Sometimes I wish I could be as wise as I am when I write.
For me, writing is revelatory. As I write, words come out that I didn’t know were in me, thoughts that I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking, patterns and connections that I didn’t see before. Sometimes when I write, someone else speaks – someone much, much older than me, someone more knowledgeable, more understanding, more confident, more certain and sure of herself. Often, as I write, I feel a sense of warmth and calm come over me; it is the feeling of being protected, of not being alone, of being watched over.
It doesn’t really matter what I choose to call this; mostly it just feels comforting. And recently, completely inaccessible.
I haven’t written anything – anything for myself, anything that I felt proud of – in about six months. I could pass this off on the increasingly busy schedule that my return to university brought about, or call it simple writer’s block (and it is, in part, both of these things); however, since it has taken me a while to be able to do so, I would like to call it by its name, which is Depression.
For someone who has spent nearly an entire year and a half pondering and writing on the meaning of “home,” I’ve been having a hell of a time finding anything worthwhile to say about it now that I’m actually here. Home, I mean – and this time the concrete sort, the “home” that means the house where I grew up, the bedroom where I slept nearly every night for the first twenty years of my life, the town where my entire family lives and has lived for three generations now, the town where I go to the photo lab to have my film developed and am almost immediately recognized as a Macdonald because the man who owns it knew my aunt in high school. Home home.
It is both the subject and the source of my problem, because of this small detail: home doesn’t really feel like home anymore.
This, I think, is perhaps an experience shared between anyone who has left and come back. It’s like culture shock, but worse, because you’re not really expecting it, no matter how much you try to mentally prepare yourself to re-adjust; you feel almost betrayed, abandoned, affronted, because this closest of places no longer feels entirely your own, and you don’t feel like you entirely belong to it either. My very first night back, after the excitement had passed and the nearly forty-eight hours of sleeplessness and jet lag had hit, I sat on the very edge of the chair in the living room, looking around in spooked silence, like a small animal frozen in fear after being released into a new environment. The next morning I woke up, panicking, afraid for those first few seconds of consciousness that nothing had been real; it took me weeks to figure out how to let the separate experiences of being gone and being home exist within me at the same time.
This is a short, true story that I wrote right after my stay on a family farm in County Cork, Ireland in July & August of 2016 . I never published it anywhere, feeling that it was incomplete and disconnected from any kind of continuous narrative about my travels, but now that I’m home it feels complete in and of itself. It is a snapshot of one moment in one day that I experienced; as a related side note, I might start combing back through the journals that I kept during my travels to see if there’s any other similar moments worthy of reproduction here – as I have always felt, anyways, it’s the small moments of travel that are the most tender and worthy of treasuring later. I hope I’ve managed to tell the story of this one with some of the same humor and incredulity that I felt while I was living it; regardless, enjoy!
Since the day I learned to read as a child, I have been an avid devourer of books. I started Harry Potter in second grade and never looked back, read the kid’s section dry at the local library, and reorganized my class bookshelf in sixth grade just for fun. I was, by all accounts, a massive nerd. This followed me into my teenage years and is true now – literature has been and is still one of the great influencing factors of my life.
What has taken me a little longer to suss out, however (at least in any kind of organized way) is how literature has been one of the great influencing factors of my life as a woman.
To begin with, in my junior year of high school, I wrote an essay on Chris McCandless and Into The Wild.
For those of you who are not familiar with the story: in the early 1990s, Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate, sold most of his belongings and became a vagabond – hiking, hitchhiking, and canoeing his way across most of the western half of the United States. Ultimately, he made his way to Alaska, where in an attempt to live off the land he ended up starving to death in a backcountry shelter.
His story, picked up by reporter Jon Krakauer, became the subject of a book and later a movie, both titled Into The Wild; it generated a huge amount of discussion and controversy, with some accusing him of arrogance, naivete, and pure stupidity, and others lauding him as an example of the enduring American spirit. In the end, all this really did was turn him into something larger than life, a symbol of individualism and a deep, life-giving connection to nature.
The thesis of my junior-year essay proclaimed that McCandless represented “inner strength of will, individuality in a world so often focused on conformity, and the old American ideals of self-reliance and adventure” and furthermore that “McCandless’s character, bright and enigmatic, serv[ed] as a reminder of important values that are so often lost in today’s society.”
It resurfaced in the forefront of my mind recently, when I found myself thinking about the “why” of it. Why did my 16-year-old self, who had next to nothing in common with Chris McCandless and knew next to nothing firsthand about the “old American ideals” that I wrote about, idolize the story so much?
Writer’s block is a bitch. I should know – mine’s lasted over three months. This is, I will admit, due in part to laziness on my end of things; I have never been the most disciplined of writers, and inspiration and dedication to the craft have been sadly easy to push aside in favor of things like impromptu day trips to Glenorchy, pancake dinners with friends, and (if we’re being honest) nights spent watching movies in a haze of exhaustion after a long day of work.
This is not something I’m proud of. I wish I had the energy and will to write a thousand glowing sentences before breakfast each morning, instead of the hasty chicken-scratch notes I sometimes write to myself in my journal before I fall asleep; but it is what it is at the moment, and hey – I’m writing now, aren’t I?
It is autumn in Queenstown these days, and it is a kind of magic. The light slants so beautifully here, in a bright yellow-gold coming down in rays from behind the clouds, the sun following the arc of the mountains across the sky. Colder nights have come down from the mountaintops and have begun to crack their frosty knuckles – I’ve actually started closing the windows at night and bundling up in an extra layer to sleep. The fields and hillsides are decked out in brown and gold, and on a clear day, driving down the country roads outside of town, through all those miles and miles of open space and sheep standing in fields, the landscape takes on a burnished patina. It looks like an oil painting. Autumn was the season that I first fell for Queenstown, and so it makes perfect sense that I love it with such tenderness and nostalgia now.
During my road trip north last month, I read a book called Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden, in which the author chronicles his journey on foot through Cornwall in the United Kingdom. His east-to-west walk also follows history chronologically – as he walks, Marsden researches history and mythology connected to the landscape, starting in the Neolithic era and continuing through the Industrial Revolution to the present day. Catalyzed by the author’s move to a farmhouse in the Cornish countryside and interspersed with anecdotes of his family’s work restoring the house and land, the book focuses on the concept of place – as Marsden puts it “the effect that physical surroundings have on individuals and whole communities, the ability of places to create mythologies around them” (21-22).
Reading this book was an odd experience: it felt simultaneously like finding fragments of my own thoughts written out in someone else’s handwriting, and like walking into a room full of strangers who all, for some reason, welcome me as an old friend. It was one of the most evocative reactions to a text that I’ve had in a long time; from the moment I began to read, I felt understood. (Nearly every page has at least something underlined, circled, or annotated with varying numbers of exclamation points. I apologize in advance to anyone who borrows this book from me – I was just really, really excited). I am never more apt to invoke the powers of words like “fate” and “destiny” as when I stumble across the right book at the right time. Tell me – is there anything more magical, more serendipitous, than finding a piece of yourself in the pages of a book that you had no idea existed, in a bookstore 11,000 miles away from the place you were born? I believe there is nothing quite like it.
Time is no straight line, but rather a labyrinth, and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot, you can hear the hurrying steps and voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
Tomas Tranströmer, “Reply To A Letter”
The weight of this year finally hit me on New Year’s Eve. We walked through the reeling streets to our favorite bar, where the father of one of my friends was playing with his band as he does every week. We got free drinks from the bartender we knew, dancing to all the songs we loved the most, and with midnight nearing, we streamed out towards the lakefront, eyes on the massive clock counting down the seconds to the new year, holding hands through the thick crowds. It started to rain as we stood waiting (the third year in a row here in Queenstown, I was told) and we laughed up at the sky and hid under jackets and shouted out the last ten seconds of 2016 as loudly as we could. We wrapped each other in bear hugs as the fireworks started, these people that I didn’t know twelve months ago and some that I didn’t know two months ago, and called each other family. I thought to myself that I would never forget this New Year’s, and then I said it out loud, and everyone nodded as we stood holding each other in the rain underneath the colorful night sky. This was a year that had changed all of our lives, and, in an exuberant second, it was over.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything for this blog, and I’ll break my quasi-silence by saying this: it’s been a hell of a ride. I will not (and cannot) even try to describe everything I have seen and done, or all the places I have been since I last wrote in Scotland – twenty cities in seven countries over the course of two months would be too much for one post, as well for my mental capacity and writing skills at the moment. I just want to do two things here: reflect on the past nine months of travel, and look ahead to where this journey will continue to take me.
Much simpler than the first option, obviously.
In exactly one week, I will fly from Barcelona to Queenstown, New Zealand. The end of my time in Europe – something that I looked forward to for so long – feels like it marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new stage in my life. In the first post I wrote for this blog, sitting in a tiny bedroom in Auckland, I spoke about how this trip around the world was a dream that came into nebulous being a full five years before it was actually realized; now, it is finally sinking in that it’s coming to a close, sooner and much differently than I could have ever imagined five years or even just one year ago.
What has it all been about, then? What has it all meant? I don’t know how to answer this except by beginning with the details, all the tiny moments that I can feel myself holding onto like a handful of pebbles, tiny and smooth and warm to the touch.
The Scottish Highlands are a playground of light and dark upon a sweeping landscape. The way the hills and mountains are outlined, rounded and shadowy, against the sky, fitted against each other right up to the horizon, the heather dappling the dusky grass and dappled itself by the patchy sunlight coming through the dark clouds. The vast stillness of the Highlands is something that is difficult to convey in words – the way the wind throws itself from peak to valley; the way that beams of sunlight sometimes stream down to a lucky patch of hillside, illuminating it as if the hills were a cathedral built by giants; the way it feels higher and emptier than the rest of the world; a single-track road weaving through all that open space & making you feel tiny driving along it. The only words that come to mind are ones like this: Magnificent. Ancient. Awe-inspiring. I felt like I could breathe deeply there, like I could breathe in and in and never run out of air.
Strangely, despite never having been there before, Scotland felt familiar to me. I experienced this feeling in New Zealand as well, the sense that I’d been there before but just couldn’t quite remember it, or that I knew what was around the next curve in the road or over the next mountain pass even though I knew logically that I didn’t. One might call this deja vu; to a certain extent, it is. For me, though, I think it is also partially the fact that Scotland simply reminds me of other places I already know and love. Two specific places, actually: the trail to Meiss Meadows on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas, and the drive out to Moke Lake in Queenstown, New Zealand.
For those of you waiting on tenterhooks for my next blog post, here it is – finally. As promised, although perhaps later than expected, this one will actually be about the things I have been seeing and doing rather than a long-winded and vaguely political opinion piece (although I couldn’t quite bring myself to do my Top Ten Bali-Inspired Breakfast Smoothies, sorry).
It is hard to believe that five weeks have already passed, that Bali and Thailand have both come and gone, and that yesterday morning I arrived in Ireland. A few days ago, I was sitting in the open air downstairs area of a beautiful wooden home on an organic farm in northern Thailand. Earlier that afternoon it had rained heavily, and I could still smell the wet fragrance of the tilled soil long after it passed. I took a bike ride after the clouds had cleared through the rice fields; on the way back I stopped to say hello to a cow that had wandered into the road, and it licked my hand with a tongue as rough as a cat’s and offered me its damp head to be scratched. Now, as I write this, I am sitting in the common area of a Dublin hostel. A group of men wearing lederhosen just walked in and the culture shock is at an all-time high, so it seems like an appropriate moment to sit back and reflect.
SGBRSH 