My reacquaintance with my basic senses continued.
After almost two decades of traveling the globe as a foreign correspondent, a serious episode of travel shock was still to come.
It wasn’t in Afghanistan, where I regularly ate off the floor and went weeks at a time without actually seeing a woman’s face. It wasn’t in communist rebel territory in the Philippines. Nor in the wars of West Africa, where vicious warriors dressed in Marilyn Monroe wigs and wore frilly skirts to confuse bullets with their dual identity. Nor in eastern Europe, where the legacy of communism had turned right to left and upper class to lower class in a Kafka-esque negative image.
It was my return to my hometown of Nanaimo that sparked the unsettling feeling of surreality. Part of it was the slightly startled reaction I got when greeting women with two-cheek kisses, the total recall of words such as “pop” and “runners” and the sentences ended with “eh?” Partly the small-town look of a place that once for me was the big city.
My accent had been polluted by the decades abroad and all my clothes were foreign. People regularly asked me what country I was from.
“I am from right damn here!”
But mostly, the shock came from the stillness.
I settled quickly into mom’s basement – after all I had nothing but my hand luggage and an outsized collection of posters from the Where’s Wally series (which is branded as where’s Waldo in North America) that I bought in London for my daughter. I had carried the awkward posters through several airports on two continents. Where’s Wally indeed.
Mom’s is the most beautiful, most serene basement I have ever inhabited. A jungle of roses, dahlia, nicotania, and heliotrope (which look like Marge Simpson’s hairdo) perfumed the view from the basement bedroom window. The wind chimes tinkled charmingly and a lazy trickle of water sent off cool splashes from the garden fountain, mesmerizing me to nap on the hammock in the middle of the day.
The stillness even soothed a deer and her two fawns, which would come to mom’s backyard to graze almost daily.
It was all a warm, affectionate tickle to my senses.
So, me being me, I fought against it. I should be working, seeking the next best thing, tackling my visa issues, finishing my book. I rebelled against the unsettling calm. Tranquility, it seemed to me, was the enemy of ambition.
Thumbing my nose to serenity, I shed the pure-food diet I had been following to lose a kilo a month for the past six months. The tastes of childhood and my university years overwhelmed me. Root beer, nachos and salsa, maple-smoked bacon, peanut butter on toast, suicide chicken wings, ketchup-flavored potato chips, pancakes and syrup, beer-can chicken, buttertarts, Reese’s Pieces, bagels and cream cheese, and chilled cans of Okanagan Spring Pale Ale bludgeoned my senses in a sustained chemical wallop that lasted precisely a month – from June 3 to July 3.
The Wallop
Relaxation is something I never really learned to do.
Many of my friends call me Mr. “Gottagetgoin.’”
That means “I gotta get going” in Adam speak. More precisely, it says this: “OK. This place is fine but there’s gotta be something better somewhere and I should go find it really fast. I know missing out on something.”
In the process, over all those years and decades, my very fear of missing out was causing me to miss out.
I now wince at the thought of all the sensory experiences I missed, or failed to fully absorb – the smells and sounds of remote villages in the Andes, the Mediterranean and the sensation of calm joy on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Or even, oddly, the bone-jarring thump and whump of incoming artillery fire in Kosovo. Like the stitching up of my tongue in a London hospital, not all sensations have to be pleasant to be fully experienced.
Suddenly, though, I had been forced to resettle. I was legally and financially forced to stay in one place. One beautiful, tranquil place.
After fighting for a month, the process of change started to beat me. It was July 3.
As a writer, I keep a journal. Typically, the entries have contained factoids, intellectual questions to myself, notes for further study, book and article ideas and memorable phrases. The notes are generally jotted down in a file named after the date – my thoughts on, say, Feb. 18 are under the heading “Feb. 18.” My notes die that same day, like linkless wiki stubs.
That’s how I can now see the change started July 3. In fact, I never closed the July 3 file and am updating it to this day. It already surpasses 26,000 words. There has been no July 4.
On July 3, I sat in my mom’s backyard, cradling my laptop in my lap as usual. Roxana would arrive for a two-week visit later that day. She was already in the airplane, somewhere over northern Canada. The tone of my notes later surprised me:
“I’m watching the clouds move above me – different layers moving at different speeds in different directions, propelled by the same winds that are probably buffeting Roxana right now. The taste of maple-smoked salmon is lingering somewhere at the back of my mouth. The front of my mouth is drier, with the tannin of my cup of Tetley’s tea. I keep trying to rub all those sensations together but can’t. They are isolated, for now.
“It is still chilly this morning and I can feel the rough, scaly heels of my feet drawing the cold up from the patio tiles. The moon is still up for a bit – now looking pale and washed before it goes back to Bucharest to visit my daughter. “I will send the moon to you soon,” I promised her at 3 a.m. via video chat. She had asked why all was dark in Nanaimo and light in Bucharest.
“Yesterday’s sunburn stings and tingles and still smells a little bit of the apple cider vinegar my mom told me to rub on it – mingling with the velvety smell of the heliotrope. That’s a smell that coats all of my tongue.”
Looking back, the notes are much better than a snapshot, or a video recording.
And they continued in the same tone over coming weeks.
“The sun and lack of rain has dried up the grass so it clutches and pinches at the soles of my bare feet. It’s drawing me back to earth.”
“I dipped into the Pacific today and the shallow water seemed multi-layered, alternating in levels of cold and warm. One current chilled my chest even as another warmed my shins. My toes scraped barnacles. I dipped under and emerged salty and crusted but tingling with the bracing cleanliness.”
Then, eventually, my notes started to show me a new direction.
“I popped a part of a sliced minibella mushroom in my mouth at 6 a.m. while looking through the fridge for blueberries and strawberries. It was the first thing in my mouth of the day, even before toothpaste. It was an explosion to a clean palate! Scientists have always classified tastes into bitter, sour, salty and sweet but this was none of them .. Recently, scientists have added umami as a fifth taste… Is this the elusive umami? I will research and design a day-long menu of umami tastes for myself. I want to wallow in umami for a day. I have to know more. But the refrigerated chill of the mushroom slice seemed to explode in my mouth in a different direction. Why? I will also record the first taste of every single day from now on.”
And later …
“When I kissed Roxana today, I could smell the sun on her skin and I inhaled deeply. The scent was both sexy and soothing. Google tells me the smell stems from a chemical reaction triggered by the enlargement of melanin when exposed to ultraviolet light. But that explanation is unsatisfactory. What is that smell?”
I was developing a fascination for my basic senses – the birth-day gift we are all given but fail to fully unwrap.
But visa issues – layer upon layer and lawyer upon lawyer, were ganging up with the nagging depletion of my bank account to shock me out of my reverie.
I still faced another several months of banishment. Or I could fly back to Europe and try to simply plead and beg my way across the border, hoping, as my daughter did, that the border guards would display some humanity this time. If it backfired, though, they could extend my exile to a year.
It was time for a drastic decision.
And the major revelation was still to come.
The dear neighbors
(This is Part 3 of a Six-Part Series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
{ Comments are closed! }