Low Tide

The taste in my mouth as I awoke in London the next day was a gourmand’s nightmare. In the foggy first few seconds of consciousness, I was left wondering where the heck my mouth had been.

Oh yeah!

The stitches tugging precariously at the heart of my tongue reminded me. My mouth had been dried by nervous tension, germ-coated at 10,000 meters in the air, heated by coffee and then ripped by plastic. Then it had been soaked in a trickle of semi-congealing blood for perhaps 10 hours, then flushed with adrenalin for two hours, then jabbed with a needle and numbed by anaesthetic. Then my tongue was run through several times with needle and thread.

And I was told not to brush my teeth!

The loose end of the stitches caught repeatedly on my upper molar when I moved my mouth that morning – just often enough to intimidate me into a day-long vow of silence. So, instead of talking, I set up my laptop and got to work, scheming.

I opened Facebook to a message – “Hi from mom.”

I hadn’t seen mom since 2007, when I had flown to her temporary home in Alberta for a week. I hadn’t Skyped with her for more than a month and she had no idea where I was.

Mom had just moved back to my native city of Nanaimo, British Columbia on the extreme west coast of Canada – about as far away from Romania as Facebook messages can travel.

“I sure miss you sweetie. Give me an update. I had a dream about you the other day and I thought that we really, really need a family reunion really soon.”

Really really?! I rolled my eyes. The last thing I could manage at the moment was a family reunion in British Columbia.

I wrote back, telling her of my situation and giving her my UK mobile number. I wrote that I couldn’t even think of a trip back to Nanaimo until 2011. My only priority was finding some way back into Romania.

I hated to let her down. But these were the facts.

Then, while I was still online, a knowledgeable friend back in Romania popped up on Yahoo messenger with a possible solution to my visa troubles …

Romanian embassies abroad, even though they uniformly maintain the smell of a bus-station waiting room, seem to be self-contained units. They operate under their own rules.

If the London embassy, as I half-expected, would simply tell me to live as a vagabond for six months and then go back to Romania when my deportation order expired, I could fly to another country and try my luck at a Romanian embassy there. If not in London, perhaps somewhere else they could overrule the ugly stamp in my passport. My friend suggested a country in southern Europe.

It was sensible advice, and he had inside knowledge. So I waited in London until Monday, exploring my temporary neighbourhood. An exotic melange of sizzling ginger, bubbling curries and deep-fried fish and chips reminded me that I could eat little more than soups. And plaques on nearby buildings commemorated, first, the al-Qaeda Tube bombings, and then, a one-time home of Charles Dickens. More depressing reminders – of past lives of both penny-pinching and violence.

Monday arrived. It was a holiday in London but, luckily, the Romanian embassy was open.

Or unluckily. The embassy official said, if I may paraphrase: “We can do nothing for you. Go live as a vagabond for six months and then go back to Romania.”

It was out of the question – work, my daughter, and a thousand other crucial matters were propelling me back to Romania with the urgency of a spawning salmon.

So I packed, took the Tube’s Piccadilly line to the airport, and flew to southern Europe for a second opinion. I took a taxi straight from the airport to the embassy where I was told … “We can do nothing for you. Go live as a vagabond …”

Yet another option was shattered. Roxana had managed to get me access to my cash in the meantime but, unfortunately, my bank account was not botomless.

So I faced the option of continuing to fly around Europe. I didn’t know if I could manage that, psychologically or financially. I suddenly needed a breather, a time and place to regroup, recover my senses.

I broke out my laptop again. Mom had apparently not yet read my Facebook message and still had no clue of my plight.

“Mom,” I wrote. “Disregard my last e-mail. I’ll be landing at the Nanaimo airport at 8:05 p.m., your time, on Thursday.”

Salmon, after all, don’t go to Romania. They go to British Columbia. They are propelled home. And I hadn’t been to Nanaimo for 11 years.

Mom’s reply this time was quicker – and she replied to my Facebook Wall.

“I didn’t know you were out of Romania! Of course sweetie. You can stay as long as you like! We will arrange everything for you. Call me collect. We will arrange the basement.”

Uggh. Mom had just told all of my 150 Facebook friends that, at 41 years of age, after surviving several wars, advancing steadily at a glamorous career and fulfilling most of my childhood fantasies, I could still need to call home collect and live in mom’s basement. I deleted the message from my Wall.

I immediately regretted the deletion. What a beautiful basement it was!

My abused tongue, dried out yet again on a trans-Atlantic flight, was braced some 30 hours later by the taste of home and childhood – the Pacific Northwestern low tide that, inch by inch, exposes the oyster beds, dries up stranded crabs and uncovers clumps of kelp in a pungent stew of brine, iodine and rime.

Even if it comes from the ocean, low tide for me is the earthiest smell of all – more the smell of life than of decay.

As a child, it was the smell of adventure – hunting for pearls in finger-grating oyster shells, building log rafts with the dream of exploring far away places, beachcombing for remnants of Japanese fishing nets, treading mossy paths padded by sailors shipwrecked a century ago in the coastal Pacific rainforest.

It was mine again in a hearty lung-full. A reminder to embrace opportunity.

(This is Part 2 of a Six-Part Series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)