by Lisa McKay
So Erin went to my writing website and looked for a link to the Headington Institute. What she discovered first, however, were my essays. Several essays later, Erin found that she wasn’t as interested in hooking Mike up with the institute newsletter as she was in hooking him up with me.
Yes, Erin acknowledged as she thought it through, the fact that I lived in Los Angeles could prove to be a minor drawback. But she also knew by now that I had grown up a country-hopping nomad. My upbringing, she reasoned, had prepared me well for the challenging romantic equation she was visualizing.
As for Mike, as she told him months later, “I was so overcome with giddiness at striking gold via one glossy sheet of press mess that I had to brag to the people in the nearest three cubicles that I had just found the perfect woman for my friend in Papua New Guinea.”
So Erin wrote to Mike that day and strongly encouraged him to look at my website.
Mike rolled his eyes and wrote back to Erin. He lived in a small town in Papua New Guinea with unreliable dial-up internet, he pointed out. He wasn’t about to go browsing the website of a stranger living in L.A., a stranger Erin wasn’t even sure was single.
Undeterred, Erin downloaded all the essays on my website, compiled them into a sixty-page document and emailed it to Mike.
Mike groaned but, other entertainment options being in short supply, started reading.
After he was finished, dial-up connection notwithstanding, Mike visited my website. As the photo on my homepage slowly scrolled open, Mike realized that he’d seen my face the week before, on the Facebook page of a friend he’d met six years earlier in Melbourne.
Mike decided to drop me a line.
Los Angeles, USA
Mike’s first letter – a casual note mentioning our mutual friend, Alison, and asking to be added to my email list – hit my inbox in the middle of a less-than-placid day at work.
I didn’t have much time to pause and wonder how my essays had found their way to a remote corner of Papua New Guinea, but I did snatch a couple of minutes two days later to send a brief reply and, on a whim, a friend request on Facebook. Mike’s thumbnail picture on the site was so small I couldn’t really make out what he looked like, but when I’d searched his name, Facebook had proudly informed me that Alison wasn’t our only mutual friend.
Mike was also friends with Alison’s husband, Paul, and several of Paul’s siblings. I’d gotten to know Paul’s family as a teenager when both of our families had lived in Zimbabwe. Paul was my first real crush. At fifteen, I was convinced I wanted to marry the brooding, mysterious seventeen-year-old.
But Paul wasn’t even the weirdest thread in our tangle of indirect connections.
Mike was also linked to another friend of mine, Ryan. Ryan was living in Afghanistan and churning out raw and compelling essays of his own when, completely infatuated with his writing, I first tracked him down via email and pestered him until he gave in and agreed to be my friend.
But back to Mike.
Five days after Mike sent his first note.
Three days after I answered it.
The letter – a letter that showed me that he’d read my essays very carefully indeed – arrived.
Madang, Papua New Guinea
Sunday, October 21
From: Mike Wolfe
To: Lisa McKay
Subject: A breath of fresh air
Hi Lisa,
It’s a partly cloudy afternoon. As I sit at my dining room table, Ella Fitzgerald on iTunes is competing with the upbeat Pacific rhythms coming from across the street. Our neighbor across the fence is having some sort of public meeting in his backyard, so every now and then fifteen men clap their hands enthusiastically. We used to think the regular Saturday meetings were political in nature, but the elections have come and gone and the men continue to gather. I’m a bit curious. But getting the answer would require me not only to walk all the way across the lawn, but also make the effort to introduce myself properly to the man of the house instead of my normal practice of smiling and nodding at him in the mornings when I jog by. Right now I just can’t be bothered to make that additional effort.
So a dear friend in Atlanta, Erin, compiled all your online essays into one compact document so that I didn’t have to labor with my dial-up connection to read them.
I really enjoyed journeying with you through your essays. I contemplated. I laughed. I commiserated. I felt moved. I felt challenged. I felt comforted and consoled in the way that one feels consoled when one reads that he is not the only being on the planet who experiences being thirty-one and talented, and purpose-driven, and questioning whether the road less traveled is worth the opportunity cost of the greener grass on the other side of the fence. And whether it’s really worth it, searching for goodness and hope in the midst of some shitty shit in this world. And feeling crap about it all some of the time and feeling really joyful sometimes, too. And being tossed around by vacillating feelings, and perplexing questions, and unrealized hopes, and longing for things to be right (whatever that means). Also, longing for a nice big bowl of ice cream. And a bottle of Barossa Shiraz shared with good friends.
Reading your essays was a breath of fresh air to my spirit. Thanks.
It’s kinda funny that after journeying with you in your essays, I feel like I know you. Which, of course, my non-psychology training tells me is most likely me projecting my needs and wants onto another person. Which is just oh sooooo helpful in life’s various flavors of relationships.
Because allow me to be straightforward here and say that I’d like to know more about Lisa McKay. I feel like I know some of your personality, but ?? You have gorgeous eyes and a great smile. I even quite like your blue passport, although I don’t need it. I already have my own blue American passport that allows me to traipse all over the world. But I do love Australia.
Of course, I have some trepidation as I write – “apprehension” or “misgivings” would work as well – about whether it’s even worth it to expose oneself to the potential ordeals that a relationship between LA and PNG would entail. My one data point of experience in this long-distance relationship matter culminated in making a phone call to Indonesia from Sri Lanka and having the woman I thought I may just marry break up with me because she realized (correctly it turns out) that it just wasn’t going to work for us. Hence apprehensions and misgivings.
Now this is all the more crazy because Tuesday I’m heading out to spend the next two months in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, and most of my time will be spent in remote villages without email and electricity (and perhaps even without Coca-Cola, but I doubt it).
But hey, why shy away from challenges?
So give it a think and decide what you’d like to do. And drop me a line when you like. No worries. Really. Regardless of what you say, I’m not going to turn into a Lisa stalker.
Acknowledging the imbalance of information between us, I feel that I ought to (“ought” in the non-guilt sense) share some Mike info. I used to be quite a regular mass emailer once upon a traumatic first humanitarian posting in Central Asia. Alas, my writing skills have atrophied over the years. I have but one mass email from PNG that I’ve attached. And they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I don’t buy it, but I’ve also attached a link to the thirty photos from thirty countries that I displayed at my 30th birthday party last year.
Well, Ella has long stopped playing, the meeting across the fence has ended and I’ve rambled for quite a few paragraphs as I am prone to do. But I meant every word.
Drop me a line when you like. No rush. And keep on writing. You’re quite good at it.
Cheers from PNG,
Mike
Los Angeles, USA
I didn’t read this letter carefully until after I’d driven home from Erica’s on Sunday afternoon. I will share most things with Erica and Leah without hesitating, so I don’t know exactly what it was that made me flip my laptop closed on that sunny fall morning in Erica’s kitchen and save Mike’s lett
er for later.
Why, right from the start, did this letter seem different?
It wasn’t just that Mike said he liked my essays. Other people had said they liked my essays, although few could relate the way he clearly could.
Perhaps that was it, or part of it. The photographs he’d sent made it clear that Mike had traveled the world during the last decade. I suspected that anyone who could survive postings in Tajikistan, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and PNG in short order was either seriously crazy or seriously interesting. And given that the letter he’d attached about bush life in PNG was relaxed, confident, and seasoned with joie de vivre, I would have put money on seriously interesting.
He was cute, too. He was in only one of the thirty photos he’d put together for his birthday celebration, but it was a beauty. He was kneeling, surrounded by children in Rwanda, looking at them instead of the camera. His eyes were green, his smile wide.
Who has the power to stay untouched by that?
I certainly didn’t, but I was nervous, too. I hadn’t dated anyone in three years, not since my last long-distance relationship had derailed in painful slow motion.
Dating? Wait just one minute! Am I out of my mind??
Mike and I had exchanged a grand total of three emails, I reminded myself. There was an 18-hour time difference and about seven thousand miles between us. We had jobs we loved anchoring us on different sides of the world, he had spotty internet access, and we’d be starting from the ground up with these constraints already in place. If I’d ever heard of an against-the-odds long-distance scenario, this was it. Why was I even thinking the word dating?
I knew it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but I was. There was no getting around it. The next night I settled down to see if I could corral these thoughts into a coherent reply.
Monday, October 22
From: Lisa McKay
To: Mike Wolfe
Subject: Re: A breath of fresh air
Hi Mike,
It’s a mellow evening. I’m on the couch. The pumpkin’s oiled, salted, and in the oven. The door’s open to let the tail end of the eighty-degree day into the house, and I remembered that there was a whole case of red wine buried in the storage closet in the garage after I thought we were out and the pasta sauce was going to have to be wine-less. Happy days.
It seems, however, that I have not drunk enough of that wine yet to stem the sudden shyness I am feeling. Yes, I know, it seems silly. I write these essays and put them online. I am choosing to live out part of my life in an incredibly public forum. But to find out that people are reading them and resonating on some primal level … well. That is profoundly exciting and validating and comforting in that inner essential loneliness, but it’s also scary. Because I know it’s an edited version of me that goes into those essays. All the boring parts, all those days and moments when I’m flat or exhausted or grumpy or uninspiring or selfish … they get cut out. I know I’m not as interesting or witty as those essays make me appear when read in a vacuum (not to mention not as attractive as the press photos for the book might imply).
So your letter yesterday morning both startled me and made me smile. I’m flattered and intrigued but, like you it seems, wary. My points of reference with regard to long-distance relationships have not ended in happily ever after either. One attempt that started with a premature and reckless intensity ended in a tangled mess, with his heart broken and me discovering I had serious conflict-avoidance tendencies in romantic relationships. A second attempt taught me the very important lesson that the living, breathing someone will inevitably turn out to be very different from the idealized someone who springs to life in my head when I read their writing.
So, all that said, I don’t know much about you except that you have good taste in friends, have chosen to live and work in a field that has captured my passions, are game to ride in trucks on dirt roads and sleep in huts, are probably largely fueled by those twin forces of adventure and purpose-seeking, have an eye for photography, and have a smile that suggests warm and friendly.
I would like to get to know you better. So if you’re game, let’s email. As friends. Or as people who think they might want to become friends. With no expectations of anything more until we at least cross paths in person, if we ever get there.
And as for inaccessibility over the next two months, I leave on Sunday for a month on the road myself. I’m off to Kenya, then Ghana, then back to Baltimore. My life is officially scheduled to be insane until the 28th of November. Then I have about a month in L.A. before I’m off to Australia for a holiday. So, yeah, I get the whole out-of-touch thing. But when you are near electricity and the www and fueled up on Coca-Cola, I look forward to hearing how your trip is going and what started you on this path in the first place. How did you end up in PNG from Pennsylvania? Where’s home?
And now I must get off the couch, check on that pumpkin, and put the rest of the red wine to good use in the pasta sauce.
Cheers,
Lisa
During the next week, before Mike and I got on planes and headed for parts beyond the reach of the worldwide web, we exchanged thirteen thousand words. And in those rapid-fire exchanges I learned a great deal about Mike.
He’d grown up on a small family farm in Pennsylvania, almost as isolated from pop culture then as he was now. The farm and his parents were responsible for instilling in him a German-Puritanesque work ethic that still haunted him. Although, he said, he felt he’d made great strides in his work-life balance strategies in recent times. He used to arrive at work between 5:30 and 6 a.m., and now he aimed for 7, you see.
Bent on embracing solidarity with the poor, Mike had followed a passion for justice into aid work by taking a volunteer posting in Tajikistan, and he promised that story later – a story of “light, darkness, hope, angst and wonder all intertwined.” His current posting in Papua New Guinea was raising the quintessential humanitarian-worker dilemma:
“My heart screams, ‘I hate this complicated messy type of work and I’m sick and tired of being so damn lonely and why can’t I just go get a job somewhere normal (whatever that is)?’ but my brain says, ‘It’s good, stick with it, it’s worthwhile.’ The shorter version is that my emotions vacillate wildly. My emotions are real. But the way I feel at any given moment isn’t the exhaustive truth about the world. And so, God, please give me wisdom, grace, endurance, patience, hope, and joy. Please, God.”
He liked red wine and dark chocolate.
Planes still filled him with the excited sense that he was headed for adventure.
His letters made me laugh.
I learned some things about myself that week, too. I already knew that I was a sucker for funny, chatty, emails written by people irresistibly attracted to challenge. But I learned that Mike’s frank expression of interest and the boundary lines I’d drawn in the sand freed me to be relaxed and openly, casually honest in ways I’d never been with a man before. And I learned that I wasn’t sure I had a good answer for one of the first questions I was asking Mike.
Where is home?
I was still thinking this issue through when I got on the plane to Kenya.
Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu
Airports and Bookstores
“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.”
(Charles Dickens)
Nairobi, Kenya
I landed in Kenya twenty-eight hours after I left California.
It was 9 p.m.
It was dark.
It’s less than completely desirable to land in Nairobi in the dark. There’s only one road linking the airport with the city. It’s not unheard of for vehicles to be ambushed on that road, especially
at night, and not everyone offering to be a taxi driver at that airport can be counted on to have the purest of intentions regarding your valuables or your person.
After years of traveling the world solo, I might be rather too casual about the specifics of my itinerary sometimes, but I do know enough never to treat travel by car in Nairobi lightly. I’d arranged with my hotel to have a trusted driver at the airport to greet me, and the hotel manager had given me specific instructions regarding the driver’s identification. He’d be carrying a sign with the hotel logo, the manager wrote, and wearing a green badge with his name stamped on it in white.
I saw the sign easily enough as I exited customs, and a wide smile, but no badge.
“Ah!” he said. “You are the Lisa!”
Where, I inquired with a smile of my own as we shook hands, was his badge?
In the car, Willy the driver confessed conspiratorially. The others would tease him, you see, if he wore it. There would be no end to the laughing and the calling out of his name by the hundreds of other men thronging the arrivals area.
“Hey, Willy!” he demonstrated for me. “Hey, my brother, Willy! Yes my friend, will you be taking me in your taxi, Willy?”
I sighed. If the word willy meant the same thing in Kenya that it did in Australia, I was sure that was not all that the mocking throngs did with his name.
“Okay,” I said as I followed him out into the night. “But I can see the badge at the car, yes?”
Yes.
There was no trouble on the drive into the city from the airport; the only unexpected sight was a herd of zebras. They flashed past, stripy and gorgeous in the headlights. It was so dry here right now, Willy explained, that they were jumping the game-park fences and wandering into the city outskirts, desperate for water.
“Are things quiet here?” I asked as we left the thirsty zebras behind and continued on into the darkness.
Willy knew what I was asking about, the post-election violence that had surprised Kenya and the rest of the world nine months before and left more than a thousand dead.