The Mayo Clinic

It is a great blessing to have never before visited the Mayo Clinic, but it's still a miraculous place. The tallest building in Rochester looks out on the infinite greenery that is the Minnesota of my earliest memories, the land of the 10,000 lakes. It is a well-oiled machine inside. Through the lobby and up the elevator and down the halls, every room has its purpose, this one for lung cancer, this one for another cancer, the best of the best treating life's most difficult maladies.

I drove six hours down to Mayo with my grandmother, and our procedure was short and simple. They numbed her side and pulled out a plastic tube and covered the wound and we were quickly on our way out of town holding on tight to good news. But that was our day. Earlier I sat outside with my mother in the waiting room, the lobby, and the restaurants that surround Mayo, and we watched the many families who had all come to Rochester hoping that someone will be healed of their problem. Mayo Clinic, and all hospitals really, are little heavens and hells each day for all sorts of people. 

Whenever someone asks what period I would most like to live, I always say right now because I see myself in some other time dying young of a common illness that no longer exists. Any examination of medical history is a disastrous look at the world of trial and error, a million mistakes and a lot of dead people, divine mandates, peculiar ointments, and over-ambitious surgeries, all giving us textbooks full of information we have today. Still sometimes this is not enough. I sat in Mayo Clinic thinking, as I often do, about things that make everyone the same; it is the fact we all get sick and die that makes Arabic people and Chinese people and Guatemalan people and American people equal. You cannot pay your way to perfect health. Sickness shows no regard for race, or economic class, and a CEO or a slum dweller can both be humbled by a man in a white coat.

I watched our doctors at Mayo carefully: their manner, their movements, their words. They do not perform miracles, but execute carefully crafted techniques -- a compilation of all those who came before and all their hours of tireless study. It is a remarkable profession really, one that takes on incomprehensible levels of responsibility, but they probably change more lives a day than any other job in the world. In another life, perhaps one to come, that will be a position for me, but I feel tired for them sometimes, and think they are real gifts to humankind. 

The World at Once

Outside my window I can see,

A love in Argentina,

Sunning herself on some quiet beach I cannot pronounce.

I can also see a bus in Andalusia,

Passing olive trees and abandoned things,

Going somewhere that could be anywhere.

Outside my window I can see,

That one night, island, volcano, and a meteor shower,

And holding her was better than any movie.

Then that day wandering stone temples in the jungle,

Wrapped up in the roots of our past,

Another civilization come and gone with the ages.

When it is night and I'm alone at my window so far away,

I think it both the blessing and the curse of our time,

To be everywhere in the world at once.

The (Very) Long Road Home

It is still difficult to cross half the world. Take high speed rail and jumbo jets and massive cruise liners and rental cars and throw it all out the window. It is still a difficult thing to do. It is, by comparison, not much a thing when examining the lives of Magellan, Marco Polo, or Darwin. These men and thousands of other lesser-known but equally ambitious explorers, navigators, and cartographers once stood on dry land looking at a port and the sea, having no real idea what was next other than some sort of life or death. In spite of this, they still decided to board a rickety wooden boat and raise the sails and set off to the rhythm of the stars. While things are now more precise and certain, there is still plenty to think about, and I am always reminded that every generation has its people content to remain on shore, and those eager to embrace the storm.

Leaving the Middle East for me was no exception to this rule, and that decision itself should illustrate which of the two people I am. Tens of thousands of miles have been covered since New Years Eve, going here and there and back again, and as any traveler will tell you there is always a potent silence at the end of it all, arriving back where you started, few things having changed, wondering what exactly changed in you and how that is measured. There are so many stories compressed in to this time, most of which I have probably already forgotten, but I have remembered enough to know I am not really surprised by anything anymore. Go from third world poverty in Central America to the surrounding essence of Arabic millionaires at the Souq Waqif, and then one morning wake up in the flat farmlands of good old North Dakota, and then culture shock becomes an obscure concept that other people probably go through but me not so much anymore. 

So my long road home eventually arrived back in the United States, this time in a customs line at JFK International Airport, where an officer, noting my address, discovered I was a Dallas Cowboys "fan." Having been out of the country for many seasons now, I know very little of what has been happening on Sunday afternoons for any team. There was a time in my life where I would spend entire weekends watching football and drinking beer with shitty pizza -- the life of an average university student at a school like mine. Given the present-day circumstances, and the things I have seen, it has all lost a bit of importance. I saw a great photo recently that showed hoards of fans covered in face paint screaming out of their minds at a game and the caption of the photo said, "can you imagine if people cared this much about things that actually mattered?" The benefits of good travel are many, but perhaps this is one simple realization you come to: the quantity of money and emotion and the sheer number of wasted hours that go into those events across the country multiplied by the number of fans, all of this combined could surely find a cure for cancer or build a 21st century car that runs on a bottle of water. My officer asked what he thought our chances were this year, and I responded, "not very good since 1995." He laughed and told me not to say that while handing me my passport. With a fresh admittance stamp, I stumbled forward onto American dirt.

Things felt good and fresh in New York City, coming in late at night on the railroad and watching a full moon shine bright orange on the horizon. I spent a few days wandering the blocks around Union Square, reading quietly in the park, drinking good hot coffees when it rained, thinking about what it would be like to live there and into which neighborhood I would fit best, and then thinking a little about Manhattan Island before Henry Hudson first sailed into New York Harbor in 1609. It was a different place then, before it was gridded and paved and leveled out into the present-day madness. There were streams and marshes and elk. Now it is one of those few places in the world that feel alive at all hours, like it is the center of human everything, a place all the world wants to come at some point in their lives, a place The New Yorker was writing about for all those years before I actually arrived, and for all those reasons and many more it is a place I should probably end up. It is a place that is not for everyone, but it is a place suited for at least a few million, and one day soon I should be one of them.

But my flights unfortunately did not stop there and a new one took me to the Southern lands of my suburban childhood and later the land of my parent's slightly more isolated adolsecence. At a doctor's office later in Bismarck, complaining of a slight discomfort in my side, a nurse told me with a smirk my symptoms resembled something of the realization I was coming to North Dakota for a good while. I have always appreciated North Dakota in small doses, and it is a useful place when one needs to slow down, but it is never a place I can spend a lot of time without getting antsy and thinking about what's next. I am sure it is a great place to grow up and come home to, probably to raise kids and to die in peace, but given the lifestyle I have grown accustomed to, I think I would side with the nurse who has presumedly lived there all her life. In doing so I would join in her not-so-hidden desire to get the hell out from time to time.

Drinking beer and watching football at a Buffalo Wild Wings (just running through the old American motions), my story -- that fact I had just ended a very long and ridiculous adventure -- came up casually in conversation with an assortment of new faces. What followed echoed many talks I have had over the years in more than one country and in more than one language; it always comes back to the same theme. A guy I just met told me my life and his life are complete opposites. He lives five houses down from his parents and does not want to ever leave the town he grew up in. He confessed the thought of being in a place they speak differently is scary, as is being far away from home. He once went years without leaving his North Dakotan city, because there was no need to. I told him, as I have told many before, that there are a million possible ways to live your life that fall somewhere between him and I, and not a single one of those is incorrect. The only thing that matters is if your choices are true to you and not ruled by that fear. I try to not sound preachy. I really do believe that.

Still though, I get skeptical from time to time. I have spent too many quality hours around so many old people with regrets. They too often look longingly back at the days of their youth, catching a glimpse of some amazing things that could have been had they not been obsessed with all the things in life that make sense. We think we have a great concept of forever, and we think we have so much damn time to do everything, but I can't help but feel the opposite; life is too short to simply go through the motions without feeling that sort of inspiration that keeps you up all night. Decide you want something, or decide you don't, but just decide, really decide, dig deep and stay rooted, and be damn sure it's what you want. If my grandmother's cancer, or the hundreds of thousands of other cases that pop up a year, or perhaps even the atrocities in Syria (depending on your connection to the international community) say anything, it's this: have some urgency. You are only damn sure if you are being painfully honest with yourself, and to be that it has to hurt a little.

There has been room for all kinds as long as humans walked on two legs and hunted nomadic animals and got on boats to foreign places when a friend of a friend said the word gold. I believe this is still true, more so in today's world of specialization, and I hope everyone finds what is right for them because then the whole thing is better. I have made decisions some probably find crazy, or unwise, but I don't very much care, because it has been a brilliant time and out of all things, I can say every moment has been something inspired. I was weary as hell on my last flight into Bismarck, watching the Missouri River flow right along as if Lewis and Clark were still out there paddling their canoes. As it landed, one great journey ended. I will rest awhile, sit awhile, think awhile -- who knows how long -- and then I am sure the next adventure will begin. 

Two Big Hours in Iceland

On a flight to Iceland, feeling a bit deflated, and uninspired to do much at all, I read a few of the materials Icelandair offers its passengers about their small island nation in the North Atlantic. It turns out, there is a lot to Iceland: its series of impossible-to-pronounce volcanos and its ancient Sagas about family feuds and tough-as-nails survival and its glaciers and geysers and naturally heated steam pools and that beautiful blonde haired airport bartender named Olivia with a sleeve tattoo that was the present-day manifestation of old lines of Viking blood. I had never thought about Iceland before, but I was thinking about Iceland very much after I finished my trek across the ocean and arrived back in the United States.

It is puzzling in a way because I did not see any of the country, apart from photos and an awkward documentary on Reykjavik. Even from the plane, the fog was so thick that I was actually startled by our landing, thinking I was still in the clouds. I certainly have heard good things, and digitally saw good things, but the rest was left up to what we infer and the hard-to-define intuition we have about places.

Lost in thought over a Viking (the name of Iceland's national beer), I asked that same airport bartender, a bit naively, what it was like being from Iceland. She smiled and looked off at nothing in particular and said that it was very good in a way that said it was not just her but all Icelandic folk that felt that way about their country. Playfully, I also asked her how to pronounce the volcano that exploded and grounded all European air traffic last year and she told me (Eyjafjallajökull, pronounced [ˈeːɪjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœːkʏtl̥]) and I felt like a tourist or a volunteer in Guatemala who asks astonishingly what animal that is off in the fields and it is just a flock of sheep. She was good with it, or perhaps just not jaded to it all yet.

But life does seem good there, and presumably simple, with its fishing and other things Iceland does I am unaware of. The World Economic Forum ranked its citizens the "friendliest on Earth," however that is defined and measured. People are happy, and the travelers like myself come and go feeling curiously tied to a place they have only spent a few hours behind the glass walls of an airport, lulled to sleep by the effective strategy of Iceland's tourism authority.

After being randomly selected for extra security examination, a jolly officer questioned me briefly on traces of ash found in my bag. He suggested fireworks, or anything explosive, but I had absolutely no idea which corner of the world that ash could have come from. When I unconvincingly offered "campfires," I am sure it sounded a bit fishy given a few colorful passport stamps from the Middle East. In the end, I suppose he did not perceive me as too big a threat, saying he believed me, me saying I was glad, and us getting sidetracked by my Norwegian surname and other casual trivialities. Before being rushed off to the airplane, I told him that I need to come back to Iceland one day and stay awhile. He laughed and told me that is what everyone says. 

The Beach in Chipiona

The first bus to the airport of Seville leaves from the Plaza de Armas at 4:30 every morning, 365 days a year. At this hour it is still so early that there is no sign yet of the sun, or the dimming of the stars. It is dark and quiet and all the passengers look tired and lost in their own world, stopping a various stops, passing Santa Justa, before making the journey outside of town. On Saturday morning, I was one of these people, alone on a bus, not having slept, head resting against a dirty window, thinking about my ongoing relationship with Spain and wondering how it always leaves me feeling completely hollow and empty but also so full at the same time.

It is a peculiar country in this way; one that sometimes I hate, and other times I love. Sometimes I give it a middle finger and vow to leave tomorrow, and other times I want to stay forever. Sometimes I feel like I have done more than any American since Hemingway to adapt and convert, and other times I feel like I have not done anything at all. It is a paradox Hemingway noted often in his writing, calling it the best and the worst country in the world, and that is about as good a way to describe it as there is if you have spent any time there longer than a vacation. It is a country that gets me thinking about the ten thousand ways one can choose to spend their life, at least one or two ways I could spend perfectly content there, marrying someone Spanish and having Spanish children that speak better than me and writing something like Washington Irving wrote about something old and meaningful and timeless.

But back in real life - apart from the pending lives we imagine - I spent a week on the beach in Chipiona, surrounded by family more family than many are by blood, after having been gone for a year. There I made a number of real life choices that will affect everything, greatest of which the decision that a return to the United States for family will preside over a return to the Middle East for work. Sometimes you need the clarity of a little sun and sand, and a few helpful words from people who matter. In Chipiona, probably thirty miles from the nearest native English speaker, I had that, did that, made a plan, and said my goodbyes in a way that was intuitive more than it was difficult.

In this strange vagabond life I have been living, I am sometimes startled to find out things have been going on in places I was before like I had never been there at all. People now have boyfriends they did not have. People still go and drink at the same bars even though I am not with them. Two people I know from different places meet each other and I had nothing to do with the introduction. People go on living as one would expect them to, and meanwhile I have been doing other things and no matter how natural that is, it is still hard to get used to even after all these years. I want to be drinking a Tiger in Singapore and looking for work in New York and giving something a shot in Los Angeles and doing something with English in Seville and trekking a volcano in Guatemala and riding a bike in the Texas Hill Country outside Austin and learning to scuba dive in Queensland but all those things require your entire person and you cannot be everywhere at once for all your life, so in the end you start feeling a little left behind because you still try to do everything and be with everyone and it is impossible and people move on.

These are scrambled thoughts for the beach in Chipiona, colored by umbrellas and games of palas and groups of young boys kicking a soccer ball around and the rising tides and jellyfish alerts and memories of taking Pepe down to the water and various family members passing him around, holding his head above the surface, floating with the waves. Then long walks down the beach to the lighthouse, and back to the other end where it gets rocky before leading to Costa Bellena, looking at the pretty people who get pretty very young, with often three generations walking hand in hand at the waters edge. Then at night having cold small beers that are finished before they get warm and small plates of tapas that lead to other small plates. Then back to Seville for a few days and having a beer with that girl that is so damn beautiful down by the water, the Puente de Triana in the background, speaking Spanish with an occasional English word or phrase when the phrases get too important to mess up and hoping to God she understands it right, and holding hands while that singer from Sudan sings the same two love songs by Bob Marley every night, and then saying goodbye and having no idea when the next hello will be. 

These are scrambled thoughts and memories from Spain this time around and all makes me think for a moment I am leaving the greatest thing there ever was, and however irrational and silly and incorrect and unfeasible that may seem, how does one leave the greatest thing there ever was?

Dachau, and Other Things

The first rain I had seen in many months came in Germany. I was on a bus, pulled over at a stop in some small village off the highway. The wind picked up, blowing leaves around in tiny funnels, and then it came down quick, forcing those outside in to a frantic sprint for cover. The girl that would eventually sit next to me was one of these poor people. A few minutes after it began, she got on soaked from head to toe, cradling a bag that contained a laptop. She said she liked the rain and did not mind it much.

Ten hours later I arrived in Munich and the clouds were still threatening, with occasional reminders it could unleash anything it wanted at any moment. I tucked away in one of the beer capitals of the world with one big beer that turned into many, making my way through some Hemingway and watching people come and go. This was one of my favorite evenings in a while -- something peaceful and so rare in my current situation -- and I did not have to take a photo or walk outside or do anything at all to have it.

There were not many things that would take me from my blissful corner seat, tucked away by the window in the presence of rain, but the next day I decided Dachau was one of those things because it is one of the simple things every human being should do in their life. A German concentration camp in operation between 1933 and 1945, it held some 200,000 people over the course of its operation while bringing about the deaths of over 43,000 Jews, homosexuals, prisoners of war, etc. The camp here served as a model for most others that would sprout up across Europe. As a close friend put it, who had been there before, "it's like being punched in the gut."

It is a very peculiar sensation being in a place where such atrocity happened on a beautiful day. You cannot really see it, or sense it, or understand how human beings are capable of doing such things to one another when the weather is so fine and the birds are happy in the trees and all the pleasant noises that would have been present back then are there still. But there were certainly other sights and sounds 75 years ago that would have changed the picture into something more haunting.

One question commonly asked in places like this is, "how could they have done it," which I always find peculiar because it assumes they were different than us and that we might have had the fortitude to do something else. The Milgram Experiment on obedience, done in the 1960s, I have always found to be a fascinating answer in this regard. Essentially, it shows that normal people are capable of doing terrible things as long as the person giving the command is perceived to be credible and in charge. Watching old videos of these experimental trials, where average subjects continually send potentially fatal electrical shocks to a acting patient, is truly a frightening display of human weakness. It seems that conscience means very little, as much as we would like to think otherwise, and I do not know what that says about us and what could be coming next if we do not remember what we have done before.

One place where Dachau becomes particularly heavy is through a small patch of woods, just over a calm little stream. It is there you find this sign which leads to a building with a chimney that holds this brick oven. There are not really words to convey how cold and plain this building is. Around Dachau, there aren't many words spoken at all.

My brief stint in Germany continued soon after on a eight hour bus to the North. The Black Forest of Bavaria gave way to lush green farmland leading up to Berlin, and I sat back, diving further into my book, occasionally looking up at the scenery and occasionally eavesdropping on the Spanish conversation behind me. In Berlin, as in most places in Germany, the holocaust is never too far away. To the credit of this country, they do everything they can to educate the next generation while embracing the past in an honest and straightforward way.

In the middle of downtown, close to shops and parks and a lovely little bookstore, lies the holocaust memorial. There is no explanation given, but most interpret the rectangular prisms at various heights to signify tombstones. I sat on one of them for awhile with my young German friend, looking around at the people wandering in between and along the edges. "There are some people who say we learn about it too much," she told me. "But I think it is very important, the education we get on it all, so people don't forget." I told her that one thing is certain: that her and I, a German girl and an American guy, would not be having this conversation, or any conversation at all, a few short decades ago, and that means we have all done something right.

Soon we moved on someplace else, and from that place I continued moving and by the time it was all done I had spent more than a day of my life on buses and completed one big triangle across the country. I arrived back where I began the week before, and things had not changed much.

Planes and Trains and Cars

I have watched planes take off since I first arrived in Doha many months ago. Their path goes directly out over the water above the skyline before veering off into the Gulf. For a while this was all perfectly visable from my waterfront view. Later I lived next to the runway, hearing planes and an occasional military jet let off steam at all hours of the night. There are some things in life you never get tired of seeing and tons of welded metal flying through the air at high speeds in a way all rationale says should not be possible is one of those things to me.

I confess that more than once I wished I was on one of those planes. Part of that is a natural human grass-is-greener inclination to imagine other places as better: other people off galavanting somewhere having more fun or doing something more efficient in the long-term plan for their lives. Part of that is simply Qatar as Qatar. But given so many highs and lows scattered across the past few months, I forgive myself for a little bit of harmless longing. These feelings are complicated and grey and do not have an easy solution.

The night before Turkish Airlines Flight 783 was not extravagant, like many of my final nights of nationalistic fervor have been. I did nothing in particular, perhaps something symbolic of my time in Qatar. The night itself was long only due to the unpopular hour of my flight. At 3am I sat in a McDonald's drivethrough watching Ramadan fasters of all nationalities load up on all the sugar and fat missed during the day. When my turn came, I asked for a cheeseburger, fries, and a drink. The Philipino attendant informed me that to do a meal, I needed to get two cheeseburgers. Out of apparent convenience, my pre-flight calorie intake doubled and I thought about how America is killing the world over and it has nothing to do with wars or foreign policy.

When Turkish Airlines Flight 783 took off at 5:45am, I suddenly realized I was on it. I felt good about that, and it put me comfortably to sleep nestled up against the window. Hours later a breath of cool air in Brussels, coupled with a blonde haired girl in short shorts, signaled I had returned to my old self in a free place: the self not suppressed by the miles and miles of flowing desert, the self excited by the prospect of ten hour bus rides alone, and the self able to become immersed in a good Hemingway that touches on bullfights, true love, and hard drinking. You don't lose those things about yourself I discovered; they are just put on hold awhile. So it is very much with pleasure that I go into the next three weeks, doing the sorts of vagabond things I think I was born to do.