The Turk Who Loved Apples (39 page)

Besides, those of us who thought of ourselves as travelers were really just kidding ourselves. We might spend weeks in Pailin or Pine Ridge, but we could always leave, and once we left, we'd more than likely be forgotten. Apart from our ability to inject cash into new economies, we would not matter to the places we visited. We'd have no claim on them, and they none on us. As deep as we looked into the pools of other people's lives, we'd always be skating the surface. We were—we are—all tourists.

And that's okay, even if sometimes it's frustrating. When I now think of my trip to Tunisia, I still can't quite put together a coherent internal narrative of my time there. It doesn't gel. But the article I finally wrote for
Afar
does. And it does so by both embracing and stripping out the complicating factors.

The story begins with the taxi driver who declared, “All the women of Tunisia are my wives!” But instead of presenting it just as comedy, or as a way of showing how easy it was to talk to people, I focused as well on its clichéd quality—the way he was embodying the “stereotypically Muslim male chauvinist point of view.” But was it what he really felt? Or just the role he took on around tourists, who might have expected exactly that kind of sentiment to come from a cab driver?

And in the course of describing this interaction, I began to realize that I, too, could choose a stereotype to lead myself through the story. And the one I chose was that old standby, my favorite crutch: gastro-tourist. Yes, I wrote about Tunisian food, and my pursuit of it from the shores of the Mediterranean to the depths of the medina. With Abdelaziz, the curly-haired
carthageois
counter-cliché, I ate
salade méchouia
—a platter of roasted peppers, hard-boiled eggs, olives, capers, shredded tuna, cucumbers,
harissa
, and more, all mixed together and scooped up with fresh baguettes—and feasted on grilled fish and delicate
brik
. I got in taxis and asked to be taken to the best roast chicken in town (which is how I met Kamel and became
Tom/Tarek). And one day, on my own, somewhere in the medina, I devoured half a roasted lamb's head, brains included, and discovered that hidden away at the base of the tongue, where you might never expect to find it, was the sweetest, most tender meat of all. It was, I wrote, “like Tunisia itself, so instantly and easily enjoyable that the clichés and counter-clichés fail to matter, and you must admit to yourself that some things are simply good.”

W
hat had I done? It was the middle of August, I was sitting in a rented house in Truro, and I was going crazy. Just a few weeks earlier, I'd been in Ho Chi Minh City, immersed in stimulation—the arrhythmic bleat of mopeds, the aromas of charcoal and melting fat, the guileless interrogations of random Vietnamese people. I'd been living a life I'd never imagined, working as a journalist, coming home to close friends, learning how to navigate not just a new language and culture but a new world of my own making. I had a motorbike, I had air-conditioning, I had freedom and independence. What I didn't have was a professional future, and so I'd given up everything else. Roughly two weeks shy of the day I'd moved to Saigon, and just before my birthday—a birthday I could have spent surrounded by those wonderful new friends!—I'd boarded a Cathay Pacific flight bound for home via Hong Kong.

But now what had I done? Those first weeks back with my parents in Virginia were terrible. I had no car, no friends, nothing to do. This was a sensory deprivation tank, solitary confinement. And even when my family assembled for a week's vacation on the Cape, my mood did not improve, despite the sunshine, the clean air, the seafood, the peace. I was filled with hate. I hated this staid, boring place. I hated my parents for bringing me here. I hated America for
not being Vietnam, and for barely even having Vietnamese food. I hated the prospect of spending the next nine months in Baltimore, a city I hated. And I hated myself for having made the decisions—on my own, independently—that led me to this position.

Without telling anyone, I walked out the front door and down the road to the center of south Truro. My brown leather boots clomping on the pavement, I marched past the overpriced grocery store and turned left onto the road that led underneath the highway. On I walked for I don't know how long, stewing as I went. The worst part was that I knew this fury and frustration were simple reverse culture shock, the awkward and painful re-familiarization process that many long-term travelers go through. I was a textbook case: Friends and family wanted to hear about my travels, but they couldn't really understand (it seemed) what it was like for me over there; I felt like I had no place or purpose here; and I worried that expressing my disappointment would make me seem whiny and ungrateful. I'd had this amazing experience—why couldn't that be enough?

I turned off the main road to the beach, and soon the cute shingled houses vanished, and I was in a more densely wooded area with few cars. No one was walking to the beach. No one knew where I was. I was alone. I kept going and going, and I didn't know where this would end. It didn't matter. With every step, my mind calmed. This was what I needed—this relentless momentum, the sense that I was going
somewhere
, even if I didn't know my final destination. Birds chirped and black flies buzzed my head. Sand flecked the edge of the road. Onward, the sweat beaded on my lower back. I wasn't deluded enough to imagine myself an explorer here, as if that could compensate for my stupid choices. I simply craved movement.

Midway up a hill that I would later learn led to the eminently swimmable Great Pond, I stopped. I'd come far enough. The anger
had been dealt with. My family might start to wonder where I was, and I didn't want them to worry. I turned around. It was time to go home.

E
verybody wants to go home. Everybody always has. From the Israelites and Odysseus to every ethnic, political, and religious group today, humans have been searching and fighting for the one place where they can finally settle down, where they belong—the place that is theirs, and theirs alone. Even modern-day nomadic communities are not true wanderers. Their homes simply span a broader swathe of earth, and their journeys are determined by regular, often seasonal constraints. No desert bedouin treks into the boreal forest or midwestern plains. Most people know where they come from, and where they hope to be.

Not me. Early on in my adult life—after I'd been asked, one too many times, “Where are you from?”—I consciously gave up on the concept of home. It was a question that maddened me. Was I from Massachusetts, and if so Concord or Amherst, and if not, then Brighton or Williamsburg or Baltimore (none of which I was ever going back to)? “Where are you from?” As casually as it was intended, it left me open-mouthed, my brain working frantically to come up with a brief but accurate answer.

And the answer was that it didn't matter. Other people, I knew, had grown up under even more itinerant circumstances—in military or diplomatic families, for instance—but even so, I'd moved enough. “You people,” my mother's mother, Grandma Rosalie, whose Plymouth Acclaim I would one day inherit, said after another of my family's relocations. “You're like Gypsies!”

So, fine, we were Gypsies. I was a Gypsy. I would move and move and move, knowing who I was but not necessarily where I was from, and I would never pin my identity and my future on some fantastical,
unrealizable idea of home. It would be easier this way, I thought, although I'd probably sound pretentious when I answered “nowhere” to “Where are you from?” I would simply be where I happened to be, for as long as fate decreed. “Home for now” would be the closest I ever got to “Home.”

I don't doubt this attitude helped me when I began traveling overseas. Despite all the lonely and awkward days in Vietnam, I never once felt homesick, never once wished I was with old friends in Baltimore or back skateboarding in the Williamsburg bowling alley ditch. I'm not even sure I ever wished I was
elsewhere
, only that my Saigon life could be better, fuller, cheerier. Had I grown nostalgic and dreamed of Baltimore, I wouldn't have lasted as long abroad as I did.

When my travel-writer traveling commenced several years later, this lack of attachment was an unquestioned strength. My trips could be lengthy—three weeks, say, or three months—and they took me away from my wife, my friends, my things. And while I certainly missed them (Jean in particular), I did not ache for them, thanks to Facebook and Skype and the ease of buying prepaid SIM cards in every new country, and I did not regret my circumstances. How could I when I was driving across the Oregon desert or sipping tea in the Himalayas? Here was where I wanted to be, wherever here was.

Sometimes, “here” happened to be a far-flung neighborhood in New York. One day in September, soon after I'd returned from my 2007 road trip across America, Jean and I were contemplating a trip to visit friends on the Upper West Side, when Jean explained that to do so she'd first need to put herself in an Upper West Side frame of mind (whatever that was). In other words, she needed to mentally prepare herself for the geographic and cultural shift. What's more, she claimed this was how most normal people behaved. I told her I'd never found such adjustments necessary—I could just go.

“There's something wrong with your brain,” she said.

That may be, but whatever was wrong with my brain rendered the constant transitioning of my life a nonissue. At the end of every Frugal summer, having been away from New York for three months, I always expected that I'd never want to leave again. With disconcerting ease I'd immerse myself in the habits of home, catching up with Jean and my friends, cooking dinner, watching TV, waking up and not immediately packing my bags. This was vacation! Infinitely more relaxing than racing across continents on a tiny budget, afraid I wouldn't learn enough or have the right experiences to craft compelling stories. Here at home, no one cared whether I could put it all into sixteen-hundred words of clever context.

But then, after a few weeks of this holiday in Bizarro World, I'd find myself eager to get moving again, almost as if I were allergic to staying put. The restlessness was a slippery phenomenon. It didn't build gradually over those weeks, nor did it come on suddenly, an epiphany over a cheap beer at the Gowanus Yacht Club. It's more that I began to realize my wanderlust was always there, and had never gone away at all. I'd been ready to depart at just about the moment I arrived.

And then I'd make plans to leave.

Every part of departure pleased me. The night before, I'd decide which clothes to bring (including, of course, a pair of pants I'd never wear), and which tools and accessories (headlamp? water-purifying tablets? portable speakers?), and what to put everything in: the rolling duffel, the hefty backpack, the black leather weekend bag, the oversized tote? I enjoyed waking up early to catch 8 a.m. flights, and riding the A train or, sometimes, if the budget allowed, a car service to La Guardia or JFK. That half-hour or so of nothingness on the streets of New York—Atlantic Avenue still asleep, the BQE my own private highway—allowed me to relax and to focus my excitement on the adventure ahead. Waiting for the AirTrain at Howard Beach in winter, I'd look out on the frosted reeds and icy pond just below the tracks, and in summer I'd watch the waterfowl
dip into this overlooked patch of green. I was leaving this all behind, but leaving was the only way I'd ever see it.

The uncommon joy of the departure found its parallel in the return. Early in the morning, my flight would glide over the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, the just-risen sun casting silver pools through the inlets. At midday, my flight—its landing happily delayed—might circle Manhattan, the lines and angles of its skyscrapers stark in the clear October sun. At night New York was a field of light, the streets of Brooklyn and Queens marked in dotted lines that extended to the edge of my vision; I'd search the angles of Flatbush and Atlantic and try to pick out my own dark little corner. We'd land, and I'd endure the slow-motion hassles of passport control and baggage claim, but then I'd be in a taxi—always a taxi, I'd earned that luxury—mounting the Kosciuszko Bridge, gridded gravestones below, the skyline closer than I'd ever thought home could be. In the next month, I might see them a hundred times, but never notice them once, not until I'd put ten thousand miles between us again.