Highway to Home

Oxen carts are a common sight here, even along busy freeways

I sit silently, caccooned in a symphony of thought, as we speed northward along the Pan American highway, away from the Costa Rican border into Nicaragua.  This is the same highway that traverses the Americas, and even connects to I-5; I could take this road all the way home to Seattle.

Home.  The word reverberates in my head and sends a shockwave down into my gut. Staring out the window, I try to banish the noise in my head as I concentrate on the details of this new place, letting it sink in.  Always struggling with my mantra of being in the moment.  All around us are fields with sugar cane, plantains, and other crops in many shades of green.  Large, weeping trees arch gracefully over the road, some of them flowering with vines dangling down.   I see children in bare feet, kicking up dust as they chase along after their older siblings.  Their clothes are casual, and haphazard.  Homes of adobe and corrugated tin with smoke curling out from behind them, surrounded by barbed wire fences are sparsely located off the road.  All the fence posts are fashioned from sticks and branches, not a single machine-milled one for as far as the eye can see.  I see fruit stands selling pineapples, plantains, bananas, mangoes and melons; pigs with a loop of coir rope around their necks, eating whatever is at their feet.

Every few hundred meters, a horse is munching grass along the freeway.  They all have narrow hindquarters and slight frames, despite the plentiful green food available to them and I mentally note that it must be just their breed that makes them appear so thin.  I am mildly surprised to see Tuk-Tuks, and as throughout Asia, they are proudly ‘pimped out’, sporting recognizable logos from bands, foods, and sports.  Another observation is the buses.  They are old-school, and painted in glorious patterns and colors, like what we saw in Sri Lanka.  I squint as I see movement on top of the bus in front of us and I realize that there is a guy up there, moving luggage around.  He is hunched over a basket and a branch grazes the top of his head as we hurtle along behind them on the freeway.  He never looks up as the branches fly frighteningly close to him.  Then I am distracted by another man who opens the emergency door at the back of the bus, steps out onto the ladder, and clings to it as he relieves himself, his back turned to us. Our driver and guide start laughing, embarrassed by our front row seat to this act. A family is riding slowly in a cart behind a team of oxen, and a motorcycle whips around them.  On the bike, a woman is driving and a man is seated behind her with a sleeping infant slung over his shoulder, his fine black hair being blown by the wind – they don’t wear helmets.  I don’t even feel compelled to comment on this, as we have seen it everywhere.  The USA and its residents live in a bubble of security and safety measures that simply don’t extend to the rest of the world.  In poorer countries, like Nicaragua, they worry about other things.

I see a woman sweeping the dirt outside her shack and suddenly I flash back to Nairobi, where I saw the same scene.  I feel that familiar nostalgia for all the places we have journeyed this year and I drop my gaze to my lap, where the passports still sit, having been scrutinized by the armed agent at the border, making sure we were legally cleared to travel here.  Another door opened for us, and we waltzed through, full of anticipation.  I thumb through the pages of stamps, stickers, and hand-scribbled initials and like so many times in the past weeks I am overcome.  Like our passports, my mind and heart and soul are full of evidence of the countries we have traversed in the last 12 months.  I am frustrated by the thought that all these months, I have been a receptacle, a passive spectator, a tourist, and I have nothing to show for all my adventures except for the stamps in my passport, the photos, and of course, the memories.  An entire year with my husband and kids, all to myself, traveling the world… now I can’t help but smile at the memories because those are truly a part of me, woven into my life to appear later somehow, in some as yet untold manner.  And my stories are intertwined with Jon’s and the kids, and yet, they are unique, reflecting only my impressions and perspectives.  This is something I am just going to have to accept, these memories are my souvenirs, mine to treasure as a memento of this unbelievable year.  I don’t want this journey to end, and yet I know that it is time to go home, to get back to a routine, to return my kids to their schools, sports and social lives.  To reality.

I turn the page on the passport on my lap, and I see two blank pages staring expectantly at me, beckoning, reminding me that I have not been everywhere yet, and that it is still on my list.