Animals and Packing

The animals know I’m leaving. Shasta has begun sleeping in my open suitcase. Radar, who is not a lap dog, tries to climb into my lap at every available chance. The only noncommittal one is Mr. Darcy who continues to prowl through the tall grass hunting mice and snakes, generally bringing home something to leave on my pillow in the morning.

I watch my home transform around me and think it’s good that I’m leaving. A stranger is moving into the back bedroom. My son taking over my room. I have to let go of things like neatness and know that in two weeks time, boy stuff will be strewn across my bedroom floor.

How does one pack for six months away? I’m usually a light traveler, but I’m not feeling light now: camera, computer, tape recorder. Then there are all the cords and adapters that go with that stuff.

And books. One of the things that drove my ex-husband crazy was that I always traveled with books. But how can I make this move to Shillong, Meghalaya without wanting to absorb as much of the place as I possibly can? A colleague from St. Anthony’s has been recommending books. I have Strangers in the Mist about political struggles and war in India’s northeast. Another follows the history of India from Independence through today. I have books on deep ecology, essays by Arne Naess. And, of course, a small book on Hindi, Urdu and Bengali languages. Not everything can be found on a Kindle. There will be books in my bags.

Other things--a sarong. A sarong is probably the most useful piece of clothing for traveling. It’s light, easy to fold. It can be used for a blanket, a towel, a skirt. It can be dressed up or down.

Besides that, flexibility is worth taking along. I have plenty of that. At times, I’ve thought I would be better off with a few more rigid boundaries. Be that as it may, adaptation probably won’t be my biggest problem.

I wonder if they have artichokes in India?  

Circles & Places

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about circles, about going back to places we started from. I keep hearing stories. A woman returns to her hometown after 40 years. A couple, who parted bitterly, find themselves reunited at the end of their lives. Over and over we return like monarch butterflies to the same tree. 

 

Maybe that’s why I like local history, me who has felt rootless for so long. I want to absorb it, know the gods who live in the mountains, the stories in the rocks, as well as the people who made their mark on the land one or two hundred years ago. 

 

And maybe it’s getting ready to go on another long journey that causes me to remember Ohio and her green hills that look like they had been born for that black, fertile soil. I arch back further still to some genetic code, some lineage that runs through my veins that I feel but will probably never understand. Even my name has changed over the years. No longer do I wear the heavy German name, like apples and dumplings, that I was born with. I’ve become a creation of place, of travel, as surely as I’ve shaped my own identity. 

 

I had always imagined my life along the ocean, the roar of waves and barking seals on the rocks. And I’ve been happy in cities with horns blowing and people elbowing their way through the crowd. But here, the wind is hot and dry.  It blows across the hilltop and like a dream disappears over the mountains. Today a friend of mine said, “I get the feeling that even if you weren’t taking this trip to India, you’d be perfectly content to just stay home.” And it’s true. I would. And that’s the big difference between this trip and every other time I’ve traveled or moved. I always felt in flight, running from one life and into a new one. Each time I moved, I saw it as an opportunity to shed old skin. Become someone new. Except now. It’s taken me have a century, but I can finally accept who I am and where I am. I don't need to shed my skin any more. And, yet, I'm sure I will. 

Memorial

He sat in the back row, his legs sprawled out in bluejeans, tennis shoes.  Even though it was the back, he was easy to see because the class was held in the music room where there were good acoustics and the rows were in tiers. His name was Rory Macquire and he had one of those unforgettable faces. Freckles.  I picture him as a redhead, then wonder if that’s just my mind playing tricks on me, so I look up his obituary on the internet and it's true. He was a redhead, although he had a buzz cut when he was in my Eng. 1 class. I remember him, not because he was a brilliant student--he wasn’t--but because of his attitude. There’s a part of me that’s always drawn to the students with attitude and Rory had a lot of it. It was a night class and early in the semester I brought in music--songs from all over the world--France, Cambodia, Brazil--and played them for my students asking them to try to feel the emotion without understanding the words. When I played a selection by Mongolian throat singers, Rory accused me of playing “devil music.”.

“Rory, it’s folk singers.” I thought he was joking. “This is the Mongolian equivalent of Kumbaya.”

“I’ve heard Kumbaya. That ain’t no Kumbaya.”

The one paper Rory wrote before he quit coming to class was a personal essay. I wish I had kept a copy of it.

He had a wild streak. You could see that in him, but he didn’t seem mean-hearted. Reckless, maybe. A little edgy.

Maybe that’s why it took a while for it to sink in that he had been killed. Shot during some kind of wild chase that sounds like something Rory might have made up for a freewrite in class. He and some friends. They were probably partying and decided to pull out some guy’s solar driveway lights. A stupid thing to do, and something that in a few years time Rory and his friends would probably have outgrown.

But a man gets in his pickup truck and goes after them.

I imagine the boys pumped up on the adrenaline of the chase, yelling and laughing as young men will on a hot night with the wind and a winding mountain road. I imagine them burning rubber around corners, going way too fast, the road turning liquid in front of them.

And somewhere it changes. They realize that someone is firing at them, shooting like crazy. Then it’s all over.

The Lizard of Destiny

 

As August 9th inches forward, it seems the fates have conspired to test me by finding things to go wrong. It doesn’t bear repeating all of them, but probably the one that was worst was a few days ago I broke my camera.

My camera isn’t just a piece of equipment to me. My camera brought be solace during the early days of my separation when I first moved to Susanville. Behind the lens was the one way I could make sense of the world. It gave me a new perspective, a new way of looking at things that transferred itself out into the rest of my life.

My camera traveled with me throughout Southeast Asia with me, recording ruby miners in Vietnam, zircon mines in Cambodia, jade in northern China. A shaman in Burma.  My camera went with me to Italy and captured fishermen on the Adriatic Sea and a young girl with red hair and a painted face in London. In Nevada it helped me chronicle the lives of inmates who trained wild horses.

I assumed it would go with me to India.

Last week I returned home after my English class had met for a field trip downtown. I had taken my camera to record the day. I parked my truck, and there on a rock sat a lizard sunning itself. So I grabbed my camera--a canon rebel--to take a closeup. I wasn’t paying attention; I was focused on the lizard when I tripped on a rock and went down, the camera between me and the rock. It shattered. The memory card stuck, and I felt my stomach lurch and my heart drop.

It’s not the lizard’s fault. How quickly one step can change things.

The Main Idea

The project is called The Language of Place. Even to me, that sounds a bit vague, but I like it that way. The thing is, I can’t really know what I’ll be writing about until I get there, so I suppose The Language of Place says enough.

A lot of my life has been spent moving from one place to another. Rootless. And, yet, I feel at home in the most unexpected places. Places where I don’t speak the language, where the food is different and I walk down the street without recognizing anyone. As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about landscape and how place forms us, how it shapes us into the people we are.

I decided on this theme because I want to write and I don’t want to go to India with a preconceived notion of what I’ll be writing about. How could I possibly do that? Maybe some people can go across the world with a clear outline of what they’ll be doing, but for me, part of the attraction is not knowing. I’ve never been to India. How do I know what I’ll find? I can’t even imagine what the country smells like, what sorts of sounds I’ll hear, who I’ll meet.

The Language of Place is the language of the unknown. It’s a language I’ll know when I hear it, but until then, the writing is a dream, a blank page that India will help me fill.

Pre-Departure Blues

It’s a familiar feeling--pre-departure blues. These last few weeks are now rushing toward me and a dull feeling of panic is settling in. Mostly money worries. How am I going to make ends meet while living in India and still pay bills back home? The Fulbright gives a stipend, but most people who go abroad have a secure university position back home and are often receiving sabbatical pay as well. I’ll be making it on the stipend alone. Will I be able to rent a room to help with some expenses? Will I have a job when I come back? How am I going to pay off all the medical bills I have for the physical I had to have to leave?

My life’s lesson must be how to live with nothing secured, and maybe that’s what it all comes down to anyway. Is anything really secure? My house is my refuge, but it could burn down. Marriage certainly doesn’t last forever. Love changes. And jobs? Every job I’ve had has been contract to contract. I really don’t even know if there will be a job when I return so I worry about coming back in the dead of January broke and no way to get by for the coming months.

So I’m homing in. Nesting. At the same time I’m getting my tickets in order, packing my bags and planning to fly to the other side of the world. These stay-at-home blues are familiar, especially now when this whole things seems to have taken on a life of its own.

The thing is, I love to be new places, but I don’t really like the traveling part. I want to get somewhere and then take my time exploring it.

Why India? Why Shillong?

This is the second time I’ve applied for a Fulbright. Last year I applied for a 10 month journalism scholarship to go to Japan and study their contribution to the pearl industry which is huge. Pearls and gemstones are another one of my interests and I have a degree in grading and evaluating pearls. Just another of my tangential paths.

I didn’t get it and it’s probably just as well. I’ve been homing into my place here in Susanville and that extra year gave me some much needed nesting time. Besides I really wanted to go to India.

India is one of those countries that has always called me on some level. It’s old and I’ve always loved exploring the past. Great stories come out of India. From One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Marco Polo to those sanskrit verses we know less well, come tales of serpents, murtis, a valley of diamonds protected by huge birds of prey.

And it’s a good time to apply to India on the Fulbright program. The Fulbright-Nehru scholarship has just made a major expansion and there are some great exchanges, especially in the creative arts, going on between India and the U.S. right now. 

I knew I wanted to go to northern India. A few years ago I was living in southern China. During a trip I took the north, I remember standing at the foothills of the Himalayas and looking up at them. I had travelled throughout southeast Asia--Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand. I had spent a summer in wildly beautiful outer Mongolia. But it was the Himalayas, those still mountains, that sent a shiver down my spine. I wanted to stay longer, but I only had a short time. I told myself I would come back, so now I will be standing on the opposite side of those same mountains. Again, in the foothills, gateway to that high country.

So I applied without a particular college in mind, just the general geography of the place I’d like to go, and they chose Shillong. It will be green and wet. Humid. In altitude it is roughly similar to Susanville, about 4700 feet.

What is a Fulbright?

What is a Fulbright scholarship and how do you go about getting one? The Fulbright Website is a good place to begin getting some background information on the all the different grants and scholarships they offer. The Fulbright is actually administered by CIES: Council for the International Exchange of Scholars.This is where you go for the nuts and bolts of applying. You can research the different awards and the countries that are offering them. Once you’ve found something, you set up an account and begin applying.

There are a lot of Fulbright scholars. It’s offered to both students and professionals--mostly college and university professors--but also artists, writers, musicians. Fulbrighters go all over the world. Iceland. Bolivia. Senegal. India. A lot of international scholars and students also come here. The Fulbright community is diverse. Although urban areas seem to predominate, there are still a lot of us from small towns and community colleges. The Fulbright Scholarship I got is the Fulbright-Nehru Award and is jointly sponsored by the U.S. and Indian governments. Right now there is a lot of exchange going on between India and the U.S.

Probably the greatest benefit of the Fulbright is the chance to open a little more to the world than you might have been otherwise. I’ve lived in two countries other than the United States: Mexico and China and have traveled to many others. By staying open to new experiences, we’re changed. Every place I’ve lived or traveled has given me a different perspective. I love Asia. There is an excitement there right now of really being on the cusp of something new. When I lived in China I used to feel literally like I could see the country falling down around me. I don’t know what I’ll find in India, but will heed a bit of advice I got while living in China: Walk Slowly.