At Home in the World Read online

  I was infected with an incurable sense of wanderlust, but I was also a homebody.

  I matured into adulthood when I acknowledged this truth.

  We may not have soul mates in this life, but most of us have my-God-if-I-don’t-walk-through-the-rest-of-my-life-with-that-person-I’m-an-idiot mates. Kyle was a like-minded American living a few villages over, rebuilding houses for widows who had lost everything during the horrific genocide instigated by Milošević. We hit it off instantly. There was someone else in the world willing to work a horribly paying job in order to play a small part in restoring a ravaged country to its former, if not makeshift, ancient glory. I wasn’t looking for him, but when you find that special someone swimming with Albanian teenage boys in a lake potentially swirling with all strains of hepatitis and you’re still attracted to him, you don’t walk away.

  We were fast friends, and we spent all our time together. We helped widows and the poor; we unearthed smoky, seedy jazz bars in the capital city; we took rickety buses to Thessaloniki and found cheap hostels on the beach. And when we weren’t together, in the quiet of my own apartment, I wondered whether Kyle was thinking of me as much as I was of him.

  We married two years later and vowed to spend our life thick in adventure. Preferably overseas.

  God has a sense of humor.

  Ten years later, I tuck my youngest son into bed and creep back downstairs to finish the dinner dishes. Kyle tosses toys back into buckets, both of us grateful for this time of the day, when quieter hours bookend nighttime kisses and passing out from the day’s toil. Our home is of the typical suburban variety, freshly remodeled with our own hands. When I chop carrots, I stand on trendy distressed wood slats; when I empty the dishwasher and toss the silverware into its drawer, the track silently glides shut like a modern marvel. We don’t suffer from an overload of stuff by normal American standards, but I am still nagged by the notion that our closets are too full. I am happy to have these dishes to wash, because it means our family eats well, and the tucking-in ritual means the children have a comfortable place to sleep. I know from our years living abroad this is no small thing for many parents and their children.

  Kyle and I—we are still the people who met in Kosovo, and we are the couple who later moved with their toddler to Turkey and lived there for three years. I am the one who gave birth to our second child in a Turkish hospital, where I barely spoke the language and almost left the building with a needle still stuck in my spine.

  It’s now ten years after we met in Kosovo and two years after we moved back to the States from Turkey, and something is missing. Our inner adventurers hug the walls as shadows, eclipsed by parental and culturally expected responsibility. I still think of myself as a vagabond, and yet these days I only travel for work. I am a writer and Kyle works from home for a small company, but we feel the heaviness of our ordinary life. It is a reasonable weight; we aren’t overcommitted, and I am mightily grateful for the years of exploration behind us. But our existence is still heavy with midlife expectations—mortgage payments, schlepping the kids to karate and gymnastics, cleaning the gutters.

  Tonight, the air is thick with the conviction that there is no reason for unhappiness. We are in our thirties, doing work we enjoy after having spent most of our twenties traveling, and we are finally settling down to become the Normal People most of our friends became ten years earlier. Over kitchen cleanup and toy redistribution, I admit what I know is true: “I miss the Adventurers. And I think it’s time for them to come out again.”

  Kyle knows what I mean. Now is as good a time as it will ever be to move beyond dreaming and playing with the idea we’ve quietly cultivated for several years. The kids are all potty-trained, they’re astute travelers for their age, and yet they are still young enough to be unrooted.

  “Let’s do it,” Kyle says. I dry my hands with the kitchen towel and find the calendar.

  This is our grand idea: we’ll circumnavigate the earth in one direction, kids in tow, for an entire school year. We’ll show them what it means to get lost in the world. It’s a dream we’ve put on hold, one Kyle concocted a few years ago. I was nursing our youngest, and he bounded down the stairs, plopped down on the couch next to me, and said matter-of-factly, “I have an idea.” It was crazy and irresponsible and no right-thinking parent would toy with such an idea. But also, it was fantastically brilliant and I said, “Thank you for bringing it up first.”

  Two years later, in our kitchen in the Pacific Northwest, we circle a square on the calendar. I like having plane tickets in my name on the horizon, and this is close enough: we are going to stop brainstorming the idea; we’re going to do it.

  We’ve been earmarking money for several years for our travel fund, and though we haven’t yet reached our financial goal, we do the math and calculate how much we’d need to earn working from the road. It’s doable. I research flight patterns and travel gear and create a burgeoning to-do list. We’ll continue homeschooling our kids, but they’ll carry the heft of their spelling lists in backpacks and times tables on portable tablets.

  I reject any speaking opportunities for the next twelve months, jokingly adding, “Unless your event is located on an island in the Indian Ocean or on an Icelandic volcano.” Kyle meets with his coworkers the next day, asks if they’re on board with his working remotely for the foreseeable future. We make a checklist of things to do in central Oregon before leaving for a year.

  We prepare ourselves in the ways we know how. We will never be fully ready, of course, because how do you prepare to circumnavigate the globe with three kids in tow?

  Two opposing things can be equally true. Counting the days till Christmas doesn’t mean we hate Halloween. I go to church on Sundays and still hold the same faith at the pub on Saturday night. I shamelessly play a steady stream of eighties pop music and likewise have an undying devotion to Chopin. And perhaps most significantly, I love to travel and I love my home.

  This is my one rub with the trip idea. All these years, I’d been plagued with longing for a return to my global explorative roots, but I also want nothing more than to curl up in my armchair with a good book. I dream about places unknown, but I also buy throw pillows for the couch and mull over the just-right master bathroom paint color. I want the perfect shade of sea-glass green both in tile above my sink and in water below my boat.

  Every memoir I leaf through in the travel section at the bookstore tells stories from people in search of themselves on the open road. Usually they are young and single. The occasional volume carries the story of someone older, often in search of healing after unfathomable grief. Their stories are a pre-travel life that is rough at best, soul-sucking at worst. Nobody seems to embark on a massive journey because their lives are already full of meaning.

  I look out beyond the precipice into a year of global nomadism and a pang of guilt gut-punches me: I wonder if it’s selfish to uproot us in the name of itchy feet.

  There is, of course, the immeasurable good fortune that Kyle is also plagued with wanderlust. This is no small thing. I know lopsided couples, one dying to hop on a plane and the other wanting nothing to do with the idea. The travel itch spills into our children as well, besotted with our DNA. Finn, our preschooler, doesn’t know the difference between a county and a continent and is along for whatever ride the rest of us venture. But Reed has an unrelenting interest in Turkey, his birthplace that holds little memory, and Tate misses her life as the token blonde kid in a sea of dark heads, with more stamps in her passport than counties in Oregon. Our entire little collective misses the world, and this counts for something.

  This is key, I think, to my acceptance of the For Sale sign in the front yard. If we store our earthly possessions for a year in a storage unit, it will benefit all five of us.

  We pencil in a hard date.

  The house sells ridiculously fast.

  Selling the house is just one piece of the puzzle; we must also decide what to keep, where to keep it, what belongings we need for
the year, and what travel plans to reserve in advance. Trekking around the world will be more enjoyable, we deduce, if we don’t schlep much around, and so we narrow down our list of possessions to only what will fit in packs on our backs. We also need to buy said packs, along with the smallest version of gadgets we can afford—only the ones that will make our travels better.

  In all this bustle, the questions churn. Do we bring all the toothpaste we’d need for a whole year? What about an extra power cord for my laptop, in case mine bites the dust in the middle of nowhere? Will the kids have regular chores? Will they still earn allowance? The answer to all is wait and see.

  On the cusp of homelessness, there’s no turning back.

  We make several trips to the local travel gear outfitter and try on backpacks half the size of our bodies, weighing them down with beanbags to simulate a full load. Reed, age six, wavers like a drunk through the aisles, knocking down compasses and water bottles. I worry about his ability to carry all he needs for the year, with his low muscle tone and his penchant for surrendering to exhaustion when things get physically challenging. The only pack that fits our four-year-old is school-sized, with just enough room for his clothes, a toothbrush, and a notebook. Maybe a stuffed animal, if we squeeze.

  All three kids are determined to bring their prized blankets, emotional lovies since their infancy, which leads to a simple lesson in economy: our bags, like life, have finite capacity. If something comes in, something else must stay behind.

  Some items we insist on, several of them surprising: battery-operated electric toothbrushes, expensive quick-drying underwear, an annual VPN account that will let us watch Netflix from anywhere. The kids’ clothing is fairly easy, and we stick to lightweight shorts and T-shirts, a few pairs of underwear and socks, and a thin jacket with the thought that we can buy anything we need as we go (after all, every culture has clothing). I have a hard time narrowing down what I will want to wear for the next nine months, and scour the Internet for capsule wardrobe inspiration; I don’t want to be an Ugly American with ubiquitous running shoes and flip-flops. I want to blend in with my surroundings, which will be hard to do, since blending in on the Sydney beaches looks different from blending in at the marktplatz in Munich.

  We will go to my in-laws for a week to say good-bye, then make a stop in Texas to see my parents before leaving the country. This will be our trial run, and I pack both short- and long-sleeved tees, three pants, shorts, a skirt, two cardigans, a jacket, and a fleece pullover. Everyone has two pairs of shoes except for me—I add another pair to my pack, in case I need to dress up sometime between September and June. We all have swimsuits, and the boys’ double as an extra pair of shorts.

  Our work is lightweight and portable, and we need little more than laptops, cameras, and a journal. I toss in a pen and wonder how long it’ll be until I lose it. Kyle adds his watercolors and sketchpad. I debate bringing my yoga mat, but it’s superfluous. It gets tossed into the storage unit with the lamps, bicycles, Christmas wrapping paper, the soccer ball, the winter coats. We pack three tubes of toothpaste because they’re on sale.

  Schoolwork is a bit trickier. Much of the kids’ education will revolve around what we do and see, most of it planned on the fly, and I don’t want hefty textbooks to detract from firsthand learning. The hand-hewn stones on the Great Wall of China will teach us more about the ancient dynasties than any map in a book. We decide on electronic readers for our two literate children and a simple learning-to-read workbook for the preschooler, mostly to appease him when he wants to do school like his older siblings. Everyone will have a notebook and pen to record travel thoughts, which doubles as both handwriting and grammar practice and a first-edition souvenir. We load the tablet with history audiobooks and apps for math curriculum and toss in a set of Uno cards for entertainment and for practicing number facts. One set of colored pencils, crayons, and markers for the five of us.

  We head to my in-laws’ house, and within a week I jettison half the stuff out of my pack.

  The French writer Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” It’s easy to assume that Earth is very, very big and we are therefore very, very small, but it isn’t so obvious from the vantage point of our living room as it is from teeming market stalls in Turkish suburbs or stuffed buses in India.

  In fourth grade, I made a model of the solar system and noticed the size of Earth compared to the sun. I think of Australia, how its gross domestic product is smaller than New York State, yet how tiny one must surely feel in the miles of open outback.

  Our individual bodies take up minute measurements of space, which is a good thing because there are more than seven billion of us. But it’s easy to feel bigger than I am, important within my own thoughts and somehow significant in the grand scheme of things. My life matters, of course, and so do the lives of my other four family members. So, too, do the seven billion other lives currently inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide twenty thousand times a day. We all matter. And yet we are so much more microscopic than our daily tasks lead us to believe. Tiny.

  What a tiny place I occupy in the world.

  I want to see a thousand tiny places, smell their flowers, and taste the sauces made by their people. I want to feel the difference between the textures of grit in Sri Lanka and Morocco. I want to meet the woman who bakes the best bread in the smallest town in New Zealand. I want to find the best vantage point to see Bosnia from Croatia. What do the Grand Marnier crêpes taste like in Rouen? In Paris? There are untold numbers of tiny places and extraordinary people who occupy them. We will perhaps see a hundred of both.

  We roll up our clothes in backpacks, test laundry soap embedded on dissolvable paper, get haircuts for the boys, then feel silly checking in backpacks meant for African jaunts on a plane to my parents’ home in Texas. We eat barbecue and Tex-Mex, we take the Eucharist at church, we say good-bye to the kids’ grandparents, and we head back to the airport.

  On a steaming hot evening in early September, we board a west-bound plane, where, in twenty-nine hours, we will next touch earth in China. As we rumble down the runway, as the nose angles upward, as we lift into the air, I already miss the lamplight glow next to our couch. I crave sitting there among my books.

  PART II

  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.

  —Mark Twain

  2

  CHINA

  Read travel blogs and books before you head out on a major expedition, and you will find as wide a variety of advice on what to bring as there are cultures and climates in the world. One expert swears by bringing only two pairs of underwear for a year’s worth of nomadic living, that the disadvantage of having to wash one daily, drying back at the guesthouse while you’re out and about, is offset by the advantage of a light backpack. Another experienced traveler—one likely without small heads to count—threatens that if you choose to rent a car instead of relying solely on public transportation, you’ll miss out on the real version of the place. Another tribe of travel writers promises that with enough tenacity, you, too, can make a living from anywhere and live the rest of your days location independent, so long as you live out of a backpack.

  Research where to begin your round-the-world endeavor, and you’ll find some sane advice: start closest to where you already are and avoid major jet lag on top of the inevitable culture shock. If you’re European, take a bus across the closest border with nary a passport stamp. If you’re from the United States, begin in Canada, Mexico, or Central and South America. (However, as some Canadian friends of ours realized when they started their round-the-world trek in Argentina, eastern South America is still five hours ahead of western North American time. No matter how map savvy you are, the world continues to surprise.)

  It’s not standard advice for this new way of life, this living out of the pack on your back for a year with t
hree small kids in tow, to start on the opposite side of the planet amid almost as opposite a cultural worldview. You won’t find many travel experts recommend, “Ah, the heck with it—chuck logic out the window and start your kid-centric trip in a huge Communist country where you can’t even read the alphabet, much less ask for an appropriate place to pee.”

  This is how we start anyway.

  There are plenty of guidebooks about the fourth-largest county in the world, and there is more to do there than is possible in a life-time. But easy? Ease into a major shift of your family’s daily routine, breakfast options, or sense of privacy? You won’t find a gradual entry by starting in China. Tiptoeing down a gently sloping beach into the waters of world travel would mean starting in Canada. Cannonballing into the deep end of an ice cube–filled pool full of swimmers with no sense of democratically promised personal space—that’s China.

  The only real advantage we have to starting our trip in the land of a billion people is that Kyle and I have already been here. Twelve years earlier, we found ourselves newly engaged and schlepping backpacks through China with friends as part of a research project entitled Could We Actually Live Here? That was the question on our minds, combining the stress of choosing the right flowers for a fall wedding with deciding in which foreign culture we should raise a family in a few years’ time.