The Last Time I Was Here, They Overthrew the President.

We got back from our roadtrip in the early evening. We came into our apartment and it had that sealed up smell that living places do when they’ve been left shut up for a while. It smelled like orange peels and some kind of wax. I couldn’t tell if this was how we had made it smell or if that was the way the room smelled without our interference. I opened the windows and we started to put everything away. It didn’t take long because we didn’t take much with us, just two bags really. We had cleaned out the car at our last stop at Gina’s parents’ in Arcata. There was still some firewood in the back seat. I must’ve gotten that stuff back in Montana. These split logs, I had taken them through 5 states without even meaning to, really. I left them for Gina’s dad in the garage. Intrepid, traveling logs. After dumping our bags out and wadding our clothes back into the closet, I ordered a pizza. There was no food in the house and the smell and warmth of a hot delivered pizza would make the place feel more like home again. After the noise of the wind cutting past the car on the highway for two weeks, it seemed really quiet in the apartment. I could think of nothing to say. While eating the pizza, we decided to watch something on the computer. Since I don’t know anything about TV we just watch Pete and Pete because that’s the last thing I remember liking. It’s never until I start watching an episode of this show that I remember I’ve seen them all fifteen years ago. I know how they’re going to end. So does Gina. She falls asleep before the first one ends and I stay up and watch three more. I knew how they all ended. We had the next day off. I had to take the car back, but it wouldn’t be too difficult. One last ride even if I wasn’t going anywhere. The weather was nice and the XM radio was finally playing something agreeable. I drove across the Bay Bridge. It smelled like fog and exhaust on the under deck, but the air was clear. It was disorientating to smell something and not see any trace of it. The only time that ever happens is when you can smell snow before it falls. It’s dark outside and all the lights are on inside. You can’t see anything but something pulls your attention away from the TV or the kitchen table, a wet and empty smell, like what I imagine space smells like. Snow? Outside its cold, cold enough to snow, but there’s nothing on the ground and the night is clear. The first snow that sticks always waits until you’re not watching. I exit from the invisible fog of the Bay Bridge, drop the car back off at the Oakland airport and begin the convoluted process of taking a bunch of shuttles around the airport complex, each one of them crossing the area that I drove through to drop the car off. By the time I get to the BART station, I’ve crossed the same intersection 4 times. But I’ve got the ghost story I brought with me on vacation and never opened. It’s engaging and it’s nice being on the bus. It’s nice not driving and sitting in the back. It’s like being a kid. When I found out I was going to Armenia, I was standing outside my apartment on Mack St. in Arcata. There was a redwood right in front of the living room window. The letter announcing which country I had been matched with had been sent to my parents’ house. My mom called and I stepped outside to talk to her. It was cold, February. It smelled like snow. I lit a cigarette. “It says Armenia.” My mom informed me, hesitant, not sure how I’d take the news. “Armenia, or Albania?” I asked, wanting to be sure before I went to the library and checked out everything they had. “Armenia. It says Armenia.” I had no associations for Armenia. The name meant nothing to me. I knew it belonged to a country in the Caucasus, part of the CIS, but my imagination had no fodder, Khrushchev houses were about all I could imagine. Maybe goats, maybe mountains. It took me a day to see the goats and mountains; I spent the rest of my time there trying to look beyond them. “Asuncion, it says Asuncion.” I told Gina after I had gotten the e-mail matching me to a program for the English Language Fellowship. “It’s in Paraguay. I’ve been there before,” I continued, “it’s not really that interesting.” I thought back to the border-crossing, the trash in the highway median, a McDonalds and a bunch of green sodas in the supermarket with gurana in them. “From what I remember, it was kind of like Argentina.” I put my head down, mentally comparing the Argentina I knew with all the places that I could’ve gone, tropical places, exotic places in parts of the world I had never seen, but Paraguay? Damn, it would be just like turning around and going back to Argentina. I remembered Gina and me sitting on a bus driving out of Buenos Aires. “Do you think we’ll ever come back here?” She had asked me. I took one last look at the place, at the parillas, the cartoneros, and the boliches. “No,” I said and shook my head. “No, I can’t see why we would.” I had meant it and here on the screen: Paraguay. “Wait,” Gina breaks my depressing chain of thought, “wasn’t Paraguay the place you were really excited to see when you went there on tour?” “Yeah, it is a really interesting place. I mean, it’s really overlooked. There’s hardly any tourism there,” I replied, remembering how I had been excited to go there back when I was traveling for work back in Argentina. “You were only there for a night, right?” Gina says, sounding as if Paraguay interests her much more than it does me. “Yeah, it was an interesting place. There were lots of illegal wires strung up downtown. It looked more like Georgia than Argentina, but I’m sure they’ve got Fernet and bidets there. You know a lot of the same things.” “I thought you liked Fernet and bidets? After we left you were constantly complaining about how uncivilized the rest of the world is because it’s not equipped with bidets and you pay ridiculously high prices for Fernet here, I mean back in San Francisco.” Gina corrected remembering we were still in Oregon. We talked about the Paraguayan possibility for the rest of the evening. The more we talked, the more interested I became. Before we went to sleep, I was talking to Gina about the place like I was trying to convince her it was the best place on earth. She switched her tact and tried to calm me down. Reminding me that we hadn’t actually gotten the position yet. I shouldn’t get too excited and start assuming that we were definitely going to Paraguay. I still had to have another interview. Before I went back to work, I had a phone interview with the US Embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay. They called me at 8:30 in the morning, so I did pretty well. I always have better phone conversations early in the morning. I feel more relaxed. After the interview, I had a little more coffee and then went back to work. I met Gina after work for a drink. I had stopped at the library and now had a book about Paraguay with me, with another on reserve when it came in. I talked about what I had read in the book and made all kinds of wild assumptions about the place and the job. “Just wait until you see if you’ve actually got the fellowship.” Gina cautioned while I was pointing out a passage for her to read in the book and spilling my beer all over the place in my excitement. I didn’t expect any news, but I thought I’d check my e-mail when I got home. They had sent the message 5 hours earlier, only 3 or 4 hours after my interview. I was invited to accept the position of English Language Fellow in Asuncion, Paraguay. I told Gina and she was as happy as I was. I wrote back immediately to accept the position and then we went out to have a drink. Outside, the streets were quiet. There was a wet smell in the air, but the sky was clear. Scarcely back home, we were already planning on leaving again. On the way down to the bar, we talked about Paraguay. I imagined what it would be like with no goats and no mountains.

Behind My Eyes, Beneath My Tongue, It's All Gas Station Coffee.

V. “What the hell is that?” Gina yells as we crest a hill and a form around a pair of large, bleary yellow eyes dips down, takes a few steps away and then reestablishes itself just outside our field of vision. It’s about 10:15 pm and we’ve been driving through these woods in Northern Idaho for almost half an hour. There are no camp sites, no signs, nothing, just darkness, the leaves in the wind spreading shadows before the headlights, miles of gravel road and now some kind of dark hulk with yellow eyes. We left Colorado on a rainy afternoon three days ago. After a stop to see my brother Mike one more time we drove straight up into Laramie, Wyoming and began the college-town tour that has comprised the second half of this trip, the part where I try to find a place so fitting to live that even a less-than-perfect job couldn’t disturb the happiness that would result. Outside of Laramie, it was snowing a kind of cotton fluff. There was enough of the stuff to make it really look like snow. Sitting inside the Taco Bell we watched it constantly falling for about 15 minutes. I began to wonder if it was actually going to accumulate in drifts around town. I imagined a plow truck clearing off a parking lot and kids diving in and out of massive piles of the stuff. But it stopped just after a general dusting. In some places the grass was hoary with it and the pine boughs a little heavier but generally the green of summer remained even as the skies began to darken. The wind quickly carried the fluffy seedlings out into the craggy emptiness of northern Wyoming. We watched them go from the concrete platform of Laramie where there are at least two bars on every block—-a noticeable difference from the general distribution of 3.2 alcohol content beer in Colorado and Utah. Wyoming was not concerned with limiting the people’s consumption of alcohol. We walked around Laramie for a while enjoying the American legacy of laissez faire, rugged individualism and booze. The sky began to darken. It was getting late and there was a storm moving out there somewhere. We decided to move on. We found the car where we had left it. All the accumulated dust had blown off and there were a few spatters of rain on the roof and hood. We had planned on camping outside Laramie, but with the leaden skies, the early hour and the long drive to Montana planned for the next day, we decided to drive north and see if we could find some place to camp closer to the border. At first the rain was a smeared curtain of cloud of the horizon, far off raining in the mountains, but as our road veered around and switch-backed we soon found ourselves driving right into a bruise that was dark in the middle and dirty around the edges and seemed to be spreading and distorting everything around it. It was like a reflection of a mountainscape in one of those old mercury mirrors, spotted with black where the backing has come off, distorted, stretched and pooled. I drove faster, trying to beat the storm before it hit us off. The lightening was nearly breaking up the sky above us, but there was almost no thunder to be heard. It was eerily silent. The car hummed down the road and the earth steadied itself for the coming rains. No one spoke. About 30 miles outside of Casper, we drove through a wall of water. The lights in the distance were instantly reduced to the bleary and menacing light that fulminates from the protrusions of deep sea fish. The town of Casper, flooded as it was looked like a school of Angler Fish, the lights like lures for their sharp mountain teeth.We found the cheapest place in town, settled into our beds and settled into the stuffy and fitful sleep that one finds in any motel. In the morning, we all woke up at once and hurriedly packed, anxious, now that the sun was back, to return to the road, meadow grass and gas station coffee. On the way out of town a restaurant proclaimed that patrons should ‘Enter at their own risk.’ It was an old diner, like the one in which Mikey and I had met each each, years ago and back in Michigan, the kind of place where the waitresses come by your booth and pour coffee into your cup every 3 minutes saying ‘warm up, hon?’ each time. The kind of place with ripped linoleum bathrooms and dusty carpet and sticky walls. The kind of place that still allows smoking—probably one of the last in America. Strangely, it wasn’t the actual act of smoking that appealed to me. Sure, I had a smoke with my coffee after I finished my hashbrowns and toast, but it didn’t give me the same satisfaction I had expected. I wasn’t in this place to write a paper, drink coffee and chain smoke all night. This was a stop on the road; I could’ve easily smoked in the parking lot or in the car. What satisfied me about the place was the smell and the indolence. I had forgotten the way such places smell. It is a smell that populates my childhood. A smell of March of Dimes mints, toothpicks, vinyl, grease, urinal cakes and second-hand smoke. Things that do not necessarily smell good apart, but when put together that smell takes me back to being five years-old and sitting in a Coney Island or a diner with my dad. It’s a smell that I grew up with and it’s gone now. I’ll probably never smell it again. When I went to Boise a few years ago, smoking was still permitted in bars. This is no longer the case. If the law has even penetrated Idaho, Wyoming isn't far behind. One place in Casper, strong as it may be, cannot stem the tides of popular opinion. By the afternoon, we were in Bozeman, Montana. We parked downtown next to something that looked like an old grain silo. Unanimously, we declared our heartfelt appreciation for Bozeman, her cafes, co-op groceries and her friendly people. On Mendenhall, I looked at the homes, the small painted porches, like craft sets and imagined my feet on their boards, my hands on their railings. In that quiet neighborhood, I projected myself up every walkway, onto every porch and through every screen door and then we got into the car and drove away. Outside of Helena, we pulled into the White Earth campground. After the sun went down we cooked beans, bagels and the chilis we bought in Colorado on the fire. We skipped stones into the Canyon Ferry Lake, we smoked cigarettes, drank beers, watched the sun go down and talked about these things like they were new things that each of us was finding for the first time. Look at this chalky rock, this water like midnight blue silk and those silhouette mountains. After dinner, Mikey and I stayed up talking for a while. He and I have crossed the country three times before together by car and have taken innumerable sidetrips here and there across a couple of states. We’ve never had to part midway before. I’d never had to drop him off in Missoula before, but tomorrow he’d shoulder his bag and walk off toward the train yard, back toward the highway, toward the places that transients sleep and I’d have to drive away in my rental car back home, back to my job and my apartment. But for now, we were on this beach and we had time for one more cigarette, one more beer and a little more time to talk about how many stars there must be out there..................................................................................... Gina’s awake first in the morning. It’s cold and sunny, we sit at the picnic table for a while, smelling the smoke in our clothes and trying to shake the beer out of the synapses in our minds. We go down to the river, test the water with our hands and then with our feet. The temperature somehow does not seem as important as the beauty of the water and in a few moments we’re in and gasping for air, the cold water shocking our chests into frail consumptive things that can barely hold any oxygen. From up on the bank, Mikey’s head peers groggily from the tent, and with a few moments he’s knee-deep in the water preparing for his own ablution. West of Helena on the 90 we are looking for the Bear Gulch Road exit so we can find the ghost town of Garnet. There’s something like Bear Mouth Road so we try that. Yeah, there’s a sign there. Garnet Ghost Town, it proclaims. We follow it until the pavement drops out from under us, until the gravel turns into football-sized boulders and until the rutted two-track is hanging about 200 feet above a sheer drop down into a Ponderosa Pine forest. The road climbs and climbs and narrows and begins to appear more tenuous, like something that started out serious but gradually became abstract, something like an homage to the original idea of road. I have to honk at every bend. If a car were to collide with us up here there’d be nothing to crash into but sky and eventually the trees below. Gina and I remember the world’s most dangerous road in Bolivia, we talk about it. At first telling Mikey the story to calm our nerves, but as we climb higher there are too many parallels between the experiences. The yelling and the crumbled cars and trucks 100s of feet below, the coca leaves and the rockslides of the road to Rurrenabaque all come back to me as we round a corner and there, blocking our path is a white truck. We slowly negotiate the skirt of a road and each other’s vehicle. I keep telling myself that at least there are trees here. If we fell of the side, they’d stop us before we got too far. Garnet seems to get farther and farther away. The signs that proclaim its existence are like jokes. If there is anything up here, it can’t be more than a few burned-out old sheds and a log that used to be a hitching post---nothing worth coming all this way for. Then there’s a parking lot, with other cars and an RV. “An RV? How the hell did they get that thing up here?” I yell in exasperation. None of the cars in the parking lot are covered with the dust that ours is covered with. They look like they all just shot up here directly from the highway. There was clearly another way to get up to this place. After the road we had traversed, I had not expected to see many people in the ghost town. While I couldn’t say that the place was overrun with curiosity seekers, there were certainly more than a few other people standing around between the general store and the old hotel. It was difficult to experience the ghostly laughter of the past when children were running past me, laughing in the present and asking the exasperated tour director where all the ghosts were. We still managed to get ourselves wrapped up alone in some corner of an old storage room or the miners’ quarters in the hotel. We were able to get away from the pack long enough to hear the wind groan in the rafters and to be slightly startled by the sudden appearance of our reflections in a faded mirror. We took the easy way down from Garnet. It wasn’t as interesting, but I could relax and try to enjoy Mikey’s company before we got into Missoula and had to part ways with him. The end of our trip together came when we went through a small mill town about 10 miles outside Missoula. Going through the mill town we made our last road-trip observation. Here was an unfamiliar place that we would probably never return to. Many of its company-built homes were empty as was the old mill. But they had built a new one and there remained a spark of life in the place. When we drove through and commented on the place our words were not yet strangled with the portentousness of impending departure. It was like the last conversation in the car before you get to the airport. After you get to the airport, you just bumble around and hold your breath. Anything you say is entirely devoid of meaning, phatic speech. We pulled over on Main street in Missoula. Mikey got out and gradually collected his things together. Gina and I stood there silent as he collected himself into a bag, Mikey clothes, Mikey sleeping bag, Mikey beanie. We made a few quips, trying to lighten the mood, but it was 92 and humid as hell in Missoula and our friend was leaving us for an undefined period of time. There wasn’t anything to joke about. Mikey finishes packing his stuff, closes his bag and looks up. This is it. Dammit, why can’t he get on a bus? Why can’t he get dropped off somewhere to stay with someone. I don’t want to leave him in the middle of this unfamiliar city with only vague plans of egress. But we’re adults, I can only offer advice and I can’t even do that very well. “Alright, Mikey, take care of yourself. Take the bus if you need to. Be careful in those trainyards.” He smiled when I was done talking and we embraced. In putting my arms around Mikey, I remembered all the other times I had said goodbye to my friend, each time knowing it would be years before I saw him again, but we always found our way to each other. As we surely would again this time. We drove off, watching Mikey struggle to shoulder his bag. We yelled. He yelled. We honked and then we were around the corner swallowed up by our destination. The backseat felt charged with absence as we got back on the highway. Lightning struck somewhere across the pine-covered mountains. I began to feel homesick for the place in the future where we’d meet. I wanted to rush back home to San Francisco. It felt like the trip was over. All the road that was left would only eventually wend its way onto our block, to our front door. Gina drove and I slumped down in the passenger seat, staring out the window. The mood lifted a little in Coeur d’Alene. The mountains in the Idaho panhandle are some of the most gothic and spired in the country. They are like jagged children’s depictions of mountains, except much darker. We had no definite camping plans—somewhere outside Moscow, Idaho. It looked like there’d be a few places in the area, about 60 miles south of the 90. Surrounded by rolling farm country, we drove south, past the sharp peaks and their dark pine-spiked outlines. It was very dark. The highway was a small local one that was nearly devoid of traffic. Our lonely car rolled through miles of unbroken darkness, tentatively casting its headlights here and there. We only had 60 miles to go, but as it got darker and quieter it began to seem unlikely that we would find a place to camp for the night. If we were to find a state park, they’d probably be closed. If it was some BLM place we’d probably have a hell of a time trying to set up the tent in the dark in some remote clearing 100s of yards from where we had to park the car. I had a place written down in Potlatch, a town which seemed to be moving down the highway. The closer we got to it, the farther the signs proclaimed it to be. It got later and darker and we got more tired. The driving continued. A car came up behind us and tailed me without ever attempting to pass when there was plenty of room. The car’s bright lights distracted and unnerved me. I couldn’t see the driver; there was nothing but light behind me, nothing but darkness and the unknown ahead. I saw a brown forest service sign with a camping icon and decided to make a quick right to check out the spot. The tailing car had dropped back a little and I was secretly relived when he didn’t follow me into the camp ground. About ¼ mile from the road there was an information board. The first camping site in this forest was 7 miles back. OK. 7 miles is a ways back, but It looks open. Let’s check it out. The road was more like a tunnel through dense and dark forest. The bark of the trees looked shoe-polish black, the leaves more yellow than green but bright somehow even in the darkness. Heat lightening flashed in the sky, but we could only see it when we rounded a curve and looked down into miles of sky in the interstices between the trees. We were up in a mountain, we could see the faraway lights of scattered towns and then the forest would swallow us again and there’d be nothing be nothing but trees and the glint of their golden leaves in the dark. The forest road seemed to go on forever. Was there even a campground out here? In 5 miles of driving we hadn’t seen anything but one trailhead and a turnout that looked like it could accommodate a single parked car, nothing more. As we went further into the darkness, it was difficult to imagine that anything could come from such a stark place. I found myself wanting to turn back. It seemed unlikely that there would be any place to camp down this endless road. We crest a hill and arrive at the beginning of the story. The darkness, the bleary yellow eyes, the dark, hulking shapes, it’s all there waiting for us at the top of this little hill. “What the hell is that?” Gina yells. I break the car, dust flies up and we stare ahead, looking into the yellow smears of eyes that are looking back into us. I say nothing hoping that some aspect of these terrifying, unfamiliar shapes will betray something familiar to me. Nothing. I keep watching, ‘tree’ my mind suddenly associates. ‘That one partially matches the definition for tree.’ The idea that these things are yellow-eyed trees does nothing to calm me down. It upsets me even more. I continue to stare until my mind makes the leap between branches and antlers, huge antlers, but antlers. I edge the car forward to cast the light a little further. “These are moose.” At the same time that I make the mental connection, I tell Gina out loud. Slowly the car begins rolling again; the rocks and gravel crunching emptily. Seven miles down the road we come to a small turn out. There’s no sign for a campground, no evidence of one, except a truck parked here. It’s empty. I drive off the road into the clearing a little, but it’s so dark I’m afraid to go off the edge of the mountain or get stuck in something. The headlights wash over a picnic table. This must be the camping area. We get out of the car and hurriedly take the tent and the sleeping bags out. Just before we take the tent out of the bag, there’s a sound behind us, a snapping stick and something like a groan. We turn around and over by the truck there’s now a little light, like a small flashlight. It continues to shine for a moment and then goes out suddenly. I hear the groaning sound again. At once, Gina and I are up throwing our stuff into the car, struggling to our seats in the dark and making the decision to get the hell out of this place. I drive the car out of the clearing and back out on the service road, just as I’m about to drive away I notice a man over by the truck. I’m slightly afraid, but I also recognize the fact that I’m being stupid. I push the fear down, put the car in park, get out and call to the man in the dark. At first there’s no answer and then he realizes I’m talking to him. “Camping? Sure, it’s right down there. We’re over here in the picnic area. Not supposed to camp here, but it’s the best spot. Got a fire pit.” “So, we can camp down here?” I ask. “Yeah, that’s all camping over there. We drove all the way to the end of this road. This is the best camping spot.” I wonder about how desolate those other, farther camping spots must’ve been. I’ve camped quite a few places, but I’ve never felt so remote as I did out there in that Idaho forest, but in that remoteness, I slept beautifully. Before I went to sleep, still straining my ears for bears, I thought about Mikey sleeping in some train yard and wondered about the parallel nature of our adventures 300 miles apart, in the dark and listening for things that may or may not be there and then I was asleep. VI. It was the first night I slept all the way through. I woke up shortly after dawn to grey and wet weather. The inside of the tent was damp with our breath and the slightest movement sent the soft shrieks of rubbing nylon through the wet air. Every morning had been like this but this one in the mountains of Idaho was markedly different because every sound was followed by a long tumbling silence. The forest around us had taken all the little noises of the night and turned them into drifting fog. Even the crows were quiet. We drove into Moscow for breakfast and found a spacious but dim café at the center of the drizzly town. I went in to write and Gina went out to buy some stuff for lunch. Traveling does not readily permit one to pick and choose cafés. Early in the morning, no one wants to go to a place with uncomfortable chairs or a crush of people. In the drizzling pacific northwestern fog, it’s a pleasure to find the café equivalent of a roaring fireplace. The café in Moscow was such a place, so much so that it gave me a pleasant impression of the entire town; after spending a few hours in the café, everything else seemed like an extension of its hearth. Moscow is not on an interstate, so we drove through the southern part of the panhandle for a while, before crossing into Washington, dallying back into Idaho and finally firmly and resolutely turning for Walla Walla. It rained most of the morning and the temperature had dropped drastically from the 93 that it had been in Missoula not even two nights earlier. The cattle stood apoplectically in the rainy fields, the radio crackled with static but occasionally coughed out a recipe from a segment on Fresh Air that we were trying to listen to. We stopped at a public bathroom in the middle of nowhere. Someone had drawn the NY logo of the Yankees, underneath it they had written Yakima and Nez Pierce. About 30 miles after Walla Walla, we started down the Columbia River Valley and eventually came into Oregon: the last state of the trip. Old reliable Oregon, the state I feel like I’ve been to more often than California. For the last 7 years, most trips have begun or ended with this state. Instead of passing through it in a day, this time I was hoping to stop and look around a little longer. I had been looking into jobs and dreaming of quiet fog-huddled, river-banked cabins. This time I wanted to go to Oregon and envision my own home amongst the neighborhoods, cafés and used bookstores. I wanted to see if it would work. We got into Portland first, not because I have any plans of living there, but because it’s home to a large diaspora of people I grew up with. Outside of Chicago, there are no other big cities in this country where I can say there is more than one person that I knew before I was sixteen. In Portland, there are two. I also know several other people from college who live in Portland. Portland is Michigan’s capital-in-exile; there’s no way I can pass it without stopping in for a few reminiscences. Both the 84 and the 5 are backed up. Portland is such an antithetical city that I am always surprised by anything urban about it. Traffic, crowds and violence all seem strangely out of place in Portland, though they happen here at nearly the same rate as they would in any other city with a similarly-sized population. We sit in traffic and the rain drizzles down on us. I unroll the window, light my cigarette and my cigarette gets wet. I roll the window back up. Behind me someone honks their horn. We spend 20 minutes a few blocks from our exit. My friends Erik and Sara live in the northeastern part of the city. When we exit the highway, I felt relieved to see that there is nothing much on this side of town, just wide roads, train tracks and some guy walking around in a thawb. Erik and Sara take Gina and I to a karaoke bar a few blocks from where they live. The pronounced David Lynch-feel of the place suddenly skyrockets to an almost impossible degree when a frail old man in a dress stands up and sings Blue Velvet. When the male Isabella Rossellini is done, a girl gets up and does an awkward show tune I don’t recognize. Despite her lackluster performance; it’s hard to stop watching her. I’ve found that to be true of most awkward and arrhythmic experiences. Sara, who is the only one who can actually sing in the place, gets up and does a song, much to the chagrin of everyone who has to follow her. A woman does a heartfelt Just to Be the Next to Be with You and everyone sings along. Including our table because we’ve had a few drinks a piece by this time. After a few more songs, I finally find what I’ve been looking for in the book. I write my name and song title down on the piece of paper. It was tough, I had to decide between With Arms Wide Open and Higher. I waited impatiently through a few more songs and then sauntered out on the floor to sing an entire song through my teeth. Wid arm vidopehh! vidopehh! I started the song with lots of energy but after 30 seconds, I began to feel like the joke was losing its punch. I gestured more grandly and clenched my teeth harder, but somehow, like most jokes, taking it to the microphone had robbed it of its spontaneity. We stayed for a little while longer, long enough so that when we went home we bumped into each other a little and stopped to lie down in particularly soft-looking bushes.............................................................................. I woke up just after six. It was almost pitch dark in the basement where we were sleeping, but a few grey shafts of light sank to the floor. I had a slight headache, felt a little tired, but I was basically fine, despite having had nothing but beer for dinner the night before. Gina and not fared so well. Her stomach was queasy and she felt exhausted. I had other people to see and felt almost anxious about leaving the basement and getting back on the road. We got our stuff together and staggered out to the car while the rest of the house and even the neighborhood was still asleep. VII. I had let Corvallis become the center of the trip. Because I had applied to a job at Oregon State University or OSU, I had let myself get carried away with fantasies of living in this often over-looked Oregon college town. Months before I applied to OSU, I had applied to a fellowship that would take me back out of the country to teach English. When I didn’t hear anything back from the fellowship coordinators, I continued to apply for jobs. The one in Corvallis was the first of these domestic jobs that I felt excited about. The day I submitted my resume for Corvallis, I got a reply from the fellowship team informing me that I had an interview the next day. So for a while, I forgot about Corvallis and went on to thinking about the out-of-country fellowship. The interview went well and the interviewer gave me reason to hope that I’d soon be finding out where I’d be going and that, indeed, things would continue as they had years before when I’d been applying to the Peace Corps. A few days later, I did another interview for the fellowship whereupon I found out that positions were extremely limited and that I had probably significantly less than a 40% chance of actually getting matched to a program. At this point, I turned my attention back to Corvallis and OSU, or at least a domestic job.............................................................................. I was excited to see Corvallis, my imagination had built it up to almost mythic proportions. In this town of about 50,000 in the Willamette Valley, I imagined the amalgamation of all of my favorite places, Arcata, Bozeman, Tbilisi, Aleppo and others would all be evenly balanced here; Corvallis would finally be the perfect comingling of birthplace familiarity with exotic beauty. We got off the highway in Albany and drove 15 miles west toward where Corvallis was framed by fields of mint and trails that spun off into the cascades. When we breached the town, I parked the car, not wanting to cheapen my first impression with stop signs and turn signals. Once the car was stopped, I took a few tentative steps. OK, it looked somewhat ordinary, but places always seemed that way at first. At least I wasn’t getting an overwhelming bad feeling. The first few blocks were almost a mass of cafés and bars with a couple of restaurants squeezed in, all of them interesting, all of them unique. At the end of the street there was a decent-looking skatepark and beyond that the green shoots of new trees and rain-sodden grass. We walked through a residential area and found some interesting places: A pet store in someone’s house, a statue of a crocodile on stilts with a hat and a coat on, a theater that charged one price for students and another, much more expensive price, for 'students of the world' and a coffee roastery with a sign on the door that said ‘Go Away!’ After a long afternoon we sat down in a café to use the internet to search for a campground for the night. I searched listlessly. Sitting there in that twilit café, Corvallis seemed like any other college town to me. It was nice, but I don’t know what I thought was going to make it so special. I could move here and maybe even live here, buy a house here and stay for a long time, but I wasn’t ever going to be as excited about it as I has once been. In many ways, it was just another American town, with its local Thai restaurant and its national chain grocery store, its parks, trees and poured concrete sidewalks. It was pretty, but it wasn’t Walden, nor was it Shangri-La. After we found a campsite on the internet, I opened my e-mail. I didn’t expect much because I had just checked it a few days before and, generally, I don’t get many e-mails. When the page loaded, a couple new of e-mails jumped out at me right away. One was from Mikey, the other was from the fellowship program. I opened the fellowship one first. “Jonathan Maiullo, you have been matched to a program in Asuncion, Paraguay…” “Paraguay?” I mouthed silently, than I looked up at Gina and practically wailed “Paraguay! That’s just like going back to Argentina; it’s practically the same country, at least as far as the climate!” But even while I was complaining about my assignment, I felt invigorated and excited to be going somewhere new. I couldn’t believe that I had been matched to anything. The director had even written to me that she had been very impressed with my dossier. Gina and I sat in the Corvallis café talking about Paraguay for a while, with every sentence, it sounded better. The prospect of living in another country, even one I’ve already been to, excited me as it always has and by the time I got up to throw out my empty cup of coffee, I knew what I was going to do. I thought about all the places we’d been on the trip and the people we’d seen. Even if we were going to move away again, I was glad we had gone to the places we had; I was glad I had seen Corvallis and Montana and Laramie. I was glad I had met my brother in Pueblo and that I had listened to Mikey play his guitar at the edge of the Mojave desert once again. “Mikey, I almost forgot!” I tossed my cup in the trash and went back over to the computer to open Mikey’s e-mail. It was a lengthy summation of the night he spent in Missoula, ducking in and out of the train yard, hiding from searchlights, getting rained on, sleeping on benches, getting soaked by sprinklers and retiring to a 6am laundermat before finally making the decision to take a bus to Minneapolis. It was a load off my mind to read that he’d bought a bus ticket. I knew he was probably a little disappointed, but I knew his adventure would come off soon enough. As would ours and maybe the two would coincide in South America.

Bottled in Bond (California-Colorado)

The computer now seems like a rude intrusion on this scene. Outside Barstow California there is a primitive campsite on the edge of the Mojave Desert. At night, it’s silent except for the small yip of fox cubs in the distance and the wind rubbing branches of chaparral. It’s not a place very germane to computer activity. Other than my screen, the only other light source is the moon and the dull coruscations of our dying fire. Getting the cheapest rental car available left us hoping shuttle buses all morning around the Oakland airport complex. Eventually we were dropped off at something that resembled an on-site construction office that had been pitched into a parking lot full of mid-sized white cars. They gave us a Chevy Malibu, white of course, that had Utah plates and XM radio. We spent the day being passed on the highways of eastern California by much more savvy and local drivers. I’m sure at least one of them zoomed past cursing the ineptitude of the Mormons that were clearly lost on the way back to their folky and homespun state. The XM radio is just something to screw around with. You don’t actually listen to those things, but rather toggle threw their channels like a TV, convinced that the next channel is always playing something better than what you’re presently listening to. It didn’t get better until we got out of the stripmall grange of Bakersfield and put on a CD. We went up into the hills and the 104 degree air cooled to 85 in minutes. We stopped in a small town and stood outside the gas station breathing in the new and strange California air that is curiously lacking the tang of eucalyptus and watching the sun draw the yucca shadows out in the gravelly soil before us. Back on the road to Barstow the sun began to set in a garnet sky. Every time the sun sets in the desert it is a western noir moment; the kind of thing that can only be appreciated properly with a cigarette burning and a complete cessation of all conversation. Luckily, all of us understood this intuitively and the only sound in the car was the crackling of the small fires that we held between our fingers. The campsite took us a while to find, which was disconcerting given our very vague and handwritten directions. All the directions we have for this trip are of such a quality so it seemed like a failure to find the campsite could only betoken future such failures. The street signs could barely be seen from the rural highway we were on. Even with my brights on I had to slow down to read them before passing on. The road twisted across the desert floor and alongside the embankment were armloads of white crosses, each with a date and nothing more. The fading light made them appear even more sepulchral. We found this place at the end of a dirt road and a day of bad gas station coffee (like brackish swamp water that someone had extinguished several matches in) and family meals of Mexican fast food. It was a great day, as Mikey said “an auspicious beginning” to our trip. Now, everyone has gone to bed and I am the only one out here beside the dying fire and the jagged outline of the hills in the moonlight. I have intruded on this idyllic scene with the bright computer display long enough. Time to put the fire out and go to bed. II. “I travel all over the central valley taking pictures,” the man in the ghost town bar says to us and nods to the area around us. I can’t quite call the clapboard, sun-dried place we were in a ghost town bar, but I find that nothing else fits. There was nothing else in the town of Yermo anyway, just a Marine base and the original Del Taco. All this was just east of Barstow. The man snaps another picture of us and continues. “I’ve been in Barstow for a few days now; I came over here today to shoot some pictures of this monastery.” “What kind of monastery?” I can’t help but to ask. “Russian?” “No, they’re Coptic.” Outside of Barstow there’s a Coptic monastery, apparently somewhat new. There’s very little else out there, except, of course, the original Del Taco. Earlier that day, I awoke to the sun already blaring through the tent. I hadn’t slept well, and was still not sleeping well. I lie there awhile trying to get comfortable when I heard the tent unzip. I assumed Mikey had decided to get up and explore, but when I finally opened my eyes, Miley was lying on the other side of the tent sound asleep. I decided to get up and make good on my plan to look for snakes basking in the early morning sun on the concrete slab outside the bathrooms. Before I got up I checked my phone. It was 6:30. As I made my way groggily across the campsite, I noticed Gina, staggering in her slip up a little hillock not too far away. In my sleep-deprived state, I thought maybe she was sleepwalking. The way she had her arms out and the awkward, staggering way she walked seemed to indicate she wasn’t completely awake if at all. Then I noticed she wasn’t wearing any shoes. We waved to each other when she got to the top and noticed me making my way to the bathrooms. There weren’t any snakes, but it was already hot enough. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep. Gina and I walked up to the crest of one of the hills and barely made it down. The surface of the desert crags was a gravelly mixture of stones and sand that was difficult to walk up but almost impossible to walk down. On a downward slope, one’s feet immediately began to slip, ditto hands or butt or anything other bodily means of anchoring one’s self. We managed to make it down, but with too much excitement before any morning coffee. I hastened to the fire pit to start brewing some. Lately, I have begun wishing for more patience. While I’m more in control of my emotions that I was as a child or a teenager, I still have embarrassing flare ups, especially where anger is concerned. I started a fire in the fire pit, let it die down to coals and put the coffee percolator over them. It was a long wait but the coffee eventually began to boil. I was about to reach down and take it, but the weight redistribution as the water boiled into the upper part and became coffee upset the percolator and it tipped over. “Shit!” I yelled in profound disappointment. Gina tried to say something but I was already up gesturing in despair and agony over a cup of coffee. I hate acting this way over something so trivial as a cup of coffee, but when you don’t sleep well and almost roll down a gravelly slope first thing in the morning; sometimes these things happen. After we had packed up camp, we drove back over the rutted gravel roads into Barstow. I found a Del Taco for breakfast and Gina and Mikey were kind enough to tolerate a meal there at such an early hour. We ate and conversed with the waitress who attended to us with matronly care. Through the driving directions of another man eating in the dining room she encouraged us to visit the site of the original Del Taco 8 miles north of town; the dining room patron encouraged us to visit one of the few remaining bars in the country were one could order a bottle of booze and sit at the counter, open it up and drink it right there. While it was a little early in the day for this experience, we went over there anyway. We must’ve been too eager-looking however, as Lee, the bartender, told us that we couldn’t just drink the pint of whiskey we’d just ordered in his store. Recovering from my chagrin, we ordered the bottle to go and talked to the photographer. Everywhere we stopped the people were friendly and garrulous, despite the desert heat, but the consensus was that 110 wasn’t that hot, usually, they said, it was about 120 this time of year. By noon we had left southern California; we stopped in Vegas, just so Gina could say she’d been there. After solemnity of the desert and the silent camping grounds, Vegas looked like a monument to despair. It seems reasonable for broken roads, battered mailboxes and abandoned homes to endure 115 degree heat. They maintain a certain dignity, having become part of the landscape, adopting its dun and ochre hues and allowing the sand to efface their individuality. By comparison, a city like Las Vegas looks ridiculous. I pull off the 15 to drive down the strip a little, thinking maybe we’ll park and get a look at the Bellagio fountains, drop a quarter into a slot machine and then get back to the desert. The place is packed. On the strip, the traffic moves like San Francisco traffic on a Monday. The only difference is about 50 degrees of heat. Everywhere hordes of pink and glistening people engulf a spectacle, drain it of all meaning and move on. A man is bleeding and handcuffed on the street; the crowd swallows the spectacle even as it passes by. Fans spray mist of outdoor bar patrons, neon sputters in the daylight, useless like a candle in the sun and everyone gets what they want. It’s a city for babies; a modern-day Roman coliseum. This part of Nevada slides down between Arizona, Utah and California like a knife’s edge, to call it a panhandle would be a euphemism. There’s nothing else out here. By the Arizona border, another one of those resort centers that ring the state on all sides. I can’t decide if it’s deceptive to outline your desert state with resorts, clatter and lights or just necessary. There’s a little rain falling outside St. George in Utah. With its red bluffs and green lawns St. George’s groomed, semi-suburban feel is a welcome change after all the desert ruins. The first campground had signs up at the entryway proclaiming swimmer’s itch to be rampant in the area. Luckily, there was another place, also with a lake, not far away and we spent the evening lolling in greenish blue waters cupped by a corona of red and yellow rock and oxidized copper skies. III. A morning swim is a great way to wake up, especially after making coffee in the fire has exhausted your patience again. Luckily, I didn’t spill any this morning, but starting a fire, letting it burn down to coals and then worrying whether the coals are hot enough to make the percolator boil is a trial in patience first thing in the morning. Afterward, already sweating in the morning sun, I drank my small cup of perfect coffee, reeking of smoke. I washed what I could out in the lake and bounded around for a while before we decided to break camp and go get breakfast in St. George. Big Rock Candy Mountain is a real place, not too far from where HWY 15 meets HWY 70 in the middle of Utah. After driving for about 4 hours, we drove about 5 miles down a two lane highway to come to a hulk of yellow-grey stone beset by wooden stores, each with large signs that proclaimed the cheesy bulk above them to indeed be Big Rock Candy Mountain. There would’ve been nothing there and I still would’ve enjoyed being in a place with a name that’s more adjective than noun. After Big Rock Candy Mountain, we began to drift. Silence enveloped the car and the landscape began to take on the look of a never ending calculation. Each boulder, chimney rock and striation meant a hatch mark on some great terrestrial ledger. We tried to comprehend it and couldn’t begin to, but it seemed profane to even talk in such a place older even than Ur. At the end of Utah were we expected a ghost town we found someone’s rage in a landscape of broken glass, snarled metal and bashed dry wall. A few signs proclaimed that some of the ruins belonged to someone. I did not envy these people. We stood in their environment no longer than a few minutes before feeling like a psychic weight and fallen into our stomachs like a stone into a well. We were relieved of our burden almost as soon as we left but we kept a flower and part of a bottle, mementos from our visit to Job. Even in the farthest western point of Colorado the desert has been given a name and placed beyond a fence. In Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Southern California it drifts into people’s doorways and lies at the end of roads like a great and patient snake. It comes invisibly into towns, into homes and curls up in the hearts of the people living there. “Stay,” say the sands. “Sleep,” say the Murano-blue skies; everything in the desert must mix the light with the dark. There are only extremes. In Colorado, we pay too much to camp near the highway in a place of gravel, starlings and E. Coli in the lake. We go down to the Colorado river, swim for a while and then sit on its banks, automatically facing west. IV On the way to Denver we follow the river down in its green gorges. The rocks are wet with a misting rain and the steel tresses of construction glint alongside the road. It’s a short drive today, the shortest since we began the trip: only half-way across the state, but the geographic change is immense. After four days, we leave the gold and sienna desert behind and climb into the summer verdigris of the Rocky Mountains. I haven’t been to Denver in seven years. The last time I was here, was the first time I traveled west of the Mississippi. I was 24 years old and was nursing fecund dreams of moving to California. We had returned from Portland, driven through the night to find ourselves in Denver. While my companions went off during the day to snowboard, I wandered around Denver’s gloaming winter lights and wooden-paneled cafés writing letters and reconsidering my impending move to Detroit for graduate school. When I returned to Michigan a few weeks later, I met with Mikey, elaborated on my letters efforts to describe San Francisco. Within a month we were making out plans to move out of the Midwest that I have hence only returned to for visits. This trip to Denver was to be of similar magnitude in terms of life-altering events. Since I was a child I have heard fleeting mention of a person named Joe. This Joe was someone who appeared in a few pictures around the house but was seldom discussed. When I got to the point in my life where I began to ask questions about the people in our family portraits, I was never given a straight answer about Joe. Eventually, I satisfied myself with the idea that he was just some kind of familiar aberration, like so many other members of my Dad’s family that he was reluctant to talk much about. When I was living in Armenia, my dad once made an allusion to Joe over the phone. He mentioned that he had spoken to my brother on the phone. I wondered aloud why he should consider this newsworthy information, given that he spoke with my brother Mike about once a week on the phone. “No, not Mike, your other brother Joe.” I was 27 years old and it was the first time that I had been told that I had another brother. Since that conversation, I have often wondered about my other brother, but given our advanced ages, I decided that it really wouldn’t be an issue worth pursuing. He was grown up with a family, living in Pueblo, Colorado and probably had very little interest in meeting another of his Dad’s kids, the same dad that he had lived his entire life without. I had always had a hard time relating to my other brother, Mike in regards to our dad. For Mike, my dad was someone he saw once or twice a year. For me he was the guy who was always there, the father figure who I had grown up with and couldn’t imagine leaving. When we were younger, I know this put a rift between Mike and I. We had different lives and different concepts of the person we both called dad. For Joe, I assumed the situation would be similar, even if we were both grown up enough to no longer be overly concerned with such things. I’m standing on Colfax in Denver, calling Joe on the phone. “Hello? Is this Joe?” I ask. “Yeah, who’s this?” a no nonsense voice responds. Well, hmm, how do I go about this? Does he know who I am? Should I just say it? Well, yeah, there’s nothing else I can say. “Hi, Joe, this is your brother Jonathan. What are you doing tomorrow?” The next afternoon, Gina and I pull up behind, Mike and his wife Amber into a suburban driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac street. There’s a lawn mower sitting outside. The job is nearly finished. Whoever was doing it must’ve just gone inside and will return probably before we get to the front door. The four of us are making our way up the driveway when the door opens. A larger guy comes out and proceeds directly over to the lawnmower. I’m uncertain if he’s going to acknowledge us and find myself wondering if it was such a good idea to come here after all. This is a guy who’s got things to do and probably doesn’t want his two brothers coming over, taking up his time and drinking all his beers on his day off. “Hey, guys!” Joe shouts from the lawnmower when he notices us making our way up the driveway. He doesn’t seem the least bit perturbed; in fact, he seems genuinely happy to see us, happy to see me even though, until this point, we could’ve walked past each other in the grocery store and never known that we were related, let alone brothers. Joe ushers us into his house and pops open beers. We sit on the couch and begin our own attempts to say who we are and what it means that we are brothers, albeit in a very indirect style that to the outside listener would probably just sound like three people having a typical Sunday afternoon conversation. These are the kinds of events that get built up too much in advance, rendering the actual event almost unremarkable. At least that is usually the case, but in this first meeting with my brother, I couldn’t help but to find myself actually feeling very content to have finally gathered my two errant siblings together and found them such convivial people. Perhaps the most astounding thing was the sight of my dad in each of my brother’s faces. When they spoke, I watched the way their arms gestured or the way their eyebrows bunched. In each action, each unconscious gesture, I could see my dad. Even more bizarrely, I could see myself. Despite the fact that my brothers and I had grown up thousands of miles from each other, we shared certain innate characteristics, not just in appearance, but in mien and perspective. Talking to them was like talking to my dad, or my grandfather or even, at certain point in the conversation, to myself. When it came time to leave Joe asked that we take a picture together. Suddenly with a kind of solemnity that seemed to suggest that the entire point of the day’s meeting was contained in this moment we stood together, entwined our arms and looked up for the cameras that Gina and their wives were training on us. A historic moment, but casually taken, we tried to look serious but each one of us wears a slight smirk, the result of the first time we had ever stood together. Hopefully, it won’t be the last.

The Shrinking Pacific

We talk about leaving all the time. I come home and say “God. I’m sick of this place,” and then, still wiping the sweat off my forehead from the bike ride back home, I’ll go sit down on the corner to smoke a cigarette in an attempt to pacify myself. Back inside, we have dinner and try to discuss our dissatisfaction, but it’s very hard to do in such a beautiful place, and makes one feel like the worst kind of curmudgeon. It’s hard to complain about San Francisco because it’s the prettiest city anyone has ever seen. People come from Nebraskas and Baltimores and think ‘my God! I didn’t know such beauty could exist in a city.” The rolling hills, the ocean on one side, the bay on the other, the spectral bridges lancing out into the fog and the dense neighborhoods, Little Saigon, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Mission all representing different cultures that have maintained their identities enough to appear different from each other, most importantly, to smell different from each other. It’s a unique arraignment to San Francisco that one can almost identify where one neighborhood borders another by the smell. Chinatown is mothballs, fortune cookie dough and mushrooms. Little Russia, is stale pirozhki oil and dried sturgeon. Each neighborhood smell is preserved by the damp pacific air that preserves the smells and then blows them out into the ocean at night. Every morning they are recreated afresh. All the highest points of San Francisco are parks; walk up a steep street and it turns into a park. There’s not going to be anyone up there, just trees clinging to the sandy soil, moss, fog and the glittering lights of the city reflected in the ocean below. These parks aren’t just an homage to the natural world the way so many urban parks are. They are light intrusions of the Pacific coastal forest where coyotes trot in the twilight and heavy ravens brood over the day. The parks fit into the pluralistic system of disparate neighborhoods. They have their own residents, advocates and distinct smells. I have always loved this city. I had never given it a thought when I first arrived here about eight years ago. My friends and I had finished college and had decided to take a roadtrip west. I was applying to graduate schools in places like Colorado and New Mexico, so it seemed like a good idea to go and see these places before committing to move to them. We drove down to Memphis the first night and then continued west from there. Alternately sleeping in the car, drinking copious amounts of coffee and only stopping in each place for an hour or so to stretch and find a Taco Bell, it took us less than three days to get from Michigan to Albuquerque. I liked the roads and the wide open spaces of Western America, but I was invariably disappointed by the towns. Boulder was too expensive and it didn’t look like there was much to do besides hang out in breweries; everything was a brewery in Boulder. I liked Albuquerque but the isolation of the surrounding desert weighed down on it. The place offered a charming melancholy to the visitor and possibly chronic depression to the resident. Phoenix was empty; even in February its million inhabitants stayed inside with their air conditioners on. The night before we got to San Francisco, we slept in our van in the hills south of LA. I looked down into the city, much like the view from Mulholland Drive. The lights coruscated through the valleys like rivers rippling over different sized rocks. I watched the scene for about 10 minutes before going back to the van and falling asleep in the driver’s seat, exhausted. After San Francisco, we went to Portland, Denver and a few other places, but I had already been seduced. I remember the cafes and bars we visited, but I don’t remember the cities, not in the way that I remembered San Francisco. After seeing San Francisco, there wasn’t room for anything else. I spent the rest of the trip writing letters about the two days I had been there. Sometimes, when I go down Davisadero, I can see myself, sitting outside a café, frantically scribbling a letter with misspelled street names and strings of clichés. I wrote to everyone, telling them about this El Dorado I didn’t even know I had been looking for. I’m sure many of the people that live here, most of them weren’t born here, have similar stories. All of them stood on some eucalyptus-scented hill watching the sun fall into the Pacific, thinking ‘yeah, this is happiness,’ and then drove back to their homes, only staying long enough to pack up their stuff and say goodbye. I lived in San Francisco for a year before I moved away to attend graduate school. When I left, I did so reluctantly. I was restless. I wanted to see the world, but I didn’t want to leave San Fran. I told myself that, barring another terrible earthquake, that it would always be there, and I could go back any time I wanted. For years, I carried the place with me in form of a keychain, the sight of which, while living abroad, actually caused me to sigh out loud on several occasions. I never tried to come back here. After I finished graduate school, I moved out of the country again. When I decided to come back, I had nowhere to go, my girlfriend’s extended family lives out in the East Bay, they offered us a place of our own for a while and it seemed like as good a place as any; we both knew people in the area, and after living in so many unfamiliar places, I was excited to return to a place and people I knew. ............................................................................................................ After dinner, we take a walk on the outskirts of Golden Gate Park, which is less than a block from where we live. As we walk, I talk about the past and how it’s shaped my perception of the future. I talk about all the roadtrips that I have taken between here and Michigan and the small towns along the way where I talked to someone in a gas station. I talk about living in such a small town, what it would be like to know your neighbors and feel like you were working toward a common goal, rather than competing with each other for everything. I a couple of days, I’m going to leave San Francisco and revisit all the places that I had passed through before when I was too enamored with the Golden Gate Bridge and the smell of eucalyptus to notice them. I do not wish to find another El Dorado; the problem with living in a fairytale is that it feels like it belongs to everyone and no one. I will never really be a part of San Francisco, though it has long been a part of me. No. I want to find a place that looks simple; I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can create enough of my own entertainment. I just need the space to do it and at least one place that’s got a decent burrito.

A Song for Everything

The neighbor is trimming something. I can’t see her, but I can hear the steady click of the gardening shears. *click*click* It sounds like someone is standing on the other side of the fence rhythmically snapping their fingers. For a moment or two I snapped back, hoping to produce a dueling banjos sort of effect, but nothing happened, the shearing neither sped up nor slowed down. Along with the clipping there is a pronounced scent of jasmine in this room. Yesterday, while biking between Oakland and Berkeley, my girlfriend, her brother and I stopped to get some coffee. There was a large jasmine bush near the café. I picked a sprig of it and gave it to my girlfriend. She put it in her hat band. That hat is sitting before me on the table. The jasmine is somehow more redolent a day after it has been picked. So it is. There is a click and a breath of jasmine in every second. That’s where I’m writing from. ... We were in Oakland yesterday for my friend Mikey’s going away party. He’s had about thirty going away parties this week (one at work, one for work, one with people from work, but not at work, etc) but this was to be the last. After spending a few hours at the Oakland skate park for what my friend Jason calls geriatric skate club, we bought a few beers at a liquor store named Shareef’s in West Oakland. Outside Shareef’s there was a pious-looking old man sitting on a folding chair and blinking into the sun. ‘Salaam,’ I said as we leaned our bikes against the wall. He made no effort to look or respond, but continued holding his face toward the sky, like he was trying to will himself to be somewhere else. We got to Mikey’s and fell upon the food he had prepared like three eagles all seeing the same rabbit at once. The room got quiet as we went back to our seats with heaping plates of tofu and pancakes. But due to the early hour and the physical exertion of biking and skating, we found that our ravenousness was a quickly passing feeling and soon we were standing in the sunlight outside, holding beers and laughing. … I moved out to San Francisco with Mikey something like seven years ago. I had gone through the lumpy ad verdant peninsula on a road trip and spent the one afternoon I was there frantically writing letters about the town that had captivated my interest, misspelling every street name. One of these letters made its way back to Mikey in Michigan. Misspellings notwithstanding, I had managed to captivate his interest. Although he had never even seen the place, he convinced me in the end that moving there would be the right thing to do, particularly because neither of us had any other prospects. We arrived something like 7 months later in a Volvo station wagon brimming with our useless stuff and roadtrip effluvia such as empty water jugs, taco bell wrappers and about 100 paper coffee cups, some smashed into the floor mats, others ¼ full of some Sumatra, old sock and kerosene concoction that had been sloshing around in there since Santa Fe. There was no one to help us and nowhere to park. We unloaded everything through the haze of a Sunday morning at the corner of Hyde and Turk. Each of us alternately staying with the car or carrying an armload of garbage bags up the stairs. After everything was unloaded and the car was parked we decided to celebrate by going out to eat. On the way, we practically stumbled on some guy shooting up on the sidewalk. … That’s the story that everyone knows already. I’m not the only one who had told it. Almost everyone else my age has their own version of it. These versions, along with mine, are now assigned to moldering corners of the internet where the years-old comments go unread, speaking with the echoing flashback timbre of high school yearbook signatures: Sounds like you guys are having a good time. Be safe. I can’t wait to visit!! -Trish I can believe you lost those shoes! See you in December! -Ernie I’m glad you moved away, jerk! JK! I got my job bac at the shoe store. It’s OK. At least it’s a job. Maybe I can sav up some money and come out and see you… -Aaron aka ‘Snake’ Within the first few weeks the stories were updated a few times and new stories were added, the stories of adjustment and discovery. Inevitably, it tapered off. The site traffic lessoned and the stories came less frequently. More people moved to other places and told their own stories, others stayed in one place. Mikey had different reasons for moving to San Francisco that I had. He wanted to live there. I wanted to go everywhere, but I had to start somewhere. I only lived in San Francisco for a year before I was off to the next thing, writing the next moving story. Mikey helped me move, but I unpacked alone on a grey Sunday afternoon, realizing that I owned nothing of value. There is no feeling as disheartening as unpacking alone and over the years and the subsequent moves, I continued to write to comprehend the feeling, so that I could hold it up and examine it. Since I moved to San Francisco, I have moved almost every year that followed. Ten times in all. I wrote about most of them, perhaps you read some. I know that Mikey read about a lot of them. Perhaps they were more interesting to him, since up until I met my girlfriend, he had been the only person to ever share the experience with me. While Mikey read about the places I went, I thought of him as a stable and therefore supportive figure. The few desperate phone calls I have had to make have all been answered by Mikey. I have received his letters on three different continents and I always looked to him and thought “I’m glad one of us seems to have figured this thing out, or at least seems comfortable with not being able to figure it out.” An idea that always comforted me when I couldn’t sleep and chainsmoked by the window watching the stars intently, waiting for them to give something up, just a hint about what it was all for. When we moved to San Francisco, I didn’t think I’d move again, at least not right away. After Armenia I told myself I wouldn’t move again and after Argentina, I just stopped thinking about it at all. All the while, letters and phone calls went back and forth between Mikey and I. Perhaps we still felt indebted in each other, not quite realizing that by moving across the country together years before we had tacitly agreed to some kind of mutual aid and protection pact. When I left Argentina, I decided to go back to San Francisco. I thought that maybe returning would exercise the restlessness that developed while I was there. And I knew that Mikey would be there, too. My girlfriend had already heard all about Mikey and they had met a few times, but I was constantly talking to her about how great it would be to live in the same place with him again. How great it would be to move to a city and already have a friend there. I began to feel comfortable with the idea of moving back; I began to feel like maybe this time I would stay. Maybe all I needed was to go back to what I had started. After the going away party, we rode off to Bekeley. As we pedaled listlessly down Adeline, I wondered if in Mikey’s absence, I was going to have to stay here for the next seven years and wait for him to come back, if he ever decided to. After all, that’s what he did for me. His stability in this place had made it exemplary in my mind. If I still felt connected to it, it was thanks to him. In a few days we’re going to change positions. Mikey’s going to go drift out into the world and I’m going to be here. I like to think I’ll stay, but I know I still don’t have that kind of patience. There’s still too much out there. The ability to establish myself in a different country is also one of the only things I have really learned over the past five years and like any special skill, it feels good to exercise it. It feels good to remind myself that I something more than a minimum wage worker. This story doesn’t end with Mikey leaving and me staying here and contemplating my 11th move. Our scenario is analogous to an entire generation that seems to have foundered in its attempts to reach a validating adulthood. Maybe somewhere else the plight had been met by more success, but for the people like Mikey and me, it seems life will continue being something so rare and obfuscated as to constantly elude us from reaching a navigable point within it. … *Click* click*my neighbor is still cutting away out there, snipping in the garden. The smell of jasmine is slightly washed out by the open window, but remains at the end of every deep breath. Some bird sings like a nightingale outside: that occasional whirring chirp. The sun makes one side of the leaves look wet, the other ashen. Maybe when I get the first letter from Mikey on the road, I can write these things to him. Maybe they’ll make him want to come back, or maybe they’ll make me want to leave. Either way.

When the Winds Have Swept the Moon from the Shore

In San Francisco, Autumn transitions noiselessly into Spring and then back again. The weather differences are subtle. It’s raining in the morning; it’s sunny in the afternoon and cloudy in the evening. At night the stars return to their ocean beds. The change was so gradual that I didn’t even notice until cherry blossoms were suddenly whirling out of the trees and collecting in drifts along the curbs. I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all if it didn’t betoken the passing of another year. I realize now that I have neglected to notice how the years have gone by; I have been attending to place much more than time. At each place, achieving something and moving on, quickly. > The wind is once again blowing and now more attentive, I hear the sound of time it nearly drowns out. The waves are moving onto the stones, the blooms are lifted and the clouds lumber across the sky. It is now impossible not to see these passages as they are. They are past progressions borne into the present: the places and the people staid forever by implacable nature of memory. 1999: The radio is on. The room smells like pastel crayons and old, wet clay. Someone is talking quietly in the back of the room, but, under the radio the predominant sound is pencil scratching and the hum of institutional lighting. Michelle bursts into the doorway. She’s got tears running down her face and now I know that Jeremy is dead. At every milestone, that moment has reasserted itself. Jeremy never finished high school; He’s there forever. Always right there in the doorway. No college, no fiancé, no travel, no child, just right there, caught up to and surpassed, long surpassed at every moment. 2003: The Grand River is rolling away under a canopy of new foliage and subtle afternoon light. I am sitting on the edge and considering the decade that has just passed away. I feel a twinge of anxiety about how I might have to think of myself differently in the future, but as the days go by, I realize that if anything is going to be different, it’s everything but me. Until 2006: The tradition and non-tradition, the Spring nights, the caffeinated dreaming, the snow outside dark windows, it’s all going to leave you standing somewhere else so obviously tabla rasa. I didn’t choose where I was born and I didn’t choose the places after that, but this street and that hill and this whole mess-I chose it all. What a horrible mistake! I’ll have to do something quick to take the responsibility off myself. 2007: I finish packing and Mikey goes off to get a few burritos. The car is pulled over on Hyde with the hazard lights on. It’s a five hour drive and I’m barely going to make it to the leasing office to pick up my keys before they close for the weekend. Moving into this new place is horrible. It’s surrounded by trees and when the wind passes through them it sounds completely empty, like it just blew in from nowhere, like it was just born there. This must be the end of the world. Mikey and I stand on a bridge together and watch the night traffic underneath. In the morning, I watch his car disappear over the crest of a hill. Completely alone, I take the first of a year’s fruitless walks. For the next year every time I cross the bridge, I see the ghost of that moment, like a llorona weeping desperately at the sputtering traffic. Each night is frozen. If not for my classes, days would go by and I wouldn’t even talk. I ride my bike for hours past old farm houses falling in on themselves and I think how they are going to send me some place so much farther than this. It’s going to be a dusty steppe of buzkashi and kumis and I am going to have to stay there for more than two years. When I leave this Klondike I am going to another. It is isolation and impending isolation. 2008: Before you even arrive you know how long it’s going to be before you leave. Every moment feels like work. Work learning a new language, work preparing teaching materials, work just trying to communicate basic feeling to the strangers with whom you live. When the work is done I’ve got enough to read to last for hours. From May to October, the feeling of adventure is grounding. The walks become 8-hour hikes but as the weather gets cooler it becomes more difficult to get out of bed. On my days off, I think about staying in bed all day. After a few hours the room is almost bright with cold and loneliness and I go out to the grey and windy foreign country outside my door where everyone stares. 2009: At night, I sit in the window with my headphones on, smoking cigarettes and looking at the stars. Sometimes, I will go out and take a late-night walk with a stray dog who disappears after a few months. I look for him well into October, but he never comes back. 2010: There is a bird outside my window that whistles a single note at night, a low, sibilant note, like the hoot of an owl very gently whistled. Every note counts off a day that I was here, but I never stay awake to hear them all. The nights are too fine and I am too content. It seems like I had to wait years to hear this bird. This single note joyously full of flour and fire, dogs barking after faraway sheep, dusty parquet floors and dusty coffee grounds. 2011: I return to that lonely town with more than two years’ worth of stories to tell, stories of which the telling has been dedicated to one person. The present becomes underscored with the past and the two are impossibly tangled. 2012: We leave together. I keep telling stories for the moments that I cannot fully make her understand and the sky of a new hemisphere scrolls over the crowded streets, inexplicably changed. Now: The sorrowful notes and the happy ones are all blown together in the wind. On this quiet day, I listen to them one after another and wonder how far they will travel. How many more empty rooms will take me in and how many more moments will spin out of them? How much more present can succumb to past?

Empty Airports

Almaty: Empty. Kiev, Budapest: no one there. Milan: no one. Lisbon: get your luggage and skate toward down town. Madrid to Dublin: empty airports all. When you’re not expecting anyone airports are strangely quiet. There are so many people waiting behind customs, at least five of them in the back standing on their tiptoes, hushed and expectant. They look at me, look right into my eyes. No. No you’re not him. I shoulder past them all. I already know there is nobody to find in the crowd. The people do not want to lose their viewing areas and are reluctant to move a few feet to let me pass. I and the bag: a salesman, a vagabond, a gypsy. I haven’t come from anywhere and I haven’t arrived anywhere. There is a seamless connection between Kazakhstan and Ireland, because I haven’t stopped once to say: “Here I am.” And no one has yet asked me “Where were you?” I haven’t been home in years. Not to America at all. Not anywhere near it. The closest I got was Sarajevo and Sarajevo is still pretty far from America. When I was there I remember thinking to myself, this is the closest I’ve been to America the whole time. I looked west from Sarajevo but there was a mountain in my way. No Europe, no Atlantic to see. They say there’s a reorientation period, that you have cultural shock. They call it reverse culture shock which is stupid. After being gone this long, culture seems like a very relative thing. It’s ridiculous to say that it’s reversed because you once understood the culture now shocking you. It didn’t happen to me. Not in America, at least not in that disorienting way. Every last volt of culture shock passed through me in Budapest. I wasn’t sure, I thought maybe there’d still be some communist vestiges there, you know? A Pushkin street or an old oxidized sign in Cyrillic somewhere. Nothing. This was a city well within the borders of its own democracy and now well within the borders of Europe. In the Budapest airport, the tourist map I’d found had a restaurant directory by category and there was a vegetarian category. I couldn’t believe it, after years of piroshky, a complete meal. I couldn’t decide if I should eat or find a place to stay first. When I considered how nice it would be able to do anything without the dacha I had on my back, I decided to find a hostel first. Near downtown, I found a backpacker place that looked like some youthful adventure club. All the places I’d stayed over the past couple of years, I’d usually been the only one there. If there were others it was hard to tell. It seemed to be expected that you would never meet. Here it was clearly encouraged. They even had outings planned and pencils dangled from string, making small hatch marks on the paper when the front door opened or closed. “Would you like to sign up for the walking tour?” “No thanks.” The guy at the desk spoke English like it was normal for him to do. I was used to using echolalia and word salad techniques to make myself understood and it was almost difficult not to interrupt him and ask him to speak slower. When I taught English, a lot of the kids would explain to me that they had already studied German. They explained this patiently in their own language. ‘Sorry, buddy, I’ve already started my third language [The native language and Russian being their first and second]. Can’t start over again and learn English this time. Wish I could, but German’s already in there taking up all the room.’ Then I would turn to them with paternal ‘sprechen sie deutsch?’ The poor kids, they would immediately respond with ‘da’ because they were almost hard-wired that way. I would repeat it ‘da?’ Realizing their mistake they would scramble to correct it, but often found that they did not know what the German word for ‘yes’ was. I would restate my offer to teach them English and at this point, most of the kids accepted it. ‘Parlez-vous francais’ worked the same way. I wondered if this Hungarian guy had ever tried to get out of his English lessons, or did he realize at a young age that he lived in a pluralistic world and not many other people on it spoke Hungarian. I went into my room to lie down. It was a dorm room but there wasn’t anyone else staying in there. At night, that seemed the oddest thing to me. Here was a room crammed full of bunk beds and I was the only person sleeping on one. In the morning, I went for a walk and ate at the first place I saw offering vegetarian food. While I ate, I looked up at the menu. There is was. ‘Vegetarian.’ It actually said it on the menu. I stared in disbelief for a while longer before accepting it and wandering back outside. It was just a word after all, but one that signified such a drastic cultural shift. All day, I walked slowly. There was too much to process: the fast food restaurants, the diverse population, how expensive the metro was, men wearing tennis shoes in public and the obvious rock and roll influence that never made it past the Urals. In the evening, I went back to the hostel and on the way I passed a park. It was filled with young people. Not kids, but people in their twenties that were not married or acting like adults. They drank beer, smoked and laughed out loud. They rode bikes and put their beer bottles in the recycling when they were done with them. I wanted to go up to each one of them and introduce myself. But I remembered that this is a disheartening correlation between places where there are a lot of young people around and places where no one has the slightest interest in you. I was part of the crowd, but I wasn’t. I smoked cigarettes and grinned like a moron at everyone, waiting for someone to come over and ask me what I was doing there. After the first day things got less disorienting. I went to another hostel, known for being a party hostel and became completely confused by the hedonism of the residents. I’m not going to say that I had been forced to live like a saint while I was away, but I hadn’t seen anything like this in a while. The Scottish girl who checked me in had been drunk at 4 in the afternoon and when I had come back in from a long walk around 2 am she was sitting at the bar drinking and laughing. She told me she couldn’t leave. I could see why. By the time I left Budapest, it almost all seemed normal again: different kinds of restaurants, places that took credit cards, police that generally left non-criminals alone. What took me an unexpectedly long time to get over was all the tennis shoes. I took a late-night bus to Italy expecting to be woken up with a flashlight in my face at the Slovenian border and a hard-faced border patrol demanding my dokumenti. Nothing. I didn’t wake up until we were already in Italy. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t even heard anything on the border. Did we even stop? I continued to travel around Europe like I was visiting some kind of limbo. The starkness of the soviet landscape was nowhere to be found, but neither was there much evidence of American enterprise. There were no clover leaf exchanges, rows of fast food restaurants, large new cars or entire places shrink-wrapped in advertising. I expected to still be surprised by some of these things when I got off the last flight and walked down a once-familiar street. I had gotten as far as Dublin, and my last night there felt like my last night in Philadelphia years before. I killed the day walking around a park and taking pictures of a typically green and overcast Ireland. I tried to walk down to the Martello towers where Joyce used to live, but I got sidetracked and ended up going back downtown. I took pictures of spider webs on wet iron gates and bridges in the distance, not really knowing what else to do. Over two years before in Philadelphia, I was looking at all the pennies shining on Ben Franklin’s grave. Why not old keys? Did these people all confuse Franklin with Lincoln? I walked by the liberty bell late at night, the same self-sufficient copper glow. America: paved in copper. It wouldn’t have drawn the immigrants as well as the gold rumor, but it had more truth. I walked into south Philadelphia, thinking I would go see some live music. I didn’t expect to have the chance again for a long time. I watched a band with keyboards and trumpets for a while, one of those bands that has more members than they seem to know what to do with. I couldn’t get into it and I went back to my room. It was late. I started at my bed and then went back downstairs. I didn’t have a phone anymore. I’d already cancelled the plan. I asked at the front desk where I might find a place to make a call. “Like a pay phone!? I honestly have no idea.” ‘Interesting how people say honestly to mean ‘really’. Gives it a little more ponderousness, I guess.’ I thought to myself after someone else told me maybe all those 7-11s still had payphones in their parking lots. I went to four before I found one that would work. Luckily, Philadelphia, at least the part I was staying in, has a lot of 7-11s. Because I was still in America, I felt like I hadn’t yet made a decision. I could still rescind. I didn’t have to go, but deep down I knew I did. Everyone knew. The call went like this. “Hello.” “Hi.” “I don’t know about this.” “Sure you do.” “Did I make the wrong decision?” “Well, you’ll never know will you?” “…” “I think it’s the only decision you could have made. It’s your decision.” “I don’t think I can do this.” “You’re being melodramatic.” “Yes, but it’s 3 AM, and I’m standing in a 7-11 parking lot making my last American phone call. I’ve barely got anything left to hold on to.” “…” “…” “You don’t know what’s out there yet.” There were a few more encouraging words before I hung up. The diner, the coffee, the drugstore, the bus ride, a giant cemetery outside of queen’s with a smokestack towering over it and a 20 dollar phone card that I bought in La Guardia and never used again and then I left. At first, I thought about it all a lot. On long walks, in the morning in my room, in the afternoon reading outside my host family’s house I would imagine myself returning tearfully to it all. I held on to these fantasies for nearly a year. It was as if I’d left only so I’d be able to return and say I had left and then never have to do it again. Even when it was clear that I would have no right to my former life when I returned, I still held on. It’s hard to stand by while the world changes around you. Usually, you have the comfort of knowing you can do something about it. From where I was, I watched my world change as if I were reading about it in a newspaper. Babies were born, friends moved or died. There was no closure to get from anything. I just watched it happen and hoped that every so often someone would remember me, just remember me; I couldn’t expect them to call. I stood on a bridge that spanned the Liffey, the night before leaving Ireland, unable to really remember all of that. I knew it to be there, but I couldn’t remember it. I tried telling myself, but the words seem to fall away without revealing their meaning. The only thing I wanted was a welcome home. I wanted the stony-faced customs agent at the airport to look up, assume a mild expression and say ‘welcome home,’ like saying thank you. I didn’t want anyone at the airport. I didn’t know how emotional it was going to be, but I wanted the customs guard to welcome me back. I wanted someone impartial to acknowledge what I had done. It was after the first year that I began to accept my situation. I stopped living like I was in exile and started to accept where I was for what it was. I stopped feeling like I was killing time, just waiting to go home. I understood that I lived in this place. I wasn’t visiting it. I had learned a lot of the language and had internalized parts of the culture. After a year, I had finally begun to understand that one day I was going to miss this place too. Once I understood that, there was no more struggle. I had a life here and until I went back, it was completely here. There was no one in the Dublin airport and no one in the Chicago airport when I came back. I really had used up all my culture shock in Budapest. I found I had none left. Once I cleared customs, a taxi driver stopped me by the currency exchange windows. I was trying to exchange a few remaining euro coins. He asked me if I needed a ride. I told him no, but stood there talking to him. He took me through the subjects, weather, sports, his job, evidently looking to kill some time. I talked a little but mostly listened to him. I didn’t have anywhere to go, not right away anyway. Before he walked away, I gave him the euro coins. I don’t know why. I thought maybe he could find some place to exchange them, or give them to his European fares as change. I went outside. I went out into Philadelphia, looking for a pay phone; I went out into San Francisco to go to the library; I went out into the Michigan summers I loved when I was a kid; I went out into an early autumn day outside Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I went out into everything I had ever known and realized that it was no longer the whole object it had once been. I put my bag down, kneeled and put my forehead on the sidewalk and I could already feel it, in the midst of my return, I had already begun to feel what was missing, but I could also feel the sense of returning to something. “Ahhh, here I am,” I mumbled into the sidewalk. Here I am.