Travels with John

            Wherever my copy of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley now sits, I’d bet my bookmark still sits between two pages, waiting. I read the first half in college, ate it up, then got distracted with coursework. The same thing has happened with The Sound and the Fury, twice.

            Steinbeck is one of those writers I feel I know, like an uncle or something, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and somewhat, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I think the key, surprise surprise, is reading their biographies and as much of their work as you can. Steinbeck, of whose works I’ve read seven, seems the closest—probably because his biography, beautifully written by Jackson J. Benson, happened to be 1,000 pages long and consumed my entire spring break 2009.

            And he reminds me of my dad.

            When a fellow volunteer recently lent it to me, I began back at page one, and read it mostly during the late mornings, sitting beside our garden where the sun and shade continuum is nearly perfect; it didn’t feel right or natural to read an observational, adventurous road-trip book indoors.

            I figured reading a book about America, and the beauty and quirks of each state and her people, would be best read outside of America, when you’re distant and longing for it on a regular basis. And I think I figured right.

            The following are my own reflections on some of my favorite passages from this lovely read; Steinbeck’s passages are in italics, and mine follow behind.

            

            There was a time not too long ago when a man put out to sea and ceased to exist for two or three years or forever. And when the covered wagons set out to cross the continent, friends and relations remaining at home might never hear from the wanderers again. Life went on, problems were settled, decisions were taken. Even I can remember when a telegram meant just one thing—a death in the family. In one short lifetime the telephone has changed all that. If in this wandering narrative I seem to have cut the cords of family joys and sorrows, of Junior’s current delinquency and junior Junior’s new tooth, of business triumph and agony, it is not so. Three times a week from some bar, supermarket, or tire-and-tool-cluttered service station, I put calls through to New York and reestablished my identity in time and space. For three or four minutes I had a name, and the duties and joys and frustrations a man carries with him like a comet’s tail. It was like dodging back and forth from one dimension to another, a silent explosion of breaking through a sound barrier, a curious experience, like a quick dip into a known but alien water.

           

            Connecting with home is odd, and we can’t help it. When we communicate with home, we’re communicating with America and all of its America-ness; and to us, America and her reality is so far away.

            Terms have different definitions on each side of the phone. I say, “We’re having coffee,” and my family can’t help but picture us clicking a button on an electric coffee pot, a buy-one-get-one-free Maxwell House container in my hand. But, really, once a week I’m rinsing then roasting raw coffee beans, fanning away the skins from my doorstep to the yard while trying to keep the chickens from coming into my kitchen, I’m cooling the beans, picking out the rotten ones, storing the rest; once every few days we’re pounding the beans with cinnamon sticks and shaking them from our hallowed-out log and into a French Press. “Going to church” to those back home usually involves hearing a sermon from a preacher whose first language is the same as their own, and attending a service of their preferred denomination; not so for us. We’re Protestants in a Catholic service for sisters, watching our friends file for Communion, while we sit misty-eyed, wishing we could join them, tempted to become Catholic right then so we can join them. “Running errands” is nothing like you’d imagine. The concept of jumping into your car and driving some place to “pick up a few things” from separate, numbered, conveniently-over-loaded aisles seems an unreachable concept, in another sort of strange world.

            I’m not even Danielle here. Sometimes Daniel calls me by my name, and half of those times, it’s Danielle. I’m Babe or Danayit or Ferengi the rest of the time. But we pick up that phone, or we turn on our shoddy Skype, and I’m Danielle again. I always have been, and on that side of the receiver, nothing has changed. I still am.

            Their lives are still normal and predictable, just what we remember. We ask about their day, and they’re either making dinner (in an oven), or just got back from the grocery store (where there was pasteurized milk, gallons of it lining the walls), or returned from their 9 to 5 (where they spoke fluent English with their coworkers), or they’re about to turn on the game, on their very own television. Then we hang up the call and hear the hyenas whooping outside our yard, and the megaphone man riding his bicycle, announcing the news in the streets. It’s a hallucinatory feeling, disorienting and dreamlike.

           

            I sometimes fear coming home and everybody forgetting about our very weird reality from 2012 to 2014. It will change us and follow us around daily, and friends will wonder why, but they won’t really ask. They’ll say, “How was it?”, thinking they’re truly asking—one question, expecting one answer. As if we could sum all of this up with one sentence.

            We went home, and it was like we never left—because they haven’t changed; for the most part, they’re the same family and friends we said goodbye to. And when they look at us, physically we’re the same, only tanner and thinner, and they may not know how to breach the subject, the Are-we-still-a-part-of-the-same-reality? subject. How can they ask, How different are you now? But, then again, how can they not?

            Steinbeck is speaking a truth close to every Peace Corps volunteer’s heart and fears when he says, Even I can remember when a telegram meant just one thing—a death in the family. Every time my phone rings at an hour that doesn’t make sense for the Eastern Standard time zone, my heart drops and I’m afraid to answer. There’s always that first, lingering question that we try to push down and hide: Is everyone okay? And I hold my breath for that first word, to judge from the hello—Is it happy, or is it sobs, like the time my mom called after my sister’s epidural went wrong?

            Outside of our home we speak a different language; we’re surrounded by it, and good English is rare. Our eggs are delivered from the neighbor boy, sporadically, still warm with feces or blood streaks covering the shell. Our garbage man is ourselves, with a match and a flame and a hole in our backyard. We go to work, to school, in what most people wouldn’t call classrooms, arriving there by stepping stones across a river, and passing flocks of sheep and grown, naked men bathing on our way. When we hear American music, whatever it may be, we feel a tinge of homesickness. Churches blast loud, awful “music” all through the night, keeping us awake. If we want a hot shower, we turn on our water heater and wait two hours; and when other volunteers come to our home, there’s a long line for the hot shower, and they bathe in the middle of the party, and it’s normal. Our neighbors knock on our door five times a day, just to see if we’re there, to talk about the weather. Camels mosey down our road, geckos run in and out of our living room, parrots fly through our yard, tarantulas creep through our grass, and I run into the house when I’m reading beside our garden and see a menacing toucan-ish beak I can’t bear to have near me. We play hide-and-seek for an hour with our favorite Ethiopian, speaking only Tigrigna, our very own Semitic dialect with 200-some characters that my husband can read. We’re surrounded, in every direction, by poverty. Meanwhile, life goes on as always for our family and friends, and if we Skype, we may hear about foreign things like Target or snowfall or ordering things online or baking cupcakes or seeing Christmas decorations in town.

            They’re surrounded by familiarity, and we know exactly what that looks like: the everyday same old—which we often love and long for. But we leave our compound, and we’re Al and Alice in Wonderland, confused out of our minds, often frustrated. Our everyday hours are drastically different from those at home.

            So what could we possibly tell them? Our sitemate Lauren, after Skyping with friends, often asks us, “What do you say to them? How do you explain?” It’s hard. We’re surrounded, constantly, by this very real and very strange Ethiopian reality, so complex and involved; and we can’t possibly tell them everything. So we don’t. They hear the crazy or hilarious stories, but it’s hard to give them a picture of what this place, our life, is really like. If they ask questions, it’s easier. Daniel’s parents are famous for this. Jim is so curious about and fascinated with everything Ethiopian, he knows how to ask great questions. And Debbie has been here. She knows what it’s like, she’s tasted the ful and sat at a coffee ceremony, she’s been followed by kids pretending to be beggars, has ridden an Ethiopian bus, has been confused by Misilal’s rapid Tigrigna, has greeted baby goats at market—has seen the wild world of market—and has scrubbed clothes with us for hours; she knows what to ask. But without questions, we don’t know where to start. We don’t know how to tell them, how to paint a full and accurate picture. Sometimes, they’ll get a glimpse. While on the phone, they’ll ask, “What was that?” as the passing donkey brays or our neighbor’s roosters crow at our doorstep; and we’ll remember that these things were once odd sounds to us too. They’ll hear us holler to our neighbors, who come knocking, and we holler in Tigrigna; to them, it’s novel. To us, it’s normal, and by the fifth time they come to the doorway, we’re tired of opening the door. I realize how much we need to work on explaining, when I get questions like, “Do Ethiopians celebrate Halloween?” and I’m confused. Well, no, of course they don’t. And I realize we’re still at square one, and may always be.

            I realize that Debbie, who has seen and touched, and Jim, who might be able to visit next year, may be the only ones who will ever understand when we talk about these two years. Them and 200-some others who will return to the states alongside us, with whom we must stay in touch in order to stay sane, in order to remember, together.

            It’s as Steinbeck says: it’s a crossing into a different dimension every time we make a call. There, we have a comet’s tail again. We’re connected to our past, American selves for only a brief moment.

            A few months ago I Skyped with my mom, and she had our nephew Zachary with her. He was on her lap, his face up to the computer, waving at us, she said; we couldn’t tell because our video has crashed. He was right up to the computer, so I got right up to the computer too. I was nearly in tears, tempted to hug the computer, and wondering, how can I be this physically close to him, but unable to reach in there and touch him? We’re looking into the looking glass, so close but so far.

            It’s weird. Every so often we break through the sound barrier, hear the sounds of home, are comforted, and then return to our living room in Ethiopia, where next to nothing is normal.

* * *

            But I do wonder if a down-Easter, sitting on a nylon-and-aluminum chair out on a changelessly green lawn slapping mosquitoes in the evening of a Florida October—I do wonder if the stab of memory doesn’t strike him high in the stomach just below the ribs where it hurts. And in the humid ever-summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

            When I described the bi-weekly symptoms—the squeezing of my heart, the sharp knives under my ribs, having to fall asleep in the fetal position—my doctor in Addis said it sounds like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, heightened in Ethiopia. But when I read Steinbeck’s high in the stomach just below the ribs where it hurts, I can’t help but smile. Or, maybe it’s that, I think. We need our auburn leaves and frosted windows and cozy mittens. We need the caressing warmth of kitchens, need to put our hands against the oven door while the weekly bread bakes, need to leave the ever-summer. Maybe without these necessities, it’s difficult for a Hoosier and an Ohioan to remain healthy.

            Daniel and I are Mid-Westerners to the bone. It would require hearty convincing to get us to settle in the southern US, or out West. We love Fall, we love Winter, we love experiencing the whole calendar and all her seasons. And yet we’re trapped in a perpetual summer. I once told Daniel that instead of this being like Narnia, where it was always Winter and never Christmas—in Adwa, it’s always Summer and never ice cream. Never swimming. Never softball. Never backyard barbecues. Never watermelon and cornhole.

            There’s a beach said to be beautiful an hour and a half from us. A Peace Corps Ethiopia volunteer from the 60s tells us Adwa was once the coveted site among volunteers, for this reason. But because that beach is in Eritrea, we will never see it. We sweat through seven months without rain, our scalps burn, we see mirages of blow-up kiddy pools in our yard, and we carry umbrellas to protect our faces from the beating African sun; and we can’t cross that border to the beach.

            Steinbeck is talking about us, the Florida retiree who longs for the Middle West. October and November are difficult for the MidWest Peace Corps volunteer living in the tropics. The months fly by us here, and we don’t even realize the calendar is closing. It’s October?! we say. But what about the World Series? What about Halloween? Where are the piles of pumpkins? Or, how can it be December already? Where are the lights and Christmas trees and carols? And why am I dripping sweat? I once asked my brother-in-law, in February, how his soccer season was going. We really, truly, have no idea what month or season is happening elsewhere. It’s always time to water our garden, it’s always time to wear tank-tops and shorts, it’s always time to freeze juice for the neighbor kids. Because it’s always hot.

            Maybe this sounds lovely to you. If so, you should visit us. The cactus always grows in Adwa; and the cactus fruit is heavenly.

            But we miss cold football bleachers, wool hats pulled down to cover red ears, hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups, leaves crackling beneath our soles, fuzzy blankets tight around us, bonfires leaving their smell on your jeans, eating chili and steaming soup when it’s not 80 degrees.

            I was reading Daniel one of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories and she described the winter wind whistling through the trees. I groaned instead of reading it. I paused and waited and tried to hear it. There were Survivor episodes where the contestants would pay the host stacks of bills for a PB&J sandwich, a chocolate bar, a glass of milk. I won’t tell you how much I’d pay for five minutes in a warm room beside a sealed window with frosty air on the other side of it, snow drifting down, and that sound—of a strong and angry bitter wind whistling.

            What good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

           

* * *

            Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner….

            Most areas in the world may be placed in latitude and longitude, described chemically in their earth, sky and water, rooted and fuzzed over with identified flora and peopled with known fauna, and there’s an end to it. Then there are others where fable, myth, preconception, love, longing, and prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high-colored magical confusion takes permanent hold. Greece is such an area, and those parts of England where King Arthur walked. One quality of such places I am trying to define is that a very large part of them is personal and subjective. And surely Texas is such a place….

            What I am trying to say is that there is no physical or geographical unity in Texas. Its unity lies in the mind. And this is not only in Texans. The word Texas becomes a symbol to everyone in the world. There’s no question that this Texas-of-the-mind fable is often synthetic, sometimes untruthful, and frequently romantic, but that in no way diminishes its strength as a symbol.

            I’m grateful for Steinbeck’s graceful stumbling through his description of Texas. His lack of the right words, his clinging to generalities, to describe Texas and the feelings she hands you, is fitting. How can someone describe, truly and fairly describe this southern queen of a state?

            One of the fun elements of being a part of the Peace Corps community is meeting strangers and friends from all over the U.S. I’ve never before had a hankering or a reason to see California, but now I have Laura Schickling, a dear friend, a fascinating person. I like meeting Peace Corps volunteers from Ohio, I do. Shane was two seats behind us on our infamous flight from Cleveland to D.C., a day before we’d depart from the country. He’s a Euclid boy, here in Ethiopia with us. He knows about the Willoughby Brewing Company, and always asks how my family, how Cleveland, is doing.

            But I feel a different sort of camaraderie and excitement when I meet a volunteer for the first time, and that second question comes—where are you from?—and she names a Texas city. Austin, Dallas, Killeen. She knows, I think. We both know. As if it’s a secret that Texas could be grand enough to place a hold on any or every individual who comes near enough.

            When a friend tells me he’s going to see Texas, I have a mixture of emotions that push and cram to spill out at once. My initial reflex is I love Texas. Texas is wonderful. You’re going to love it, and then I want to clarify and justify and take it back. Because it’s different, I think, if you’re going to visit Texas. It’s likely and often that a temporary passer-through will not love her. He’ll drip with sweat and ingratitude and not appreciate what this sweet, hospitable hostess longs to offer him. I want to adjust my answer to a more honest and helpful one: Don’t visit Texas. Live there, if you can.

            I’m still in the sappy break-up period with Texas. I’m trying to appreciate the time we had together, trusting that it’s fate alone who keeps us from partnering up again. I’m trying to keep bitterness at bay, my anger that it couldn’t last forever. There were two deal-breakers then, they’re there now, and they’ll always be there: she’s too far from family and roots; and she doesn’t give me red leaves or a proper winter. Ohio is someone I can settle down with, Indiana too. Our rough patches would be limited to only a few green Christmases in a life-long commitment; Texas and I would have a nasty row at the close of every year.

            I can’t say exactly why I love the place so much. But it’s more than a place, it’s a being, and I know that you really can’t understand what I mean until you’ve lived there yourself. It likely has something to do with cowboy boots, barbecue, ya’ll and the accents, five or so families I wish I could carry with me everywhere, Bless her heart, ranches, LadyBird’s bluebonnets, the elderly customer on the phone who yelled to his wife in what I thought was a different language, camping in April and October, pecans lining the sidewalks, country-fried steak, and hard workers. In so many ways Texas seems to represent for me the beloved values of America and Americans. She’s hometown, country, family, spiritual, multicultural, with great food with lots of butter thrown in.

            I was born and raised in the same suburb of Cleveland, Ohio for twenty-some years, and yet I claim that swelling Texas pride. I don’t know if I’m allowed this, if Texans are okay with me taking this—but if you’ve met a Texan, you know she’d invite anyone to join her in singing Texas’s praises. And it’s a sort of rite of passage. If you endured the egg-sizzling-on-the-sidewalk heat for a year or more, if you’ve seen her in the Spring, if you’ve been overcome with crickets, you’re in.

            The only way it could ever work out for the two of us, in some alternate universe, would be if my family had brought us up there, if the 20-minute radius in which all my relatives, save a recent handful, have lived, could have been in McClennan County instead of Lake County. Or if she were just a tad bit closer than an 18-hour drive. Yet every time Texas smirks that knowing flirtatious smirk of I won you over, too, and now you’ll never get over me, I find myself both wanting to bashfully agree with her and loudly sing Adele lyrics back at her, at the same time. Nevermind, I’ll find someone like you.

            But the wiser part of me knows I won’t; there’s only one of her.

* * *

            Americans as I saw them and talked to them were indeed individuals, each one different from the others, but gradually I began to feel that the Americans exist, that they really do have generalized characteristics regardless of their states, their social and financial status, their education, their religious, and their political convictions. But if there is indeed an American image built of truth rather than reflecting either hostility or wishful thinking, what is this image? What does it look like? What does it do? If the same song, the same joke, the same style sweeps through all parts of the country at once, it must be that all Americans are alike in something.

            Before I began my semester in Uganda, I wasn’t sure how I felt about America. I was an angsty college student, upset with what I considered to be our nation’s needless consumerism and unhealthy rate of selfishness. There was a point I stopped holding my hand to my heart during the national anthem at baseball games—not to prove a point (I was hoping no one would notice, actually), but because I felt dishonest doing it.

            But then I went to Africa. It was probably as early as the second week that I realized the gravity of my mistake. Going to Africa can do that. It was what I learned about my own country while within one very far away that made me a firm believer in cross-cultural travel.

            Before you leave your country, it’s possible to mistake your basis of logic and reasoning and every part of who you are and how you operate as universal traits of humanity. This is what makes me human, you may think as you complete a task or think a thought that seems to you to be something true for all people. But if the only humans we’ve observed and communed with have been Americans—then, really, how can we know the difference? Then you land yourself in a place like Africa and suddenly everything is topsy-turvy, your head and heart are not just swimming, but floundering, and you can’t believe this alternate reality has been happening all along on the other side of the globe. You do and think your “human” things, suddenly aware that the humans surrounding you are perplexed and staring. Wait. They aren’t like this too? And then you understand the difference between being human and being American.

            It’s safe to say that the basis of most of our frustrations here, our headaches, my ever-increasing number of gray hairs, just behind the bangs, comes down to the qualities and characteristics that I as an American sincerely value and yet find absent in the Ethiopians and the culture around me. Qualities I naively expect good, kind people to innately have, and here, may be nonexistent. No one tells you in third grade Social Studies that good and kind are relative, that maybe fifteen years from now, standing in line in an African bank, you shouldn’t yell at those shoving you out of line to get to the teller before you. No one tells you that somewhere out there in a hot, dry place called Tigray, Ethiopia there’s a language where need and want are the exact same word, and one day you’ll be wringing your hands in front of your classroom, deeply needing to explain the difference, because to you, the difference means the world, as your own personal economy and simplicity depends on this very semantic difference.

            We’re always learning here, and that’s what’s hard. Our brother and sister-in-law, Andrew and Kate, recently told us that a baby has a rough, fitful sleep during a crucial learning period. Nights before a baby walks, he’ll be restless in his dreams, somehow trying to work it all out. Our poorly-made bedframe is louder than a freight train—trust me, I’m not trying to blame my less-restful-Ethiopian sleeps on the constant learning. But it is true, for me, that it’s hard to be fully at peace in a foreign land. You’re always behind the curve, you’re always wondering Where the heck am I? You’re always waiting to be thrown off balance.

            I find it ironic that one of the infamous questions a proud English student will ask a foreigner on the street in Ethiopia is How do you compare Ethiopia and America? Because, really, it’s the contrast that makes the difference.

            And that’s how I came to know America in Uganda. That’s how, when I returned home from Uganda I wasn’t only ready to place my hand over my heart again, I was ready to sing the anthem as loud as my bad pitch could take me. I was eager to be the one to unravel the flag from my parents’ closet on any day that would even vaguely encourage us to wave it from our porch. And if four months in Uganda made me a patriot, a year and a half in Ethiopia has made me—I don’t know, what’s the next step? Should I carry the Bill of Rights around in my pocket?

            Being in other countries, in developing countries, hasn’t made me love my country out of appreciation and relief-at-flushing-toilets alone; I’m not talking about only the abundant American blessings. Being in other countries has simply shown me the tiny details that make up my country, taught me what she’s like, by contrast, and sometimes by comparison. And in this I’ve come to love her.

            Americans hold politeness very near to love; if we forget to bless someone’s sneeze, it may bother us for an hour. Americans value cleanliness, of person, of home. Americans treasure the freedoms we’re awarded, and struggle to expand and redefine them, in an effort to include everyone. Americans value uniqueness and individuality; we value individuals’ opinions so highly, that if someone criticizes us, we’ll likely not forget it. Americans know the worth of self-esteem and confidence, of independence from the norm. Americans love privacy. Americans think it’s hurtful, and hence, wrong to point out “flaws” of another person, to compare two people, and to do so right in front of them. Americans are protective of everyone we love and everything we own; if we let our young toddling child out of our sight for more than three minutes, we think the world might combust (and it might). Americans hold logic and reasoning to a high standard; we disregard spirituality, or political debates, if they’re not well thought out, if they’re not our own personal opinions and choice, but someone else’s we’ve only copied and repeated as fact. Americans value variety. Americans love food like it’s a family member, understanding that taste is a gift, and experimenting with it is a noble endeavor. Americans respect some animals, our pets, almost on the level of fellow humans; we not only feed them, but we value nurturing them, petting them, welcoming them (and naming them) like people (sometimes, well, clothing them). It should be noted that this certainly is not true for animals that Americans eat; we could take a lesson from Ethiopia in how to care for such beasts.

            Americans value heritage and traditions. Americans, believing so fully in the American dream, really do believe we can achieve whatever we set out to achieve—this makes us feel guilty if we achieve “less,” makes us feel entirely responsible for our own futures. Americans feel deep down that everyone, everyone, deserves to be equal, in everything; our laws, our Supreme Court, are still trying to make sure this evolves with the times and continues to happen. Americans value a job well done; we hold “work ethic” up there with “righteousness” and “integrity,” and feel that if we don’t put in a full day of back-breaking, sweaty labor, maybe we could’ve worked harder. (This is what I miss the most about you, America; we’re a hard-core, trustworthy country when it comes to doing work and doing it with perfection as our goal.) Americans value timeliness and equate it with responsibility—if you’re two hours late coming to meet me, maybe stay home; if you didn’t call to say you’d be two hours late, it will take me a while to get over it.

            The slippery irony of all this is: I’ve lived in Africa longer than I’ve lived in any state outside of the Midwest. And so, everything I just said above may not be true of Americans at all. Maybe it’s only true of Midwesterners, or of the Midwesterners I happen to know. America is a big place; I tell Ethiopians this, when they ask me if I know so-and-so. I didn’t know folks from Maine are a terse group, until I read Travels with Charley. I can guess some laidback, even keel things about Californians. I assume New York, New Yorkers and Chicago-ans are always in a hurry; I’ve seen them cross crosswalks. Texans are as warm and hospitable as you’re imagining them to be. So it’s true that we’re not universal, and have our own separate pockets of truth sewn throughout our great country. But the above is what I’ve noticed about the America I know and the America I love.