GONE
I am sitting on the back deck of my house overlooking the Warren Wilson farm and with a row of evergreens that I have looked at for years without every finding the name of lining Warren Wilson Road that the cars come swishing by on below the green curve of the pasture.
The sun is setting beyond Jones Mountain on the other side of the house but shines on Four Brothers Mountain across the fields that line the Swannanoa River where for centuries native AMerican farmed and hunted from their riverside village. In the evenings the clouds change shape as the float by, very different each day, with the lower clouds turning lavender and then dark purple while the higher clouds stay white as they gradually turn pink.
The view hasn’t change much in eons but it is reminder that I am a stranger in someone else’s land and that the land that I think of as mine and mow reluctantly whenever prodded to is merely where I am sitting and not mine at all. The land will remain, I am the transient one.
And that is what I have been thinking about all day, my transition from one place to another. At this time in the early evening in a week I will probably be dead alseep in the Acropolis House Hotel, an old style two star family run hotel in an old building with furnishings from the last century as I try to deal with jet lag. But if I am awake and sitting in a cafe having an early supper, because I read that the Greeks eat at 9 or later, I will be in transit, certainly a transient, not speaking the language, not knowing what to order, not knowing how to tip, completely turned upside down and too foggy to do more than stumble through the evening.
But today has been just the opposite. Today I haven’t stirred out of the house except to take a half hour walk up Jones Mountain. And as I walked I was wondering to myself about my inner working, about the changes in mood that happen before a trip. I had the feeling that I was almost not here at all, that all the things I ordinary am stimulated by, the people I write to, the activities that I normally do, the way I normally feel my way through life, had all come to a close. Nothing here matters any more, I am only barely here. What is happening within me is not something that I have control of, it just happens, it is as if some life force that is beyond me has stopped impelling me along in one way and has shifted to another way. The journey to Greece and then on to Germany is not so much an outer trip of adventures as an inner mythic passage in which I have to deal each day with another set of swirling emotions and feeling that seem to have nothing to do with me, the conscious me making my way along, but to do with some inner visceral drives projected into the everyday world. I don’t think is just because Greece has always been the source of so much of mythology, the projection onto the gods of our inner turmoil, I think it comes from letting go of the ordinary and the routine and being forced to open up to the unknown, the unknown within myself.
On most trips I pack at the last moment, half the night before I leave with a group of students at dawn as I try to get a diverse group out the door and into the air for their own months long mythic adventures. But now it is just me and I have been fretting about what I will take and how I will pack for weeks now. Maybe it is old age that makes me so fussy.
But it is partly because in the old days we could take on a flight a carry on and up to 150 pounds of checked luggage. The tendency was to take everything you might need and then to lug it around for months. But now I am limited to 18 pounds of carryon and nothing more as a result of getting a very cheap ticket. I have weighed everything. My clothing for two months including sandals and clothes for warm and cold wether, two sets of clothing with two of each (four shirts, two long sleeved, two short sleeved) two pairs of trousers, three underpants, three pairs of socks weighs 11 pounds. What I wear is included in this. I will have to wash clothes by hand every evening.
And then my cameras and iPad and charging equipment weight another 10 pounds. The large best camera weighs three pounds and I wonder if I should leave it behind. Do I really need a lightweight laptop. Do I need sandals to walk on the beach in Greece. I do need pajama pants and a hat for the bright sun.
Finally I decide to leave the laptop which I use for processing storing photographs, to leave my sandals, but to take the camera. All together everything weighs ten Kilos even when I use a laptop bag for some of the electronic gear. I think that I can get most everything into the small carry on bad but will still be overweight.
But I have a back up. I can put all my cameras and hard drives and lens and even my iPad into my vest. Fully loaded my vest can hold half of my 18 pounds. I look like the Michelin man but with my coat draped loosely over me I look like a good deal more corpulent gentleman than I already am. I hope to look like a shuffling old bleary eyed man that people will take pity on and not examine too closely, an advantage of being ancient.
That took me all morning. By lunch time I knew just what I would do when challenged in the airport. First attempt to make my way comfortably but with overweight luggage, secondly to have a light carryon bag and look like a stuffed goose. The third option is that I will just pay the extra $70 they want, but very reluctantly. I am ready.
But that left half a day. And all of a sudden I realized that I had nothing necessary left to do for the next five days and that I didn’t feel like doing any of the things that I normally do. The Republicans are gerrymandering like crazy, trying to put an end to abortions, about to make us default on the national debt and shut down the government, refusing to get vaccinated, and still calling the last election corrupt. But I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. The empty days gape ahead of me. All of the things that I normally do to get through the day seem stale or empty. I am free to do anything, but I find I’ve gotten ready to go too early. All I want to do is let go, to leave and I have five more days to wait.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 