spots a bit of rhino scat he can show us – note the precise 45-degree angle at which the rhino’s teeth cut through twigs.  Reaching into Amos’s head-cone to provide the ear scritches he appreciates so obviously, fending off curious goats, ferrying donkeys’ heads to the boys, tweezing ten hairs of various sizes and colors from the remnants of a scat sample.  The two weeks contained about a year’s worth of new experiences.

Heading home, about a hundred miles out of Dulles Airport, the pilot announced that the temperature in Washington, DC, was six degrees below zero centigrade, or 21 degrees Fahrenheit.  It seemed unreal.  The Namibian savannah needs rain, and all my thoughts are of dark clouds lowering – and when can I go back.

Laurie Marker, founder of CCF; Tiger Lily, no longer interested in posing;
and me, not ready to leave yet.

Days 46 through 48: Jetlagged in Jo'burg

Stinks, actually.

Traveling all ‘round the country was amazing.  I cackled with glee, I clapped my hands (three times fast, then grabbed the wheel again), I pulled over when I wanted to and felt the wind, sniffed the seals (no one ever says, “Stop and  smell the marine wildlife,” but it’s worth doing), gazed at the stars overhead and the moonlight on the ocean.  I looked at highways in a new way, met people with new stories and felt myself coming alive as I never would have if I’d curled up on myself and tried to burrow deeper into the life I’d been living.

At the same time – that’d be spring 2013 – that my essential self knew to drive around America, it also knew that the next thing to try would be a trip to someplace brand new to do something useful.  The organization called Earthwatch came highly recommended by friends as a mentor for that.  Earthwatch offers paid-volunteer opportunities around the world working on archeological digs, wildlife studies and other research projects.  So I made a spreadsheet and compared a few of their more interesting opportunities:  cost, duration, distressing-ness of local government, probability of leeches, weather, etc.  My final choice, from amongst things like dolphins in Greece and water in Mongolia, was cheetah conservation in Namibia.  I had just a few days after finishing the road trip to start my malaria medication, unpack the Honda and re-pack one large and one small suitcase for two weeks of very new adventure.

Earthwatch and its partner the Cheetah Conservation Fund were very careful in directing me what to pack, so that part was pretty easy.  Somehow I never did get the bug spray they’d suggested, but mosquitoes aren’t supposed to be a big problem in that part of the country in November.  I did pack a few boxes sent over by the CCF office in Virginia, including one containing golf-cart parts that are difficult to find in southwestern Africa.  Given the cost, time consumption and difficulty of shipping goods in and out of that country, they make use of couriers as much as they can.  Then there were long sleeves for evening and short sleeves for daytime, a spare picture card for me and a few dozen for CCF’s camera traps, four kinds of strong sunblock, a rain jacket and my notebook.

Golf-cart parts in black case,
to be checked through.

The flight was 17 hours, including a one-hour stop in Dakar where we through-passengers remained on the plane.  Ann from Boston had the aisle seat, from which she described herself as ‘a DEET factory.’  She was going on safari in some of the wetter areas of southwestern Africa.  She is 60-some, maybe 70, with the thick, dropped-r’s accent of Boston’s outer neighborhoods.  This was not her first major excursion; she has been to China, South America, Australia, Egypt, Spain and Morocco, and 30 years ago visited, “I don’t know what to call it – Israel or Palestine.”  In between bouts of learning about Ann and sleeping shallowly, I tried to get some exercise.  The plane was configured so that I couldn’t do laps around the coach section, so I walked up and down my aisle, trying not to look suspicious.

One night to spend in Johannesburg, and no place to spend it.  Some kind of Travelers’ Aid desk helped me out (I got the impression their system was baksheesh-based), and after a bit Octavia from the OR Tambor Country Lodge arrived and guided me to their van.  It was a bit less than an hour to the Lodge, and Octavia offered a choice of music for the ride.  I asked her to pick, and she went with gospel – South African gospel instead of American at my urging.  Our driver, Ken, was from Malawi; Octavia was born in Durban, on South Africa’s southeast coast.  She grew up speaking Zulu, learned English young as a second language, and has picked up pieces of nine other languages.  She wants to learn Portuguese next.

None of this, of course, precludes the possibility that Ken and Octavia don’t work for a hotel at all, but are going to take me to a back alley somewhere and hit me in the head with a rock, and sell my three quarts of assorted sunblock on the black market.  Spoiler alert:  they didn’t.  They took me to the OR Tambor Country Lodge, about ten rooms strung together in an L-shape, facing a garden courtyard with the owner’s home on the third side and what looked to be pasture on the fourth.

No water in the fountain.  That's foreshadowing...

There were big, puffy, scentless white roses in the garden, and fragrant lavender, and even more fragrant gardenias.  There were birds calling in the early evening, and all kinds of chirping frogs or insects or both.  One bird said, “Wheet-wheet.  Wheet-wheet-wheet,” in a hospitable tenor.  More, different “wheet-wheet”s respond.  I didn’t recognize the call, of course; the only bird sounds I can confidently identify are roosters crowing and woodpeckers rapping.  I might get a whippoorwill right, but I couldn’t guarantee it.  Later, when I woke at midnight to think about jet lag, breakfast times and alarm clocks, the wheet-wheet bird would still be chatting away.

There was another that gave a drawn-out, whistling call that I liked quite a bit also.  Nobody seemed to reply, but I expect the bird can hear things I can’t.  It, too, would be awake in the wee smalls, but then it would offer only a single sustained note before dropping out of the night noises.

Before darkness fell, I was feeling pretty unremarkable.  A 17-hour flight is almost like suspended animation for me, with the weird dips into dozing and back out again, the food descending from above at random moments, Ann complaining, gently, of this or that airline policy, and my occasional too-brief ambles up the aisle and back down again.  It’s unreal time.  In contrast, the Lodge felt like very real life. 

I never quite figured out where it was, but I think it’s between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and a bit closer to the former.  One of the realities it offered was ‘self-catering facilities,’ which means the owner, or the manager, or Ken from Malawi (he’s the driver) will drive you to the Pick ‘n’ Pay to get some groceries.  For the Welsh couple in #1 and me, it was the owner, who crammed us into his not-tidy car and drove us by neighbors’ houses, and stretches of bare ground, and a warehouse or two, until we arrived at the grocery store, which rose suddenly from nothing.  I bypassed the display of biltong – dried meat in many curious shapes – and found a plastic tray of pasta salad with bland cheese and some not-Italian herbs.  The lodge owner got Kit-Kat ice cream for his kids, and the Welsh couple (taciturn, in the nature of their people) got something the owner microwaved for them, as the self-catering doesn’t extend to any kind of cooking apparatus.

A lot of people romanticized Africa for me before I left the U.S., but I had a hard time buying it.  For one, it’s an entire continent.  I simply cannot believe there’s something mystical that imbues this entire continent yet is absent from South America, North America and Europe (I’ve never been to Asia or Australia, and will probably never make it to Antarctica.  Leave Antarctica alone, that’s my motto.)  Really?  Gabon’s beaches, the Holiday Inn Harare, the Sudanese desert, a convenience store in Alexandria, the gardens of Constantine and the Pick ‘n’ Pay in Kempton Park, all magical in their other-ness?  Magical I’ll accept, and celebrate, but not more magical than the bison of Oklahoma, the mosses of Fairbanks, the autumn foliage of the White Mountains, or the thunderous falls of the Potomac outside Washington, DC.  Nor yet the corn soup of Cuzco, the Incan stones of Choquequirao, sunset over the Seine, the North Coast Cliffs of Derry or the Škocjan cave outside Ljubljana.

I watched for extra magic, but so far things seemed very normal.  Gardenia fragrance is magical, that whistling bird, too.  As expected, seen from the ground, the human imprint in suburban Johannesburg seems much more spontaneous than South Africa seen from the air – roads waver and bend, then twist back; a few shacks appear; then nothing but road and a group of three people, and a group of two, then a sudden grocery store, carefully landscaped behind a serious fence.  From the air, everything looks much more symmetrical and planned.  It is entirely wonderful, and entirely usual.  Here in this tiny speck of Africa, there’s no Dark Continent mystique I can find.  It is, in fact, brighter than moonglow.  Maybe it was a Dark Continent in days gone by; maybe it’s some other part that’s Dark.  Goodness knows this section offers very little shade.

Of course South Africa’s recent history is dramatic, and that was a constant in my thoughts.  But it is, so sadly, not unique in any way.  My own country offers occasional reminders of its brutalities – a drunk Athabascan staggering into the sled-dog museum to request a pen; a plaque memorializing Black Hawk, a Sauk leader who fought displacement of his people (the fourth time they were forcibly re-located, thanks); monuments to slave-owners and civil rights leaders; the wreckage of lives implicit in Detroit’s mangled neighborhoods.  There’s nothing darker in African history than the decimation of native populations by imperialists, colonists and smallpox, or 620,000 dead in a war over slavery, liberty and which rights trump which.  And while there’s plenty in South Africa’s history that’s just as bad, of course we can always look north about 4,000 miles and back sixty years, and European history looks darker than the black mud of the Niger River.

These were not the exact ideas that I entertained while consuming my salad in #4, the room with no key.  I was more thinking, “Recent history notwithstanding, it just doesn’t seem that different.”  Dinner finished, I sat for a bit in my room, with the windows open.  It was a beautiful night, and I hoped for the scent of gardenias to make it over from the far edge of the garden.  Most of what I got, though, was the neighbors tuning a radio, almost at random.  Or maybe the signal was bad and kept fading and coming back.  They were mostly bringing in pop music, including a countdown of something.  Number eight on the countdown was “Cups (When I’m Gone)”, but I got pretty well sick of that six weeks before in Kalona, Iowa, at the fall festival talent show.  I really didn’t need it 17 hours on an airplane away, especially when I started thinking about the razor wire around almost every store and home I’d passed in this country.

Fifteen years ago I knew an Irishman who’d trained for his finance job in Belgium and moved to Texas after a couple of years in Johannesburg.  He had some seriously alarming stories of colleagues being robbed and beaten in their homes, despite the guarded gates and ground-glass-topped walls.  He said it was routine for someone to be out of the office due to violent crime, like cold season year ‘round.  Everyone at the lodge assured me it was perfectly safe to leave my things in my key-less room, and certainly everything was still in place when I got back from the Pick ‘n’ Pay.  Still, part of me questioned my decision to go to sleep with both door bolts set, the chain on, and the windows open.  But I did enjoy hearing the nocturnal birds.  They made the dripping toilet less irksome.

The jet lag woke me around midnight, and I checked and re-checked my alarm and pretended to be tired for several hours.  Absolutely not sleeping, and getting achier and achier around the browbone, I decided trying to sleep was senseless.  Just thinking the word ‘senseless’ made me yearn to be... 

I laced up my hiking boots and stepped outside.  The horizon was showing a faint light, but I didn’t know if that was a rising sun or a distant city.  Passing through the lighted part of the lodge driveway, where the ruckus of birds was excessive, I could hear a choir of roosters forming from points west, north and east, so odds on rising sun improved.  That reminded me to look up, at the stars.  A moderately dark sky offered a moderate display, including Orion’s backwards Belt and a scrambled Great Bear or Big Dipper.

My walk was thwarted by a sturdy gate, closed for the night with iron bars and topped with electric wire that I bet wasn’t charged.  Since it was a) fifteen feet up a gate and b) electric, I chose not to test that theory.  The rest of the fence was topped with coiled razor wire.  The courtyard, with its floral display and a couple of statues, was beautiful but pretty small, so laps around it felt ridiculous.  Instead, I decided to climb the interior fence into the pasture area, where I thought a swimming pool might lurk.  I don’t know about the pool, but two handsome dogs I had met earlier through this fence were lurking – or maybe just sleeping.  I believe we all know what to do with sleeping dogs.  But my meandering woke them before I realized they were there, and they came charging at me, fast and barking furiously.  I felt like a cartoon character, frozen with one foot off the ground, arms ready to pump, and eyes grown gigantic.

I am not physically nimble enough for sprint and scramble – remember there’s a fence to climb – and I don’t like the idea of turning my back on an alarmed animal.  So I murmured softly, backed up slowly, and held out a friendly fist.  I wrote this journal entry (longhand, by the light of the rising sun, accompanied by a smell of cinnamon and ruckus of roosters and every other bird on the ark) with an unpunctured, though slightly befurred and spitty, hand.   The greyhound was delighted to greet me, tail wagging and body writhing; the boxer-like pup was too leery to come over for pats.  I still thought it the better part of valor to move slowly toward the fence, and exit discreetly.  The dogs barked disappointment as I made my way back to guests’ quarters.

My headache had cleared up as soon as I stepped out of my room.  I suspect the people in #3 of smoking as they tuned their radio, and smoking some nasty, extra-strength foreigner substance.  Not one of the fun substances; just extra-powerful smokiness.  I essayed a sun salute on the wet courtyard grass, and that worked out a few kinks.  The dawn light was sufficient for writing in a journal, on the step outside my room, but gradually I grew chilly, started yawning, and decided to try for a nap.

Not enough water in the tower to waste on a fountain.

The nap was a very long time coming, but finally I fell asleep, around 6:00 or 7:00.  When my alarm went off at 8:29, I needed two minutes of confused dreaming before I clawed myself out of the exhaustion-swamp, and into the reality of jet-lag, a chirping clock, and 30 minutes until breakfast.  I spent ten minutes fumbling into some sort of clothes.  The main gates were now open, so I could stagger ten minutes along the road, and ten minutes back.  The neighborhood would have qualified as decidedly upscale back home, with fancy landscaping and huge yards.  Each house was protected by walls, wires and dogs; each had a small water tower in the yard.

Despite very serious brain-fuzz, I could appreciate a marvelous breakfast of custom-scrambled eggs and fresh papaya, prepared by a quiet, black woman in bright clothes.  Teeth cleaned, I joined the former owner of the lodge, now its manager, for a ride to the airport.  He was the default driver, he explained, as Ken from Malawi had called in sick this morning – after receiving his pay in cash last night.  Oh, Ken.

The airport was very like every other airport, but with biltong where the Anchorage airport would have ‘moose poop’ candy and Heathrow would have Big Ben tea towels and Lima would have Pan flute CDs.  The plane to Windhoek didn’t even have biltong – I could have been on the Dallas to Denver route, or Glasgow to Dublin.  Except when I looked out the window, of course.

Suburban Dark Continent

Days 37-40: Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, to Merchantville, New Jersey, to McLean, Virginia

Tuesday 29 October – I had such good results from driving up the secondary road a bit before getting back on the highway when I was in Adel, Georgia, that I decided to try it in Roanoke Rapids.  Of course there’s a complicated intersection by the interstate-exit motel-cluster.  I was stopped for the light when the driver’s side door of the Dodge Dakota pick-up truck next to me opened.  A tall, lean man, maybe in his 30s, with an impressive mustache, stepped out into the street, retrieved a soda can from the edge of his truck bed, turned around and stepped back up into the cab and closed the door.  I don’t know how far he’d been driving.  I don’t know whether he was as cool about having left his soda on the truck as he looked, or berating himself for stupidity, or cursing someone for distracting him, or pleased that the can hadn’t tumbled away into the street, or laughing a little on the inside – because it was, after all, pretty funny.

Rosemary Baptist

In the next five miles, I saw four churches, a tabernacle and a religious ‘outreach center.’  There were lots of small houses, mostly single story, some trailer-style.  There were scrappy little general stores and an industrial laundry and several feed and farm stores.  I did not see farms on this short stretch of road, but I’d seen cotton fields from Route 95, and what seemed to be hay fields, and I’d seen a sign somewhere that suggested there were peanut farms in the area.  I did see three or four semis in my ten-mile round trip, all going in different directions, loaded with more-or-less tree-length logs.  The landscape was gently hilly, with lots of tall trees of many breeds, but I did not see any stretch that looked like it might have been the scene of a recent harvesting of trees.

I stopped at one of the farm stores because it was advertising 25% off shrubbery, and I thought a shrub might make a good hostess gift for Sister3, toward whose home I was aimed.  A store clerk greeted me in a voice that explained what the desk clerk last night meant when she asked if she sounded ‘country.’  She sounded ‘warm kitchen with honey somewhere;’ this man sounded country.  He invited me to make myself at home, look around, ask him if I had any questions, and then he just kept talking and talking.

He pointed out the 25%-off, noting that it applied to the roses.  He’s never done anything to his roses, now you might look them up on the computer and it may say to do something – maybe a little fertilizer – but he’s never done anything to his, and they do just fine.  He said all of that at least twice and maybe three or four times.  “Look them up on the computer.”  He was white, about 60, lean and a bit shorter than average, and nice as a puppy.

I picked out a gardenia, which by the way is insane.  I love how the flowers smell, but NoVA is a bit cool for gardenia, although they do grow outdoors here if carefully situated.  But I’m probably moving north, and anyway this was supposed to be a hostess gift for my sister outside Philadelphia, where there is no site careful enough to sustain a gardenia.  And I might not even have a home; maybe I’ll move in with a friend or get an apartment.  I really, really love gardenias, though, and maybe I’ll find a home with a little greenhouse attached.  Plus, it was 25% off.

McLean, Virginia, overgrown shrubbery

The clerk kindly carried my gardenia to the car, since, as he said, I’d have to do all the work of planting it.  I did not tell him about the imaginary greenhouse.  He advised me to drive carefully, and asked where I was headed.  On learning of my Virginia home, he told me he’d been to Maryland recently, to visit family.  He seemed not to think much of it; there were a lot more people in suburban DC than there are here in Roanoke Rapids, and all moving faster – "a rat race."

I mentioned that I was coming to the end of a 9,000-mile trip.  “Bless your heart,” he said, and told me about a recent trip he’d made.  He drove the two hours or so to hike Big Meadows park, near Charlottesville.  I think this is in the Shenandoah Mountains, and most likely beautiful.  There was a lengthy story about finding an iPod in the parking lot, and phoning the various numbers listed on it.  The third number was the owner’s daughter; when feed-store guy described a hiker he’d seen on trail and the cars he’d seen in the lot, she recognized her dad.  Dad was thrilled to get his iPod back; his life is on that device.  Etc.

When he goes to Big Meadows, he makes a day of it – leaves at 8:00am, gets back about 8:00pm.  There’s no place around here as good, he told me.  There’s a small mountain (this may be Medoc Mountain, but I’m not sure), but he wouldn’t recommend I go there as it’s not a good area.  What does that mean?  And did he miss the part that I’ve just driven all around the country, and am headed to Washington, DC?  Or maybe he figures that after 9,000 miles, I might be in the mood to jaunt over to Medoc Mountain and take a look.  He did keep inviting me to come back again, as they’ve got all sizes of rock, beach sand, mulch... which is clearly missing a point or two.  Eventually, he tapped the trunk twice and headed back into the shop.

These were great little stories, and a snapshot – maybe a collage of snapshots – of one person’s life.  I really enjoyed them, and to the very slight degree necessary, encouraged him to talk.  Well, maybe just didn’t discourage him.  But occasionally, listening to him repeat some part of his story, I would wonder about this.  When a total stranger pulls into my tiny corner of the world and tells me she’s just seen dozens of places I’ve never been; never imagined being, I want to hear about it.  I start asking questions, not telling stories.  Still, I’m glad to have heard his.  And frankly, as much as I like telling you about my travels and my thoughts on these pages, when we meet in person I’ll probably try to get you talking about your adventures.  I am an INTP, in case you’re interested in that sort of thing.

George Washington, mounted.

The gardenia nestled on the floor in the back, I took 95 up to Richmond, the capital of Virginia.  I came in past Marlboro smokestacks, a Peterbilt yard of some sort, and structures I believe were tobacco-drying sheds:  a tatty industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.  Then I crossed over the James River, and into the high-rise, steel-and-glass downtown.  Steel, glass and marble, with lots of stately seats of government and many, many statues of heroes of the colonial era, the revolution and the confederacy.  I read an essay recently by a commentator dismayed by the number of U.S. government facilities named forconfederate politicians and soldiers, on the grounds that they were, in fact, traitors to the U.S. government.  I’m willing to believe it’s more complicated than that, but in my Union-bred brain, confederacy just equals slavery.  And slavery equals indefensible, inexcusable evil.  I was glad to have seen, finally, the capital city of the commonwealth in which I’ve resided for almost ten years, but I was perfectly happy to leave.

Sublime Potomac

Two hours of trees – evergreens mixed with deciduous, now decked in yellows and dull oranges, with occasional glints of greens – got me back to DC in time for rush hour.  So I stopped in at a friend’s house, wandered the glorious woods and stood awestruck on a cliff over the Potomac.  I have stood in this spot a dozen times, and others very like it dozens more, and I hope I am always awestruck by that sublime view.  My friends eventually got home from work, and we chatted and caught up for a bit, which was very grounding.  I headed north again – three hours – once the traffic had dissipated a bit.  By the time I made it to the Delaware Welcome Center Travel Plaza rest area, most of the restaurants had closed.  It wasn’t much past 9:00pm, so I was wildly disappointed in the recently-razed-and-rebuilt Delaware Welcome Center.  If the highway doesn’t close at 9:00pm, the rest area shouldn’t close at 9:00pm.  Sheesh.

Sneaking into Sister3’s house at whatever o’clock at night, I felt a door close on a great adventure.  Then I opened the next one.  (Sister 3’s house has a sun porch, so you have to go through two doors to get in to where the bedrooms are.  Ha!)

Wednesday 29 October to Friday 1 November – Love the lovely family.  Love the cute, mostly-well-mannered dogs.  Love the cute and financially-inefficient little town and the children dressed up for Hallowe’en.  Niece6 was Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls, and Niece7 was Rosie the Riveter.  I love these girls.  They take the road less traveled.

Proper foliage at last.

As I drove home again, the superhighway was a perfection of fall foliage, and I took pictures through the sunroof.  New Jersey was as beautiful as could be, with leaves of every shade of red, orange, yellow, and lots of greens and muddy purples.  There were brilliant blue ponds and streams, and the grass was mostly non-sparkly green with patches of brown, and orange where the pine needles had dropped.  About five miles before the Delaware border, I saw a cornfield.

Love the lovely EZPass, but strongly dislike the toll booths on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which insist I slow to five miles per hour.  Leaving the state less than 30 minutes later, the Delaware toll plaza lets me speed right along the real highway, with sensors in a technological-marvel roof hitting up my transponder for four bucks.

Havre de Grace, Maryland, has a beautiful river view and a beautiful name.  I have stopped there a few times, seeking grace and a fancy sandwich, and have left without even a decent lunch.  So I don’t try anymore.  I just roll by, enjoying the stubble fields that come after the river.  Even the oft-traveled bit from Baltimore to NoVA did not feel like just another nuisance, this time.  I wonder if I’m really changed forever.

Almost home.  Weird.