Back from North America

I’ve started packing this evening. Early Friday morning I will leave San Francisco, having sat my final two exams for the term Thursday. The journey won’t be overly long, only about 150 miles. It’s a trip I usually make twice a month. Living in the second most crowded city in the United States can become a bit overwhelming at times, especially for someone who had spent the previous 25 years of his life in either small towns or the countryside. For twelve days I will be there. “There” is Amador County, where my father largely grew up and where my mother chose to make her life. It’s one of those places that’s difficult to duly appreciate until one sees the lesser aspects of more exciting places. For that matter, the lesser aspects of excitement. That there is always something “happening” isn’t always for the best.

On the 28th I will leave again, this time to fly to Germany via Switzerland and Luxembourg. One of my friends who will join me in Amador County after he sits his last exam will see me off at the aeroport before he packs his belongings and prepares to move to Minneapolis to finish his degree in finance. It will be the last time that we see each other for a while.

It seems odd going to Germany, a strangely unfamiliar flight. It’s been some time since I’ve gone back. Life has taken me elsewhere, across the Pacific to Polynesia and the Far East. Maybe it sounds strange, but “meeting up with an old friend” doesn’t mean chatting away happily in Trier anymore, nor anywhere else in Germany for that matter. Time’s battle of attrition ensured that that would fade away like so many other memories. No, “meeting up with an old friend” is most likely to mean walking under Sakura trees at Ueno Park in Tokyo, having a coffee in Hilo, or walking past the Dongdaemun in Seoul the evening before flying to Kaohsiung. Going on holiday with a good friend is more likely to mean travelling to Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur than it is Berlin or Paris.

Perhaps this is the lot of the migrant, the one removed so far from the land of his birth both geographically and culturally that sleeping in his old bedroom is strangely unfamiliar. The streets and buildings remain largely the same, the path somehow familiar, but alien. The neighbours are mostly gone, just a few old-timers still hanging on by the skin of their teeth.

John Betjeman once wrote a brilliant poem, “Back from Australia”. Actually, he wrote many. Does my bias, that he is my favourite poet, show? The feeling, the description of returning “home” and feeling relieved that the long trip to a strange land is past, the unnatural, inhumane gaol term that is the aeroplane flight is mercifully past. But where will that strange land for me be, Germany or the United States?

“Back from Australia”.

Cocooned in Time, at this inhuman height,
The packaged food tastes neutrally of clay,
We never seem to catch the running day
But travel on in everlasting night
With all the chic accoutrements of flight:
Lotions and essences in neat array
And yet another plastic cup and tray.
"Thank you so much. Oh no, I'm quite all right".

At home in Cornwall hurrying autumn skies
Leave Bray Hill barren, Stepper jutting bare,
And hold the moon above the sea-wet sand.
The very last of late September dies
In frosty silence and the hills declare
How vast the sky is, looked at from the land.

Author: Christopher-Dorset

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