Return

How do you return to a place? After seven months in India, Nepal, and Africa, and having most recently spent a week in Paris with its animated cafes, its restaurants, its all-hours activity, its famous features, its legendary art and culture, how could I return here? I stood in the carpark outside the shopping mall in drab Palmerston North with its grey and windy streets and distracted people─many of whom seem focused on shopping for stuff that means nothing at all to me, a slight desperation in their rummaging through clothes shops filled with cheap Chinese imitations of haute couture—and felt almost overwhelmed by bleak despondency, a sense of loss, a kind of uncertainty not bright with possibility but dull with the knowledge that a return to the places of the last seven months, if not impossible, was so unlikely it's not even worth thinking about. Even while travelling I'd begun to wonder whether the travelling was a mistake, not because it wasn't wonderful, but because it was; because, perhaps, I'd be unable ever to settle again; because instead of satisfying my restlessness it might aggravate it.

Now, everything seems strangely unreal, as if all that's happened over the last eight months has been too strange, and mostly too wonderful, to believe. A bit like a dream, really.

A few days after returning I picked up one of the books stacked in heaps on the floor─Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. I opened it─at random, I thought─and read:

Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

The synchronicity of it struck me─and in Paris my friend was becoming interested in Jung and had a copy of Victor Mansfield's Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making, which I began reading. She'd met Vic and had a copy of his paper, which I read and found intriguing. Well written, too. He's a physicist, but with a much broader worldview than the reductionist stereotype, and I suppose I felt a kind of affinity, having myself come from a science background and becoming, as he did, dissatisfied with the constrained way of understanding imposed by that kind of science but grateful for the training and the rigour it encourages. Even there in Paris I had that strange and wonderful feeling that “things” were beginning to connect; that the threads of my life had begun to weave together into something not entirely random─that something might begin to form. Then I returned to the Pohangina Valley and picked up Rebecca Solnit's book and read that passage and was delighted not only by the synchronicity of reading that passage, but by the synchronicity of reading that passage after having read about synchronicity.

...

The moment in the carpark proved transitory. Occasionally I've glimpsed it again, usually while reading my notebooks, but a month after returning, I've yet to encounter the pervasive dislocation and culture shock felt by many travellers returning from long journeys, particularly those who have spent time in cultures wildly different from their own. This seems not to surprise my friends, who usually flatter me with a comment like, “You're so good at adapting to where you are.”

Maybe. I'm less sure than they are that adapting comes naturally to me. Rebecca Solnit's distinction between those confident in their own selves and those who reinvent themselves is the sort of dichotomy that should annoy me, but it doesn't, not because it's not artificial—it is—but because it contains enough truth to make me wonder where on that psychological cline I lie. Unusually, I'm fairly sure I know where that might be.

But, getting back to the shock of the return, I think my escape from from this feeling—that is, from the feeling which I happen not to be feeling—arises from my awareness that it does happen and can strike hard; forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes. Or, perhaps I've been so preoccupied that the reality of where I was and what I did hasn't really sunk in. That explanation seems to tally better with the peculiar feeling that it was all unreal; that the person who travelled to those places and did those things was, in fact, someone else. And it's true I've been preoccupied: with catching up with friends; with finding and setting up what was stored; with several weeks of solid contract editing; with looking after one of the Eastbourne houses (a delight, especially because Ralph and I got to share time together); and with all those small tasks you face after a long absence.

Moreover, if there's a sense of loss, it might in fact be more to do with how the Pohangina valley's beginning to change. One evening a few weeks after returning, I walked out onto the verandah after dark and was astonished and a little dismayed to see a line of lights along the opposite side of the valley. House lights. The character of the valley has begun to change; it has begun to relinquish that relaxed, rough-and-ready feel, that kind of easy dishevelment and low-level untidiness so often characteristic of necessary pragmatism and the long histories of rooted lives, of generations whom the land has adapted even as those lives have adapted the land. Now the valley in places seems too neat, too orderly, too manicured, as if new wealth has begun to modify and control, to shape the land according to a particular, human, vision. All with the best of intentions, I'm sure—but the valley is no longer a refuge from the suburbs. It is becoming a suburb.

At about 4:30 p.m. the sun breaks through, dipping below the watery greywash of cloud, into the irregular gap between cloud and western hills. I turn to look downvalley, at fractal winter trees caught by the light, so alight they seem almost illuminated from within. On the far side of the valley, beyond the road, gullies form a chiaroscuro brought into relief by that low, glancing light. Form and light; detail confined to the boundary between shadow and sunlight. A heron perches high in one of the leafless poplars on a bank of the swollen, turbid TeAwaoteatua Stream. The bird stands, hunched, head drawn down into its shoulders; a pale grey body on thin legs; white face tapering to a beak long and thin and sinister. The pale bird stands there on a thin branch, high in the stark tree; stands there like an omen, wrapped around by the sound of rushing water.

I wonder what I burned — my house, or the bridges behind me? Where, now, is my own ground?

---

Notes:
Here, as promised, Zhoen, are a few more critters.
I'll return to my travels in later posts, interspersed with, ... well, ... whatever I feel like writing about. Perhaps it's something to do with rebuilding.
Photos (click to enlarge them):
1. Boehm's bee eater, Merops boehmi, at Chinguni hills, Liwonde National Park, Malawi.
2. Bushbuck, Tragelaphus scriptus, Nyika Plateau, Malawi.
3. This was among the wrack near the Pencarrow lighthouse, along the Wellington coast South of Eastbourne.
4. Saddle-billed storks, Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis, Kruger National Park, South Africa.
5. Burchell's zebra, Equus quagga burchellii, Nyika Plateau, Malawi.

Photos and words © 2007 Pete McGregor