Anxious others

I don’t know if I was ever a planner of trips; I like to blame my aversion to it on my time in South Africa though. Rural South Africa at that. A place where the best laid plans yielded results not particularly different than no plans at all. Transportation failed, reservations were ignored, business hours deemed irrelevant. I learned to improvise. More importantly, I learned to laugh while improvising. The alternative was much less joyful. I think I began to associate joy with a lack of a cohesive plan, plus there was always an air of surprise to the things I did. Who doesn’t love a surprise?

My current narrative, crafted over the last 15, almost 20 years, is that I learned not to spend energy on something that probably wouldn’t come to fruition. Although, if I really think about it, I have a similar philosophy about deadlines. I could be smart and work on project well in advance of their due dates, but why. That philosophy was part of the reason journalism was a good (if fleeting) fit for me. You spend so much time waiting -hurry up and wait. It worked to my strengths. The flurry of activity when something new is about to happen, and then a lull of navel gazing, and then the slightly nauseating fatigue associated with worry as the deadline approached.

The thing is, I don’t know if I am built to work under deadline or if I simply trained myself into it, either way, I usually trade the turtle’s philosophy of slow and steady for the hare’s procrastination. I’m willing to suffer the consequences for the freedom it provides.

But for some reason my foot loose attitude disturbs other people. People who have nothing to do with the consequences I’ll face. I see it most when I am preparing for a trip. I don’t usually have much angst about preparing for a trip, even to a new country. It isn’t that I don’t worry at all, it isn’t that I don’t know things can go wrong. Actually I assume that something will happen. Something unplanned, some degree of unpleasantness. I just don’t think I can control whatever that unpleasant thing is with additional planning. I also recognize that whatever happens, however horrible in the moment, will probably yield an amazing story after the fact.

In search of the source of the Blue Nile

But I digress…

Other people insert their apprehension into my preparations. It is the oddest reality. 

Friends check up on my planning. Do I have a hotel room? Do I have an itinerary? Have I packed?

I’ve trained my mother over the years. She’s stopped asking me about packing until my trip is literally within a day or two. I don’t doubt that she wants to ask me a week before she actually does- but she already knows the answer. The answer is always “no”.

Peace Corps, 1999, was the last time I packed in advance. And truthfully, even that doesn’t really count. I spent several weeks piling things in the living room – ever higher. Finally, my best friend at the time, came over and looked me in the eyes and asked, “do you need help?”. I almost burst into tears, I was so grateful. I had no idea how to even begin.

She kneeled down beside the pile, held one thing up after the other to see if I wanted to include it and folded it all neatly into my suitcase. I doubt she remembers that. We aren’t friends anymore. But it was a kind and needed gesture. When she was finished I had a suitcase and my father’s Air Force duffle bag loaded with clothes. 

Of course, it was my first trip and I was only thinking about things fitting into a bag not how much the bag weighed. The night before I was actually departing, I had to repack the whole lot, a new pile of things that were discarded and left behind because the whole thing was too heavy to carry.

Ever since then I’ve been a last minute packer. The night before I left for Liberia I had all of my stuff strewn across my sister’s living room floor, her middle daughter asleep across my lap.

Packing at the last minute doesn’t make me anxious. I’ve learned over the years of living in resource poor areas, that although it is sometimes a pain, it is always possible to find what I have forgotten, or at least a reasonable replacement (as long as I have my passport, ticket, and cash/credit card/ATM card). And so I don’t have much angst. 

My calm doesn’t stop other people from having anxiety for me. Wanting me to plan when planning just isn’t my thing. And by thing, I mean it isn’t my preferred method of travel– not that I am unable to do it. When my dad and I went to Peru last year, he was very clear that the planning was on me. And I did. I created a spreadsheet with details about times and money and contact information. I had our days accounted for and possible activities. I handed him his copy and he summarily grinned, folded it, and I never saw it again. He would simply ask me what we were doing next. I guess I got the anti-planning thing honest.

Ultimately, not planning is what calms me down. I have friends and the plan is their balm. The plan is their assurance that things will be ok. But for me, planning is my every day. Planning is my work. Planning is real life. Vacation is a chance to get away from that. To deviate from my script and see what happens. Sometimes that means I spend all day eating a tajine with a shopkeeper in Casablanca after searching out an actual piece of Sandalwood, sometimes that means trudging shin deep through mud and then floating on a papyrus canoe in search of the source of the Blue Nile. And sometimes it means I am stuck, and a little panicked, looking for a way to the Guatemalan village where my language school is located. 

I have learned to take it as it comes…even if no one else seems to appreciate my approach.

Photo Graveyard

Photos are scattered across my living room floor. Piles, slightly askew, marking different places in my life- be they time or geography. Me with straight hair smiling and scar-less. Me as a toddler, chubby legs and the same fat cheeks. Me in South Africa, wasted down to bone after my car accident. 

Me post-accident, in Swaziland

I pulled them all out with the hopes of bringing order to the chaos. For years my mother has tried to coax me into making scrapbooks. She bought one for my high school graduation, I bought one when I returned from the Peace Corps. They both have strong beginning, they have pictures and journal entries pasted inside. But a few pages in, and the glue stopped, there are photos slipped between the pages with a hint of my intentions. And then at the end it all tapers off…first to a page filled with photographs without a common theme or message and then no photographs at all. 

I grow bored. I become irritated, limited by my horrendous handwriting and too lazy to transcribe everything to the computer so it can be printed neatly. So the books sit on shelves, a half memory of a time long ago.

My mother encouraged the scrapbooks because she understood I wouldn’t remember things forever. I scoffed to myself, how could I forget such important events. But important as they were, they have been crowded out by so many other things. Other events, other cities, other people. Hell, some of it was knocked clean out of my head from an accident – some blotted by a desire to forget.

My high school bestie

I pulled out the photos on my floor the day, and traveled back for a moment, into the space of the places that are captured in those glossy squares. The ones I remember clearly. The ones that hit me roundly in my nostalgia. Sitting with my head on the shoulder of my best friend in high school. We spent so many hours on that couch. More hours talking…about what…we have no idea now. 

There is a photo of me dangling by a bungee cord over the Zambezi River.  I remember the exhilaration of actually jumping off a bridge- ignoring every survival instinct in my body and hurtling myself, arms spread like wings, toward the horizon. I remember the exhilaration morphing to pain as the cord settled and I dangled from my ankles while I waited for them to pull me to safety. And of course I remember the Egyptian man who told me, as I walked back to the starting point on the bridge, “you have the most magnificent scream.” And I did.

There are so many photos, my first boyfriend hugging me close at New Year’s, 10 years after our first kiss, my college friends, my Peace Corps ones. My family. 

Staring at them I understand and don’t, why we take them. I love the moment of love and joy and even the tinge of sadness that is embedded in each one. The memories that shock me back in time and then propel me back to exactly where I am, sitting on my couch flipping through pictures.

I don’t know what to do with them all.

Arranging them into books feels so strange. I heard an article on NPR a few months ago that talked about how in a recent year we took more photos than had been taken in all of the years before. All of them. 

My grandparents, back when folks dressed for photos

We used to arrange our photos into books because they were select and special. We arranged them because they were, if not quite few, at least precious. A smattering of baby photos, some family shots on vacation.

Now I have pictures of a friend sitting on the beach, a bunch filled with sand dunes (trying to get the perfect angle), one of friends piled on a single chair for no particular reason at all. 

I can’t imagine who will look through these. I can’t imagine they will be cherished like the two black and white photos I have in frames of my grandparents. Pictures taken back when folks dressed for the occasion. Or like the school picture I have of my father when he was 14. We have so many pictures to choose from how will any of them stand out as special?

Partly I feel lazy. Some images I have seared into my heart, never to be forgotten even years later. There is no picture of me saying goodbye to Ess at the airport. But I can see it so clearly. Too clearly, it hurt so badly I can recall not just the image but the pain itself. Palpable. No camera was necessary.

But you can’t share a memory the way you can share a picture. The exactitude is lost in a sea of metaphors in speech and the pieces of the moment we tuck away and reserve just for ourselves. Photographs tell a seemingly whole story- even if it isn’t always complete. 

The reality is these photos will go back into a box. A little more orderly. Possibly with some notations of dates or geography, but back into the box where they belong.

Visiting a picture

Champagne lake, Rotorua- New Zealand

An abstract oil painting. It looked like something someone rich would hang on a wall and swish wine in front of while boring friends discussed the merits of the bold color choices and nuanced brush strokes. The picture was the cover art on my New Zealand travel guide; I was determined to visit that spot (Rotorua) while I was there. I couldn’t tell you why, other than something that beautiful in nature was something I wanted to witness firsthand. And so a few weeks before I departed from New Zealand for good I found myself intermittently holding my breath (it wreaks of sulfur) and gazing at the art of nature. Rotorua is flush with all sorts of bizarre colors and designs. Boiling mud and sulfur smelling winds that colorful designs are stamped into my brain even all these years later. It is a memory I have because a picture lured me to that spot.

I’m susceptible to suggestion, photos of the Danakil Depression inspired me return to Ethiopia. It wasn’t the only reason but it was one of those things I was determined to see. The alien landscape rich with color and texture. Everything I read talked about how dangerous the journey, how hot the temperatures, how volatile the region. All of those warning were drowned out by the possibility of experiencing the landscape of science fiction movies in real life.

I never made it. It was the wrong time of year, too hot. Too dangerous. And so it lingers in my mind, in my imagination. This place that is real to me only because I saw photos that urged me to seek it out. Some mystical image acting as lure. If it were audible it would be the tune that I hum without realizing I’m humming, always there on the edges of my mind.

Recently, the desire to go to Turkey emerged and would not be silenced. I don’t remember every talking about Turkey until it became the only thing I talked about, edging out Brazil and Mali. I’ve been researching the local food of various regions. I’ve become obsessed with Turkish breakfast and have steeled myself to at least try Turkish coffee. 

In between websites dedicated to Turkish cuisine I ran across a picture of Pamukkale. I don’t even know how it happened, but all of a sudden I was gazing at what appeared to be iced wells clinging to the side of a mountain. It was immediately familiar. Something I’d seen before although I don’t know when or where. However I saw it, I didn’t realize it was in Turkey until a few weeks ago. 

Danakil Depression (http://www.sefere.net/place/danakil-depression/)

So now my attention is turned from Istanbul, and cooking classes, and cruises, and baths…to Pamukkale. I don’t even believe there is much to do there. I haven’t read that it is a place that must not be missed. But something about the pictures stirs me. Something about the beauty of the clear water in calcified wells cluttering a hillside is something I want to witness. 

It feels as if it could be a quieter version of Victoria Falls. There was nothing to do there but lay down beside the thundering water, droplets clinging to my hair, and sleep to the lullaby of raging water. There was nothing to do there but sit. Watch. Listen.  It is still one of the most beautiful places I’ve been. More than beautiful… it was powerful; something pictures can’t convey.

I hope to sit on the lip of one of those calcified puddles in Pamukkale, dangle my feet in it- if permitted, discover the view looking out. Maybe the breeze will be warm on my face, the water cool on my skin, the birds light in my ears. Maybe the vision in reality will match the one in pictures…I doubt it, the actual is almost always better than the imagined.