The New View from Turkey

Each morning in Istanbul began with the solemn hymns of Muslim prayer drifting in from a nearby mosque. It was a peaceful, steady way to wake up in the darkness, moving from the bed to the shower to the suit, then down the elevator to breakfast and out the door into the chaos of metropolitan Turkey. It’s back to the professional world for me – the offices and coffee breaks, the ties and dry cleaners and hotel rooms, the meetings and the schedules and the rush, the rules and the routines – all to the backdrop of new faces and places.

As most suit-and-tie professions go, you donate your days and endlessly attempt to take back your nights. For a week my nights were christened by the streets to Taksim Square, history's glowing mosques lining the Bosporus, and Turkish music down the alleys that evoke the flying carpets and magic lamps of A Thousand and One Nights. After living in Qatar, it was delightful to be in a Muslim country that sits somewhere in the realm of modern thought, where couples kiss in the street and girls wear short skirts into bars.

I remember flying into Istanbul the first time for a connection, and thinking how good it would be to stop awhile. In another one of life's unpredictable progressions, at the narrow meeting place of two continents, standing on a quiet balcony with a Turkish girl at night, that little wish manifested into the tangible things around me.

Thinking About A Time Back Then

I did not realize how traumatizing my job in Qatar was until I sat on my mother's couch and watched the days and nights flicker by in books and other nothingness. Back in that desert land there were ethical questions -- those that sit somewhere between obvious treachery and little white lies -- that no one ever wants to ask themselves. There were unjustifiable problems in funding -- simply not enough money to pay basic costs -- that bleed into now and make these days harder. Then there were lonely adaptions to the Islamic world during Ramadan, and what that means when no one is there to help you or tell you what to do.

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood,
Throws down in front of us is not to bar,
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are.

Such is Qatar: a vague hazy country that does not sit within real world circumstance, and a place that feels as though it does not exist wholly for me. Yet time and space are nature's great healers; rainy days and long bus rides help, listening to the potent quietness of life, looking up at all the vacuous space in the clouds, thinking how few things there are to do and casually coming to terms with a time it was all so very occupied. These short still pauses, the long drawn out monologues with myself, these passing coincidences and periods of impeccable timing, all fill me very full with gratitude, for what was and what is and what isn't, and for all that is so very suddenly set to come.

Back Down South

I have gone south on Interstate 35 more times than I can count over the years. They are some of my earliest memories, and some of my best, alone on the open road as the sun comes up and still when the sun goes down. I know the flat moonlike landscape of Kansas too well, ditto the dense forests and perfect lakes in Minnesota. I know it is Missouri when the hills start to roll, and Texas when the world goes dry and flat. It is a strange and special part of the country to me, and one I will probably always come back to after being somewhere else.

The most worn and well-known path sits between Austin and Dallas, that three plus hour span that separates my first recognizable family home from the first place that was mine alone. In the middle lies a million small unknown towns, the true just-off-the-interstate Texas. The two 35s join up at Hillsborough, and then you must stop for a kolache in West. Waco marks the halfway point, and Temple says you are an hour out. The IKEA of Round Rock says you are entering city limits, and then finally the numbered streets begin, the longhorn football stadium and the tower fly by out your right-side window, and baby skyscrapers line the horizon by Town Lake.

Austin has turned into a once a year trip, a meeting place of old friends who once roamed the city with me and are now dispersed across the globe. Every time I go I am reminded it is a city of littered memories, virtually every hidden alleyway shooting back to a good conversation or a bad night alone or something that did not have to be that way but was. This is youth I suppose, and what college is made for, but the feelings are grey and yank at my stomach from time to time. It's good, helpful even, to be around people around back then too, those that feel similarly bittersweet about this wonderful city; I imagine I'm not the only one who finds value in both coming and going each time we stencil this all into our itineraries.

Visiting the old bars on Rainey Street reminds you change is good, and part of me finds it fitting that in a few short months Lustre Pearl will be bulldozed, erased forever, new condominiums built up in its place. So many people still have not left that drunken world and it very easily could have been me back there pouring beer and coming home at 5am feeling empty. There are plenty of reasons to desire Austin again; its coffee shops and drinking joints and running trails and delightful fall weather and hill country and beautiful girls in dresses on a friday night resonated back then and do with me now. That all crashes into the many periods of exponential growth that are never particularly fun to revisit.

The goodbyes in Austin happened swiftly like they have happened before, and things continue on like they always have. The front porches that once sustained the toughest of conversations are still there, now supporting someone else. New underage students scurry about on Sixth Street hoping for a stroke of luck. Someone else probably stands up on Mount Bonnell at night, entranced by the red lights flickering on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off. People leave and fresh people arrive and it is exciting for them, something new, like it once was for me. It will always be there indeed, cycling people through the same lovely motions, forever, and I can always come back and pick out which stage certain people fall. After a while -- it could have been a week or a month -- I drove north on Interstate 35, passing everything in reverse, leaving Speedway and Alta Vista and all the other little realities in the rear view mirror. I did not look back too much because I've done it so many times already. 

Passing Through Joplin

When I got pulled over for speeding off Main Street in Joplin, the officer asked me if I was familiar with the small Missouri town. My mind had been on other things, least of which my driving, as far back as Minnesota, and I wanted to tell him an elaborate story that would explain everything. I wanted to tell him I had no idea what the hell was going on with my life and hours in the car alone had not decided much at all. I wanted to tell him that I did not know if I would stay the night, and if I did it would happen almost certainly in the back of my small car in a parking lot because these days hotels are not justifiable expenses. There was more too -- thoughts that hit you hard like bugs on a windshield across miles of open road -- but instead I told him it was my first time, only passing through to pay respects, which seemed a forgivable offense to him. I continued on Main, looking out at abandoned buildings, for sale signs, and the essence of a city still recovering.

The tornado hit Joplin two years ago, but it is still evident something bad happened. At a mile wide it passed through town diagonally; the line separating new houses from those surviving the storm is quite distinct. There are plenty of places in the world catastrophes like this are commonplace, but I imagine it is especially difficult on those in small town America. Here, everything stays the same, always, generation after generation, peaceful and quiet, a beautiful little bubble. It is light years away from mall shootings in Kenya and sinkholes in Guatemala. Call it naivety or ignorant bliss or great fortune, but in any case it must be one great shock when someone wakes up one day and their neighborhood, previously plagued by an occasional high school dropout and petty theft, is simply not there at all.

I found a coffee shop and a pub and stayed the rest of the night, talking to a strange bartender of Irish descent who had an affinity for tattoos and exotic pets. When my night was done I said goodbye to a raw assortment of faces I would never see again. As the sun woke up, I woke up too, groggily crawling from the backseat to the front, rubbing my eyes, starting the engine, and beginning the long drive south to the most stable resting place I've got these days. 

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.