We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  Small things made us realize that the trip was effectively over. I checked the weather forecast for Hanover because we would be back soon enough that it was likely to be accurate. We desisted from asking Sophie about VLACS; her deadline was days away. CJ had one final meltdown in our Tbilisi hotel room. He had given me a rough draft of his research paper, and I offered constructive feedback. CJ felt I was overcritical. He began blubbering, “You’re treating me like your Dartmouth students, even though I’m only an eighth-grader!”

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “I will try to take your limited ability into account.”

  “You can’t say that!” Katrina yelled. “If you were a middle school teacher, you would be fired on your first day!”

  “I hope so,” I replied. “Or I would have to quit on the second day.”

  The flight home was long. We transferred in Doha, where I managed to take a two-hour nap on the floor using my camera bag as a pillow. The floor of the insect-free, air-conditioned Doha airport was more comfortable than many of the places we had slept. We landed in Boston and caught the Dartmouth Coach up to Hanover—the same bus we had taken the other direction nine months earlier. The day was gray and rainy, so we did not have a beautiful ride for that final leg. Mostly we slept. When the bus pulled to a stop in front of the Hanover Inn, Sophie’s and Katrina’s friends were waiting to meet them. I got off first so I could snap a picture of Sophie coming down the steps of the bus, utterly delighted to see her friends. The kids disappeared almost immediately, but not before I corralled them for one final family photo.

  We were home.

  * Myers-Briggs has four personality dimensions: Introvert or Extrovert; Intuitive or Sensing; Thinking or Feeling; and Perceiving or Judging. This creates sixteen personality types.

  Chapter 18

  The Things We Learned

  But let me be clear: I was in no mood to chuck my worldly possessions upon our return. I really like fountain pens and cashmere sweaters. And I prefer to shave.

  FOR MANY MONTHS AFTER WE GOT BACK , I could not read the travel section of the Sunday New York Times. I had no interest in exotic places. Instead, I relished wearing regular clothes, sleeping in the same bed every night, and having hot water with good pressure every time I stepped into the shower. Reentry was so easy that it felt almost bizarre. One day I was sleeping on the floor in the Doha airport, the next I was back shopping in our local grocery store. We returned to the same home. I went back to the same office. We picked up the dogs and brought them back to the house. They were excited for forty-five seconds and then went to sleep in their favorite spots. We felt fortunate to return to lives that were comfortable in every sense.

  Nine months felt like a long time for us, but it was a relatively quick stretch for our friends and acquaintances. We became good at succinctly answering the question: “How was it?” (This book is my long answer to that question.) We had stepped away from our lives for a while and then we stepped right back in. CJ finished the final draft of his research paper before our bus arrived in Hanover. It turned out to be really good. He came away with a more nuanced understanding of deforestation, particularly the economic causes, which was what I had been hoping for months earlier.

  Miraculously, Sophie finished all of her VLACS classes on time, more or less. She finagled a one-day extension from the “final deadline” so she could spend her first day back at Hanover High School with her friends. Leah and I appreciated the irony: The child who fought us on her schoolwork all the way around the world pleaded for an extension so she could go to school. We felt like bankers who had arranged repayment of a hundred-million-dollar loan: even if it came in a day late, we were happy to have it. The state of New Hampshire allowed both Sophie and CJ to advance to the next grade—and I hope I will never have to homeschool another child.*

  One of our cars would not start. I jumped the battery and put air in the tires; after that it ran fine. Everything else was pretty much as we’d left it. I began preparing for summer classes. Leah started a training program to become a school principal. The kids went to work at summer jobs. Sophie put in long hours at a local pizza restaurant, which I’m convinced made her more serious about school.

  During the trip, I often spent hours downloading photos and posting them on our blog. Once we were home, I had thousands of pictures from the trip and no time to organize any of them. My plan was to curate the photos and make a photo book for each member of Team Wheelan. That photo book still has not happened. I did buy an electronic picture frame into which I downloaded all the photos. I put the frame on the kitchen counter. It has a motion sensor, so whenever one of us steps into the kitchen, the frame turns itself on and begins displaying photos from the trip in random order.

  Life went back to normal, as if we had never left. Yet the five of us were different people for having made the trip, both individually and as a family. What did we learn? Having had some time to reflect on that, here are some answers to that question:

  The world is still an interesting place. One fear we had when we set out was that even distant places would feel homogenized—indistinguishable cities with the same chain restaurants and everyone speaking English. Would Ho Chi Minh City feel like La Paz? Would Tasmania be just like the United States, only with an Australian accent? No, thankfully. South America feels radically different from Southeast Asia, which feels different from East Africa. Within those regions, each country has its own feel and personality. So does each city and each neighborhood. The world is alive with fascinating and quirky cultures. Yes, there are emerging similarities around the world. You will see people walking around checking their phones wherever you are, including remote villages without running water. Yes, the Internet has connected us to one another in ways that cannot be undone. The anonymity that we had on our first global trip is gone forever. Still, there was no stop along the way that did not have its own unique sense of place. I am now guardedly optimistic that that trend can continue indefinitely—that a richer Ho Chi Minh City will always be distinct from a richer La Paz, just as New England feels different from Texas or Northern California.

  We pulled it off. We made it around the world: nine months, six continents, three teenagers, and one flesh-eating parasite. For years, the trip was a vague family aspiration. Then it was a goal, and finally it became a plan. Along the way, lots of people dismissed the idea as crazy talk, either explicitly or with some patronizing acknowledgment: “Well, now, that would be interesting.” People don’t usually take off with their family and go around the world, and that pitted us against some powerful social forces. I worry that some of the most talented people I know, including the students I teach, have been suffocated by conformity—an American culture in which we “live to work” and mindlessly accumulate. This adventure was, in part, an effort to push back on that. I’ve tried to make the case that the barriers to doing something like this are lower than one might think. A big reason many people don’t do it is because many people don’t do it.

  Leah is a great teammate. At our wedding in 1992, I gave a toast in which I declared that my future bride, among her many other wonderful attributes, would be a great teammate. I was right. Marriage is about picking a person you want at your side to help navigate whatever might come along. Traveling on a low budget to bizarre places is a good example of that. Would I have preferred that she allowed me a cup of coffee on days when I had bumped up against my food budget? Yes and no. Yes, I wanted that coffee, but no, if we had blown the budget early in our travel, the whole adventure would have unraveled. The trip worked because Leah and I shared a vision of what we wanted to do, and then we shared responsibilities along the way. If I had tried to do this trip alone, I would still be wandering somewhere in Africa, lost and broke.

  The teenage brain is a bizarre thing. Plenty of research supports this claim. Don’t get me wrong: Katrina, Sophie, and CJ were great travelers (as were Tess and Isabel and Kati). They shared our sense of adventure and managed the roughest of circum
stances with aplomb. We asked a lot of them and they stepped up. But it is also true that being with teenagers 24/7 gives one a special appreciation of their unique worldview. One of my most common refrains in trying moments was, “You can’t make this shit up.”

  A particular incident near the end of the trip stands out. Leah, Katrina, and I had spent the morning in the Museum of Soviet Occupation in Georgia. After hours in the museum, Katrina tried to persuade us to visit a particular Orthodox church. Leah and I had no interest; we declined, which caused Katrina to declare that we were “unintellectual and uninteresting.” That is a curious charge to make against two people who have just taken their family around the world. At any rate, Leah and I did not quibble over the substance of the charge. Rather, we decided it was time for Katrina to have some time to herself. As we walked away, Katrina yelled, “Wait, how do I get back to the apartment?” We just kept walking.

  For all those moments—some of which I have documented in the book and many of which I have not—I will be eternally grateful that we had this uninterrupted time with our teenage kids. It was parenting on steroids: the good, the bad, and everything in between. One thing about raising children—the research is clear on this—is that there is no substitute for spending time with them. Even when they tell you they don’t want you around, the truth is that they do. This trip was the ultimate family dinner. When Sophie locked herself in her room in Peru, and when CJ curled up in a ball and said he wanted to be a taco, we worked through it.

  And when the mood generators all fired in the right direction at the same time, as they did in many places, it was pure bliss. I want to thank each of my children for having the stamina and curiosity and resilience and sense of adventure and good humor necessary to do what we did.

  Life goes on without you. We came back to a place that was—the presidential election excepted—pretty much the same as we had left it. I mentioned earlier that our dogs wagged their tails excitedly for less than a minute and then went to sleep in their usual corners. Our friends did the human equivalent. The great news is that we appreciated the lives we were returning to: our friends, our jobs, our community. One way to take stock of your day-to-day existence is to step away from it for a while. By living out of a single backpack for nine months, we learned what we could do without. There was a simple elegance to getting dressed every morning when I had a choice between two pairs of travel pants and three shirts. (Since most of those clothes were likely to be dirty at any given point, I have overstated the degree of choice involved.) But let me be clear: I was in no mood to chuck my worldly possessions upon our return. I really like fountain pens and cashmere sweaters. And I prefer to shave.

  The greatest luxury is time. We slept until we woke up refreshed. We read for long stretches at any time of the day. We wandered aimlessly or sat on a park bench for no particular reason. Our meals were not rushed. For most of the trip, if we missed a train or a bus or a plane, we took the next one. (The irony is that we had so much time on our hands that we typically arrived early.) I had accumulated a long list of books that I hoped to read on the trip; I made it through most of them. I will offer up one personal confession: I tried to finish Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page “uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human.” I gave up somewhere around Zanzibar.

  The world is significantly less poor than it was in 1988. If you are looking for good news in the world at the moment, this is it. I study public policy, so the trip was fieldwork in a way. There is no doubt that the poorest places in the world are significantly better off than they were when Leah and I traveled in the late 1980s. Some of this is apples and oranges; we were in China in 1989 but did not return on this trip. We went to Africa this time but not on the first trip. Still, there were some straight-up “then” and “now” comparisons in places like Calcutta, which feels remarkably less impoverished (though still like Calcutta).

  The data support what we observed. The number of people living in poverty around the world has fallen sharply in recent decades, both as a percentage of the global population and in absolute terms. One of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals was to cut the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world in half; that goal was achieved five years ahead of its 2015 deadline. The fraction of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has fallen from around forty percent in 1990 to below ten percent today.†

  Now the bad news: We saw evidence of serious environmental damage along the way, particularly air pollution in big cities and deforestation in less developed areas. We were not imagining this, either. The World Health Organization warned recently: “Global air pollution is worsening, and poor countries are being hit the hardest.”‡

  The past decade has also been one of the worst on record for deforestation.§ A specific moment from the trip stands out in this regard. Katrina and I were on a short trek in Laos. Deforestation had left scars on the hills in every direction—huge swaths in which all the tree cover had been cleared away. On the second day of our trek, we were walking along a narrow trail when we heard the pounding of an ax somewhere ahead of us. Seconds later, there was a cracking noise and a large tree fell across our path. As the tree hit the ground, two bats flew out of the canopy. There was something particularly depressing about that one tree and those two bats. Stalin supposedly said that when a million people die, it’s a statistic, but when one person dies, it’s a tragedy. What we saw on that path felt like the deforestation equivalent of Stalin’s tragedy.

  Nor did Leah and I imagine the changes we discerned on the Great Barrier Reef. In the thirty years between our two visits, the largest reef on earth has lost half its coral cover. Rising prosperity and increased environmental degradation are related, particularly in the developing world, as CJ learned in writing his research paper. That said, there are policies, in rich countries and poor countries alike, that would promote more sustainable kinds of growth. That is the subject for another book. Maybe CJ will write it someday.

  It was really fun. Okay, back to us. We had a great time. Not every moment, but most of the time. Many of the adventures we had been looking forward to—exploring the Amazon, visiting the Galapagos, going on safari—turned out to be worthy of that anticipation. But there were many more great moments that were entirely circumstantial: making chocolate; eating street food; happening upon a concert or an amusement park; eating fresh bread and cheese while walking the streets of Tbilisi.

  It was like a family vacation that worked out well. And it turns out that experiences, rather than things, are what make us happiest in the long run. This is a paradox, admittedly, because spending money on objects gives you things that last while experiences are ephemeral. But here is the weird thing: research has shown over and over again that experiences have the most positive long-term impact on our well-being.

  How could that be? Because experiences “become an ingrained part of our identity,” says Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich, who has synthesized a number of studies on this subject. Here is his explanation. First, experiences connect us to the people with whom we share them. Second, experiences make us into the people we are. And last, even bad experiences morph into positives over time. Gilovich writes, “Something that might have been stressful or scary in the past can become a funny story to tell at a party or be looked back on as an invaluable character-building experience.” Like getting lost on the metro in Medellín, or contracting a flesh-eating parasite in the Amazon. To be clear, the latter took longer to become a good story than the former.

  Carpe Diem: That means “seize the day,” for those who never saw Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. In planning our trip, we knew that family circumstances gave us a small window during which we could make the trip work. We did not anticipate, of course, that global events would later slam the window closed on all travel. Not long after we returned from our trip, Hong Kong was engulfed by protests. In Chile, too, protests broke out on a scale that disrupted the country. I
remember feeling fortunate that we had made it to those places when we did. And then covid-19 came on the scene—first in China and eventually the rest of the world. Before long, we could not leave our home, let alone the country.

  As with so many other things, we got lucky. But it’s also true that while the window was open, we went through it. Coronavirus will eventually recede, making travel safe again. International events will continue to affect the travel map. Some countries will become harder to visit, or less safe; others will become more accessible. One thing will never change: fortune favors those who get their passports and go.

  * Of course, when the coronavirus arrived, the entire world became more familiar with the joys of homeschooling. Our children were old enough by then that we no longer had to offer much guidance.

  † I will point out, perhaps gratuitously, that much of this success is due to globalization, particularly the integration of India and China into the global economy. Trade turns out to be one of the most powerful anti-poverty tools in our arsenal, so if you care about global poverty, globalization is a good thing.

  ‡ Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “WHO: Global Air Pollution Is Worsening, and Poor Countries Are Being Hit the Hardest,” Washington Post, May 12, 2016.

  § Brad Plumer, “Tropical Forests Suffered Near-Record Tree Losses in 2017,” New York Times, June 27, 2018.

  Epilogue

  Where Are They Now?