Crumpling the Map
Look at all those closed borders.
Well, I think it’s safe to say it’s all ruined.
The trip we’d worked for years to imagine, arrange, and plan. The trip where it seemed the biggest hurdle would be whether or not my French citizenship would come through in time (and for folks following that saga, I’m sure those Parisian offices are empty and I won’t be hearing anything). The trip that spurred endless dinner table debates such as, “Can Lithuanian bread water actually be good?” and “Is the iconic Spanish experience to be found in a city or village?”
As I wrote in “When a Pandemic Crushes Your Dreams” we’ve held out hope that we’d be able to find someplace, anyplace, with an open border. We’d be fine quarantining, we’d be fine avoiding shops and pubs and museums, we don’t care about that stuff anyway (okay, I’m lying about pubs, which, clever you, you saw right through, didn’t you?).
But now the days are vanishing and our June 10th launch is almost one calendar turn away, and if anything, the window of opportunity only looks more murky.
One thing I’ve realized is that much of the pain of this situation is that we’re sitting on a wall between two possible realities (and their myriad variations)—going and not going. That wall is a dreadful place because then the siren song of what we’ve all but lost pulls me back, reminds me of how I used to fall asleep imagining evenings spent listening to Highland music at the Plockton hotel (I’d already followed everyone involved with this Wednesday tradition on Instagram). As soon as I start thinking, “Well, maybe we can still make it work…a bit later, a different collection of countries…” I get slammed with confusion, despair, and anxiety.
The problem is, the other side of the wall, the not going, is not fleshed out. I have one side that’s all lush camera work and rousing soundtrack and the other that is a black and white cartoon of us sitting around the house.
It’s impossible plan anything in this post-pandemic world, this I know, but it’s become clear to me that to do the work of closing my eyes to the lost dream, I have to open my eyes to something else. I can grieve what I lost, that’s fine, but I need to accept the new reality.
Because I can’t have my heart shattering, again and again.
We have to decide—what will we do?
Many have asked if we can just put it off for another year, and unfortunately we can’t. Siena deferred her college acceptance to Rice University to join us on the trip of a lifetime. She can’t take two years off. And if she could somehow un-defer, that wouldn’t help, as no matter how much she loves us, I know that college life is too beguiling to step away from once she’s started.
I suppose we could go without her, but that just seems cruel, to take this trip she helped create and then freeze her out of it.
So we’ve got a year’s worth of devastated plans and nowhere to put them.
Now, if we can’t rent our house in Charlottesville, that question is moot. We can’t pay rent somewhere along with our mortgage, so that’s a slamming door. Our usual leads for incoming faculty are understandably dry. We’ve listed our house on Sabbatical Homes and with an agent, but we can’t count on anything panning out.
But even if, supposing, we got our mortgage covered by renters—what then?
Thinking about that side of the wall, the stark and bare side, makes my gut twist so much I avoid it as much as I can, leaving the future to unfold in some unspecified “later”. My head feels more comfortable lodged in the sand, thank-you-very-much. But, like other people, we’ve been taking a lot of walks lately, in an attempt to see something more novel than a new spiderweb in the corner of the living room or a new bottle of wine on the counter. In the quiet, as my kids skip rocks and build canals in riverbanks, I have, for better or for worse, time to think.
In the bubble of peace created by my children chattering about moss as if they’re suddenly eight-years-old again, an idea has bloomed.
Instead of a year around the world, what if we did a year of playing outside? We could stay in this country, in places where the natural environment tugs us outside to explore and discover together. In fact, it occurs to me as I watch the children’s excitement about another romp in the woods, that a year of playing outside bears a passing resemblance to a year traveling around the world.
How traveling is like playing outside
Both require astute observation and thoughtfulness.
Both eject us bodily out of our comfort zones. Already in the few weeks that we’ve been taking these walks and “explores”, I’ve found myself getting braver about hopping across stones to get to a new riverbank. I’m more apt to slide down a steep hill to see what’s at the bottom, rather than saying, “you can tell me about it later.”
Both create and nourish a sense of wonder. I remember when we first moved to Italy, Gabe would ask, “Why do they make the streets so narrow?” and it was fun taking something we never really thought about it and digging into the “why”. When we got back, I realized that, as a rule, we don’t really ask questions. We are so familiar with our paths that we just trod along and often forget to look at the scenery. But when you are in the scenery, that’s harder to forget. Nowadays, I overhear a lot of why. Why is this leaf black, as if it’s been painted. Why do the fish hang out where the sand falls off into the deeper water? Why is the sediment a different color? I have no answers. I’m okay with that. The world is a wide place.
Both make us appreciate the moment. Two weeks ago, as my kids made boats out of bark and leaves, I sat on a rock and watched birds wheel and dive among the rapids. I have no idea how long I sat there, the sound of water rushing mixing with the sound of laughter. All I know is when we finally left, I felt refreshed and rejuvenated, like I’d taken a mindfulness class.
Sounds wonderful, right? Very wholesome. The itinerary version of a balanced meal.
There’s just one problem.
I don’t particularly like the outdoors.
I mean, I like nature in small quantities, especially if it involves moving water and/or meadows. But though I’ve been known to camp, I’ve always gravitated to cities. I’m just not comfortable in the great outdoors. Why? Well…I give you my lack of nature aptitude (aka, mostly my neuroses) in list form.
I cringe at the mere thought of how a ticks’s legs move.
I’ve noticed a menacing glint in the eyes of more than one goose.
Our family has a history of crisis-level poison ivy episodes that would send any reasonable person running for the crisp steel of skyscrapers.
Though I like breathing the air around trees, after a few minutes, I find woods a bit samey samey.
I enjoy the satisfying feeling of locking a bathroom door.
I call all white flowers “edelweiss.”
Plus, it’s hard to find someone to connect with when you’re sitting on a boulder. Far fewer tales to bring home about the intricacies of language and what it says about a culture. And perhaps most glaringly, there are almost no food discoveries to be made in this plan.
Even so, I suspect becoming comfortable in nature, finding beauty in the subtle gifts our earth provides would probably make me a better person. I mean, it’s good to not require the stimulation and sensations of a city bustling with museums and culture and flavors and sigh… I’ll stop there before I get sad all over again.
But…. critical question here…aren’t I too old to become a better person?
The shocking thing is that the kids seem perfectly happy with this plan B. Not disappointed at all. Now, are they faking it because they see the bulging stress lines around my eyes? Or maybe the quarantine is getting to them? I don’t know. Maybe. All I know is that I’ve been caught off guard by how much their enthusiasm for the new plan eases my own spirit. I mean, Siena took a year off of college for…a year of playing outside? And she seems delighted at the prospect. Though she says she’d be even more delighted with her and Gabe’s plan C of turning our backyard into a farm. More on that later.
There is an immediate flaw in this back-up plan of ours. The pandemic could rise to the level where stateside travel would be impossible. But we can only play the hand we’re dealt, and in the meantime, I’ll look up Google images of the Maine shoreline or Colorado mountains. Maybe…maybe we could make this work. In a way we never imagined.