14 June 2016
As of about a week and a half ago, I have officially entered my fifth month of travel – a length of time that honestly feels kind of useless. Five months seems far longer than necessary to describe experiences that have passed in what feels like a blink of an eye, but also sometimes seems so long that it makes me feel exhausted just thinking about it. Linear time has never felt so flimsy. Regardless, it has put me in a reflective mood.
Remember the very first thing I ever wrote on this blog, about how this trip was nearly four years in the making? Well – before the whole “I want to travel the world for a year” thing, there was something else, which was simply: I want to go back to Bali.
When I was nine years old, I traveled with my family to Bali, Indonesia, where we lived in the house of a family friend for one month. This month printed itself indelibly on my brain, and I can recall full conversations, meals, and even days in weirdly specific detail. It’s my opinion that I have this trip to thank for the desire to travel that has burned in me ever since, and thus in some small way, I believe it’s thanks to the deep impression that Bali left on me that I’m sitting in this hostel right now, typing this blog post and listening to the rain on the converted warehouse rooftop. Weird how things cascade into each other sometimes, isn’t it?
Now, in two days and over a decade later, I will be getting on a plane to fly back to Bali. I don’t expect it to be even remotely the same experience, and the point is not at all to re-live any kind of formational moment from my childhood. The point is that simply by the act of returning to Bali, I am doing something I’ve wanted to do since I was literally nine years old. That’s eleven years in the making, folks – which may not be a very long time, relatively speaking, but it is over half of my life, so make of that what you will.
Regardless, what this has done functionally is turn the month I will spend in Bali into a rather significant-feeling moment in this year. It happens to fall almost exactly at the halfway mark of my trip around the world, and it feels a little bit like a level point in the middle of a steep ski slope, where I can rest after having carved my way down the first portion of mountainside and before I carve my way down the second. Before Bali, there was New Zealand and Australia; after Bali, there will be Europe and maybe New Zealand again and a road trip home across America (although “after Bali” does admittedly still exist to some extent in a kind of unplanned, nebulous state where nothing is truly set in stone). Bali itself, somehow, exists outside of that in my mind – it is a still place to catch my breath, a kind of homecoming, if it is possible to “come home” to a place you’ve only been once before, when you weren’t even in the double digits yet.
As transitional moments typically do, my imminent return to Bali has prompted me to ask: how have I changed? Not how have I changed since I was nine years old, obviously, because Lord knows that wouldn’t fit into one reasonably-sized piece of writing, but simply – how have I changed since I left home in January?
In many ways I don’t believe I’ll be able to fully answer this until I return to Santa Cruz and measure myself against a fixed point, so to speak, but I can pick out a few things. Some of it is easy – new, concrete experiences, like hitch hiking and learning how to be a trekking guide: I am different simply because I’ve seen and done and learned things I hadn’t before. The other aspect is largely the internal, subconscious result of the first; I feel more confident, more capable, more outgoing, more knowledgeable of my own self because of the way I have had to throw myself into the big, wide world. Travel has also given me focus – so much focus, in fact, that occasionally every day I must remind myself to not rush through life right now in an attempt to get back to the grind and start checking goals off my list.
However, perhaps most significantly for me at the moment is that I’ve gained a stronger sense of identity and a greater appreciation for where I come from by virtue of leaving it. What I’m saying is: I’ve realized that I’m cool with being American.
Which, for me, is like…really weird.
Before I left home, I couldn’t wait to go – sick to death and overly cynical about all things American, convinced that other parts of the world had far more to offer me than my home country did, that maybe I didn’t ultimately belong in America anyways, since it had never truly felt like a homeland to me. In part, I was right – I couldn’t have experienced any of the things I have over the past five months if I’d never left California, and the jury’s still out on where I’ll end up settling down. But there’s something that usually happens when you meet people from other countries, which is that you talk to each other about where you’re from – and somewhere in the past five months, I noticed that I had moved from simply explaining the bare details of what it was like where I came from to lovingly describing my childhood and experiences growing up on the West Coast. I’d talk about Santa Cruz, and its beautiful cliffs and oceans, the family and friends I had there; I’d talk about summers spent camping and hiking and swimming in lakes in the Sierra Nevadas; I’d wax lyrical about how you can never truly know what it’s like to take a road trip until you’ve done it in the United States – how the desert swallows up the entire West, how the highways run straight for days and days before finally bending up into the fragrant pine forests, how you can watch Texas turn from a dusky red-brown to a rich, rolling green just by driving through it.
Homesickness has come to me in the details. Last week, I was talking to a guy I had met in the hostel I was staying at – he was also American, from Oregon specifically, which lent us an immediate commonality as West Coast-ers. We let loose with slang I haven’t used in months (everything was “trippy” and “gnarly” and “sick” and that long walk to the grocery store was “such a barge, dude.”). One night he spotted the Trader Joe’s cloth bag that I brought with me from home – and that was it. The next hour was spent naming all the Trader Joe’s products we could think of, googling images of our favorites and laugh-crying hysterically over them. The package design of a damn bag of lettuce nearly brought me to tears; at one point, he paused, looked at me with haunted eyes, and whispered “Oh god…Just the Clusters,” at which point I actually did cry. (For those of you not in the know, “Just the Clusters” is the name of a Trader Joe’s-specific brand of granola, which has – as its name suggests – just the clusters of granola without any dried fruit or corn flakes. I cannot truly describe how wonderful this product is to someone who hasn’t tasted it; if you know, you know, and you would cry too, if you were me in that situation.)
Anyways, it was that moment, shedding tears over breakfast cereal, when I realized that I had never before identified so strongly with the place I was born, or felt so proud of it, or felt like it truly filled the role of “homeland.” Getting to grow up on the West Coast was truly a stroke of luck essential to the shape the rest of my life has taken, and it took leaving to make me understand: I’m a California kid, always have been, always will be, no matter how much time I spend away. If that’s not character growth, I don’t know what is.
This has not been without its own set of internal struggles. How can I feel pride in a country whose history is so filled with injustice, whose leaders are – at infrequent best – trying their hardest within a diseased system, whose politics are corrupted by money, a country that makes me fearful to read the news every day because of the fresh horrors I might find there? The best answer I have found for myself is: I don’t. The things I love about America are specific to my life there – they are about my home in California, or about the land itself and the people I have met; they are based on emotion, snapshots of personal experience, and individual characteristics that I appreciate and have come to miss. America is a place, like many others, filled largely with well-intentioned and honest people, and plagued by the shittiest of politics, pockmarked by hatred and violence, and sporting an undeniably inflated ego. I cannot move myself to patriotism for that country – but I can still recognize the beauty of its landscapes and the goodness of so many of those that populate it; I can still love it for the childhood I had there, and for the role that it undeniably played in shaping the person that I am. I am American, and at the very least I will wear my damn Santa Cruz jacket with loud, untempered pride.
As a sort of aside, this is actually something I’ve noticed in speaking to many travelers about where they are from – a kind of grudging, nostalgic affection, as towards an offensive relative. Like, “Yeah, that’s Uncle Sam….he usually gets drunk off Lemon Drops at Christmastime and yells racial slurs across the dinner table in between talking loudly about his gun collection, but he used to take me and all my cousins camping every summer when we were kids, so even though we all want to punch him in his alcoholic face most of the time nobody can quite seem to give up on him completely.”
Whether or not you share these views, there is something here that I hope is universally understood – that travel has provided me with the perspective to make those distinctions for myself and to better understand the place I am from, as well as my own identity as a citizen of that country. This is something I have discussed before, and would probably be one of the major themes of my blog if I were to analyze it in true 12th-grade English class style: travel makes you think in new ways, and that is one of its greatest gifts and powers.
Stay tuned for Bali updates in the next few weeks – I might even find myself inspired to write about the actual things I see and do rather than rambling, self-reflective (one might even say self-centered), semi-political monologues. Maybe I’ll post my Top Ten Bali-Inspired Breakfast Smoothies, or a guide to The Best Off-The-Beaten-Track Beaches, like a real travel blogger. I wouldn’t take any bets, though.
A big ol’ high-five to any fellow California kids who happen to be reading this, and, as always: safe travels.
-Sierra
SGBRSH 