I thought it was pretty likely my plane out of JFK was going to crash, if only for the opportunity to disrupt the perfect performance that was Monday, the day I left the US. I packed until the very wee hours of the morning, accompanied in my low-voiced monologue (“this goes here, and oh! I can…oh yes, that will fit…hells yeah I packed that shit”) only by birdsong, which grew louder and louder as I myself grew increasingly desperate to zip my bags and be done with the thing. I finished at 4 am on the minute, but woke Monday (at 8 am) with a sense of accomplishment at knowing that almost everything I needed was sealed in two not-even-remotely-professional-looking bags (my new internal frame Osprey hiking backpack, and my large soccer duffle bag from the days of Shooting Stars), which were zippered securely shut, clad with soft, smushable items around their exterior walls and not even lumpy. There should be an award for packing that well.
I spent Monday morning jetting around 17 North in New Jersey, buying up last minute items that should never have been left for last minute, and wincing every time my Gold credit card – which I refer to simply as the “big card” for the size of the trouble I could get into for using it too much – was pulled through the payment machine. All in all I hit Home Depot (they sell flagging! And flags!), Kmart (just as horribly sketch-tastic as it used to be, but …I was desperate), and a few other smaller stores to pick up odds, ends, and incredibly-important-things-I-should-have-ordered-from-Forestry-Suppliers-WEEKSAGO. To keep from being too hard on myself or getting tired early I played 92.3 (KROC) as loudly as I could stand, making it through not one, not two, not three, but five iterations apiece of Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without U” and Pink’s “Sober” before I had to put on the classic rock station and lay off the teeny-bop. Playing KROC while driving in New Jersey always sends me straight back to the balmy summer nights of high school, when I would fly down routes 17 or 4 on my way to Jose, Cormac, and Pat, or Cristi and Tia, rocking out and singing along to whatever new middling rock band was dominating the airwaves at the moment. Those few years in New Jersey were the only ones in which I drove with regularity, as I have not owned a car since a short, nine month stint in senior year. So driving, for me, is mostly a set of very specific memories, rather than a daily part of my life.
But back to perfection. I set my goal to return to the house by noon for the inevitable re-packing and forgetting of various items, and returned by 11:45. This never happens. Like, not-in-this-lifetime, never. But by noon I was back at my computer, finishing up some emails, googling some of the stuff I had just bought to make sure I wanted to keep it before I opened it ::cough:: expensive-Garmin-GPS-device-and-fancy-schmancy-high-end compass-I-don’t-know-how-to-use ::cough::. I had lunch with my parents, actually speaking to them instead of sitting at our dining room table working, or doing my best to avoid our screamingly loud TV while I finish my work (do people ever not get attacked by snakes and vampires on TV? Someone is always dying! And they have to die so loudly! And so often!), which is what I’ve done since arriving home Friday. But we had a quasi-leisurely lunch, and I returned to doing work before Jose came for some coffee and chatter, and to help me pound the last few items into my bag by sheer force and innovation (hello, duct tape!). It was lovely, actually, and by 2:24pm (with 2:30pm my target departure time), the car was loaded, the photos were taken, and I and my copious amount of gear and plain old shit (plus both 5lb forest ecology textbooks! Oh yes, oh yes I did bring them!) were on their way to JFK, and by extension, Nepal.
I arrived at the airport right on time (was aiming for 4pm, arrived a few minutes before), moved effortlessly through checking my bags and security despite the fact that my hiking backpack is three kilos of last-minute-flagging over the weight limit, and found myself sitting idly at the gate almost an hour before my flight, feeling, well…nothing.
Although it seems like a bad thing not to feel anything after something I’d worked so hard for, it was in fact my reward. I’d traveled to Nepal over spring break so I could sit here now and feel nothing – no fear, no hesitation, no worry over where I would sleep next, whether my hosts would find me likable, whether the food would make me sick. Instead I rested complacently, blankly staring out the window at the gorgeous early summer day, content in the fact that I was about to board a plane to spend three months abroad, doing many things I’ve never done before (and undoubtedly failing at some of them), living amongst what was before March a completely foreign culture, eating a metric ton of rice (I may actually calculate how much I end up eating by summer’s end…and I bet it’s more than one metric ton), and speaking in (flawed) Nepali. The contentment and the nothingness, then, were in their own way, beautiful.
I do want to say here that I did not achieve all that I should have, or finalize everything I ought to have, before I left. My methodology is wobbly and I keep changing my mind about how to go about it, so have done a poor job of putting it on paper (which would enable others to help me strengthen it…but…) I didn’t maintain good contact with the Nepali faculty between my trips to Nepal, so spent the last two weeks rapid-fire emailing kindly Nepali faculty members with limited access to email or power, to confirm that upon my arrival in Pokhara logistics would be arranged as we had discussed. In perhaps my stupidest, most ass-backwards oversight of all, I procrastinated, and avoided, buying the appropriate already-budgeted-for gear from Forestry Suppliers that I need for my summer in enough time for them to mail them to me, and so was left scrambling for substitutes at the very last minute. My execution of this process, despite hours of rehearsing it and thinking through my actions and to-do list, has been incredibly flawed, and without good reason. I’ve never procrastinated so much in my life, and have done so of late when I should have been working on some really important things that I know matter to me. So one of the things I hope to have come out in the wash this summer is that procrastination, and ascertaining why I do it.
But in the meantime, there I sat, waiting for my flight, and ready to go. I felt ready, and that was really the point. I had given myself a lot to think about on the long flight through Belgium, Delhi, and finally to Nepal, but in that moment, with the things I needed packed, my bags checked, and perhaps most importantly my head in the right place, I was willing to accept that maybe right now this is just the way I do the things I do.
-M-
