by Lisa McKay
Mike, Papua New Guinea
Sent with this letter was another, more personal one to me alone.
“It rained for almost 36 hours straight, so when we left the village yesterday the small trickling creek at the bottom of the ravine had been transformed into a muddy torrent,” Mike began. “We had to wade through waist-high brown water to get out of the village. But I am back from the bush now, and thank God for hot showers and razors and beer. Aaahhh.”
He was enjoying local Thai food and a cold beer, he wrote. He’d also just enjoyed a couple of days off work to do some world-class scuba diving and “caving, climbing across boulders, swimming down a canyon, jumping off rocks, and all sorts of little boy adventures.”
As we had signed off three weeks earlier, I had told him that when we were both back on terra firma I would want to know, in detail, about three highs and three lows of his time away. That’s what filled the rest of this second letter – several thousand words on brilliant, sunset-lighted highs and some searing lows.
He finished with a bit of teasing and a few questions.
“I read the taxi driver essay you sent out,” Mike wrote. “I laughed, although I’m actually quite jealous because I’ve never been able to manage to get a proposition from an African man. So if/when I leave the field and move back to the ‘normal’ world, does that mean that I’ll still receive multiple offers to marry the daughter of whatever village I happen to visit? And speaking of normal, is it normal for those of us at this 30s stage of life to be constantly pondering whether we’re better off spreading our wings and pursuing our dreams of careers with adventure and excitement and purpose or whether we’re better off going ‘home’ (wherever that is) and doing something ‘normal’ (whatever that is) and having stable friendships and singing kumbaya at night?
“Your writings are funny. And vulnerable. I know you said that you read essays like that so many times before you send them that they don’t seem so vulnerable, but you do really bare yourself. I like it. It’s genuine. Naked. But why do you choose to write essays and post them online for all the digitally connected world to peruse?”
Lisa, USA
“I really enjoyed reading your white skin essay,” I began my own letter back to him later that night, cushioned against the cold by the fluffy white comforters adorning the hotel bed, my laptop on my lap. “But regardless of whether we blend in on the outside we’ll never be internally anonymous again, you know. We’ve both passed that point of no return where we could ever fit into one ‘place’ completely again – either here or there. I’m not sad about that, except very occasionally when I’m having a really bad day and being entirely unreasonable. But it does regularly make things less than comfortable on a non-abstract basis. That constant restiveness can seem more like a curse or a goad than a blessing a lot of the time. Where does that restiveness come from?
“I think it comes from having seen a lot. Knowing that the world is my oyster at this stage and that choices (well, more than one, or two, or ten) are mine for the making about what I want to do and where I want to be. And an internal and unwinnable war between my need for intensity/novelty/challenge and my deep longing for routine/comfort/a normal.
“As for chiefs’ daughters, this is something that I can speak with authority on. You will still receive multiple offers to marry chiefs’ daughters when you visit villages after leaving the field – probably even more of them since your stock will have risen, as you are no longer crazy enough to actually be living in their country but are living in the land of plenty, where everyone else wants to live.
“And why do I write essays and put them online? The real reason why I wrote my very first essay? Sad to say it wasn’t uncontrollable artistic urges or existential angst desperate for outlet or anything similarly noble-sounding. Really, when it came right down to it, my primary motivation for writing my first essay was to catch someone’s attention. Yes, translate that to: to impress a guy.”
I stopped typing.
Mike’s questions were pointing me toward my past. Toward murky territory I hadn’t revisited for more than a year. Toward one story I hadn’t written about and posted on the www for all the digitally connected world to peruse.
“You know Ryan Schmidt?” I had carefully asked Mike in one of our earliest emails after we discovered all our mutual acquaintances. “I tracked Ryan down very similarly to the way you just tracked me down – through an essay of his that a friend of a friend forwarded to me.”
Just how much more of this tale was I willing to share with a distant, familiar stranger?
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
Chasing Silver Dollars
Los Angeles, USA
A complete answer to Mike’s question about why I write essays would have started the story more than three years earlier. Shortly after I moved to L.A., a friend forwarded me an essay she had stumbled across and enjoyed, an essay written by a Canadian named Ryan who was living in Afghanistan.
“I turned thirty in Afghanistan,” Ryan’s essay began. “It was my second birthday here. Last year I was hit with a weird flu three days before and the fever finally broke as I entered the last year of my twenties. My friend, Halim, came into my room to my weak groans and cheerily offered me a bowl of rice and beans. He told me again that no doubt I had malaria. ‘Today check blood?’ he asked hopefully, just like every other day. Here everything is malaria. If you have a toothache they suspect malaria.”
It was a short essay, barely a thousand words, but it inspired the first truly electric flicker of interest I’d felt since the heartbreak of Notre Dame. After I finished reading the piece, I forwarded it on to my parents with a brief and blithe “Read this. It’s amazing. I’m going to track him down and make him fall in love with me.”
But Ryan turned out to be harder to track down than I’d expected. I didn’t have a last name or an email address. I had to trace the trail back through my friend to her brother, who also lived in Afghanistan, to a friend of Ryan’s in Canada who sent out Ryan’s essays and compiled any replies into one document for him, a system prompted by internet constraints in the remote province where Ryan was based.
Ryan’s friend cheerfully agreed to add me to the distribution list, so I settled in to wait for the next installment. When it came, the essay, titled A Portable Life, cut to my core.
“I crave Adventure,” Ryan wrote. “Sometimes I flip through my passport just to feel the 48 pages of possibilities. But I’m also completely obsessed with the idea of Home.”
It’s really something to travel the world, to bump over roads in Russian jeeps, to see the villages, the citadels, the minarets, the mosques, but it’s not the same without the memory of Vancouver back home. It’s beautiful to fly in over Vancouver on a summer evening and see the Lion’s Gate lit up like a drawbridge on a fairy castle, but it’s only if I’ve been away on the dusty roads that I get that feeling of my heart collapsing in relief like a knight at the end of a long battle. As exciting as adventures are, there’s too little of home in any of them. And even though there’s no place like home, there’s not much adventure there.
The fact is, I feel a bit restless no matter where I am. The more world I see the more it delights me, terrifies me, astounds me, and the more I become convinced that it will never be the right world for me. Maybe somewhere in me is a distant memory of a world from my childhood or even before that, from the time I was a twinkle in Abraham’s sky, from the moment the voice spoke into the darkness and light rose like a daisy.
I’m not ungrateful; I love it here, maybe even more for all the longing. But there is neither home nor adventure enough for me in this world. What there is is enough of each to set me off questing for a place where home is really Home and adventure is real
ly Adventure – enough to satisfy the paradoxical longings of my soul.
It might not even be a place or a thing that I want. There’s a part in one of Frederick Buechner’s novels that I love. A man has a dream that he finds a silver dollar with a name on it. He says,
“It wasn’t any of the other names I’ve been called by various people at various times in my life, and yet it was my name. It was a name so secret that I wouldn’t tell it even if I remembered it, and I don’t remember it. But if anybody were ever to show up and call me by it I’d recognize it in a second, and the chances are that if the person who called me by it gave me the signal, I’d follow him to the ends of the earth.”
I wonder if that’s just it. Suppose what I keep calling home and adventure could do with a bigger name, say, “God.” Suppose when God says, “Come on, let’s go home,” or, “Follow me on this adventure” – suppose it’s all the same thing, simply because God is there.
What if with God there is enough adventure at home and enough home in the adventure?
I don’t just need a better world, I need a better self; I need a real name. The backpacks and the down jacket and the computer I’ve selected so carefully as the building blocks of my portable life are a poor substitute at best. But one day I believe that Someone will come and flip me my silver dollar and call my name. Then I’ll drop these three bags in the twinkling of an eye and discover the real world at last.
I sat there breathless and stunned for a long time after finishing Ryan’s essay. Then I had only one real question.
How was I going to connect with this mysterious man who wrestled with questions of home and adventure the way I did, who had named my struggles and who seemed a lot more hopeful than I was at that point that there may somewhere, somehow, someday be reconciliation of those contradictory longings for adventure and for home?
This was the question I pondered during the next two weeks while I packed up my own portable life and hopped on a plane for the first of what would be many trips to Kenya for work.
It was a tough assignment, and to top it all off I came down with a terrible case of what I finally figured out was food poisoning. By the time I arrived back in L.A., I’d lost eight pounds, hadn’t eaten much more than yogurt and apple juice in a week, and I had my answer. Ryan’s raw, lyrical honesty had shivered through me on some deep level – as if he’d struck a large bronze bell in my soul. Perhaps my own honesty would evoke a similar resonance.
So that is when I sat down and wrote my first essay, all about that first trip to Kenya, and sent it out into the universe and to Ryan.
*
To be honest, I was rather unreasonably confident when I sent out this essay that it would evoke some response from Ryan. So I was more than a little surprised and disappointed when the days, then weeks, passed with no reply.
But then I got distracted.
The same week I sent out the essay about Kenya, I received an email from Colorado. From someone who was not on my mailing list. From someone whom I had been matched with five months earlier when (bored and lonely right after my move to L.A.) I’d been dabbling in online dating.
Jason lived in Colorado and worked for a publishing company. When we were first matched up online I had thought he sounded promising, but before we ever got beyond a couple of emails he forthrightly let me know that he’d decided to pursue another match who also lived in Denver.
Then, after months of silence, I heard from him again.
The woman in Denver hadn’t worked out, he said. He’d been thinking about me and wondering how I was. Would I like to chat sometime?
“Sure,” I thought. “Why not? What did I have to lose?”
Soon Jason and I were talking on the phone every day.
My initial instincts had been right: there was promise here. He was warm, sweet, and transparent. He asked a lot of great questions. He paid close attention to the answers. And four weeks after we started talking long distance we were practically dating.
We made plans for him to come and visit me in California in the beginning of September.
And then Ryan wrote to me.
He’d just finished a month-long assignment and was headed back to Canada. He’d been catching up on email at Heathrow Airport. He’d read my essay.
“I don’t know you,” he said, “but you’re up my alley. If you ever find yourself in Vancouver, sing Australian drinking songs on a corner until someone flips you two bits from pity, then call me.”
Then he gave me his phone number.
It is at this point that I started to get very, very confused.
*
Before long I found myself emailing Ryan many mornings and talking to Jason for hours on the phone every night. I still hadn’t met either one of these guys in person – I hadn’t even talked to Ryan or seen a photo of him – so I couldn’t exactly figure out why I was starting to feel like the worst sort of cheater.
But I was. And it was catapulting me back in time a dozen years. To the tainted era of my first kisses.
Technically, I guess, the kiss I’m thinking of wasn’t my first. But if you don’t count the quick peck executed in front of ten pairs of thrilled eyes during a game of truth or dare when I was in fifth grade, then my first kiss was with my first boyfriend, Dion.
I was sixteen and Dion was a kingly two years older. I was in Zimbabwe at the time, attending an all-girls school. Dion was the head boy of our brother school. He attended my church and I’d watched him, interested and somewhat awed, for months. Interested because he just seemed so … nice. Awed because, in the rigid and hierarchical British school system, the prefects were a remote and authoritative sort of royalty. And so, for the first three months of that year, whenever I was bored in church, I just watched.
I did a lot of watching.
But I didn’t do anything else until the date of the fourth-form ball began to loom.
I didn’t want to go to this dance. Spending my teenage years in Zimbabwe had been good for a great many things. I had, for example, learned how to sew baby clothes on a hand-crank sewing machine, ride a horse, use a log table instead of a calculator, make bread from scratch, and locate a cattle dip tank on a topographical map. What I had not done was learn how to dance.
(I had not learned any algebra either, but that wouldn’t come back to haunt me for another year, until after we’d relocated back to the U.S.)
So, dancing.
I’d already suffered through a couple of school dances in preceding years, and they’d been truly painful. At fourteen I was fascinated by the boys, these creatures we never saw during school hours who just appeared, so neatly groomed, at the chaperoned events in the school hall. I longed to be asked to dance and I was terrified of being asked to dance. More than once I panicked and made a quick escape to the bathroom when it looked as if a boy was approaching with intent. Then I would stay there, locked in a stall, until I figured the coast was clear.
I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go to my own fourth-form ball – a formal affair to which we were expected to bring an actual date – but my girlfriends begged and harassed and teased until we struck a deal.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask one guy. If he says yes, I’ll come. If he says no, I am off the hook.”
We all agreed that this was fair. So I went to church the next week, sucked in a deep breath, and went up and asked Dion.
He said yes.
I had such a glorious time that night. Not even the memory of the dress I’d had custom-made for the occasion (a bright pink satin frock overlaid with black organza and sporting a big bow on the back) can erase my smile when I stop to think about that first taste of the surety of being partnered and the exhilaration of finally relinquishing self-consciousness on the dance floor.
Dion did not kiss me that night. In fact, he didn’t kiss me until we were well into the six months we spent as an official couple after attending the ball. And even then I never really felt it counted because he never kissed me with tongue.<
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Dion was every bit as nice as I’d judged him to be, the sort of considerate and respectful first boyfriend parents dream about for their daughters. In addition to being the high school equivalent of the president, he ran track, he played in a local Christian rock band, he even wrote me a song. But to his credit and my great disappointment, what he never did was put his tongue in my mouth or his hands anywhere he would have been embarrassed for our pastor to see them.
When he broke up with me after six chaste months, he told me it was because he felt as if he were dating his sister.
“Perhaps,” I thought resentfully, “if you’d kissed me with tongue I might have felt a little less like your sister.”
*
When Dion broke up with me I was determined not to turn seventeen without having experienced real kissing. In retrospect, this is perhaps one of the clearest examples of my ability to resolutely and willfully pursue experience for experience’s sake – an ability that has not always served me well.
The person who served me up my first “real kiss” was the friend of a friend. We were out together, part of a larger group on a Friday night. We’d gone to the one movie theater in town and then back to someone’s house to watch another movie. We sat at the back of the room together, cuddled under a blanket. I had heard he had a girlfriend, but I kissed him anyway. If he wasn’t going to say anything about her, why should I?
He tasted like potato chips. His stubble hurt my chin. It was slimy and not all that much fun.
I never saw him again after that night.
I can’t remember his name now, but I can remember his girlfriend’s name. And I can remember how I felt even before I learned her identity and realized that she was a friendly acquaintance from school.