8
AUSTRALIA, AGAIN
Australia feels like returning home. For three weeks, we have permission to take off our sweaty, itchy vagabonding hats because we are house-sitting for friends currently on vacation in Canada. We will hole up in the Sydney suburbs and take care of chickens. Heading here, I suspect, will be like waking up from a complicated dream, where your surroundings seem familiar but still slightly off-kilter. This is a regular home for a regular family, and yet it isn’t ours.
The real trick is getting to the house. We’ll deplane; then we need to take a train several hours out to Glenbrook, a western suburb hugging the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and then walk ten blocks uphill to our house with heavy packs on our backs. We’ve held this news as secret from the kids because I know they will be less than thrilled.
I mentally rehearse my news bomb and warm up my cheerful mom voice, and then I spot a stranger holding a sheet of paper among the welcome crowd, Oxenreider scribbled in black marker. I glance over at Kyle, and his look of confusion verifies he’s seen it too. We have no plans for pickup.
“Um . . . hi,” I say reluctantly to this unknown woman. “We’re the Oxenreiders?”
“Hello! I’m Beryl, Brooke’s mum,” the woman replies eagerly, shaking my hand. “But everyone calls me Bez.”
Brooke is my friend and writing colleague on holiday in Canada, who has given us detailed instructions how to get to her place. We’ll find her parents on the front porch when we arrive, Brooke said, where they would give us the house and car keys.
“Oh, well. Hello! Brooke told me we’d meet you at her house,” I say sheepishly. I wonder if I’ve missed something in my sleep deprivation, lost in translation in the shuffle of travel plans. Perhaps we were going to meet her mom at the airport after all?
“Yeah, that’s right. But we thought we’d surprise you anyway with an airport pickup. You’re probably knackered,” she remarks. I am frozen and say nothing, eyes wide. An airport pickup?
“That’s awfully kind of you,” I say, “but you really didn’t have to.” My brain is still fully operating in game-face mode, seconds away from telling the kids we need to board a train and walk for miles, pushing through exhaustion. I’m aware I’m still staring, mouth agape.
“Well, we thought about you guys and your kids, and thought you might like a little old-fashioned mum and dad pickup,” Bez says. “We know what it’s like for our kids to travel with their kids, and we hated the thought of you fighting through Sydney.”
“Thank you, but . . . it’s not cheap to come all the way out here. We know what gas is like in Australia,” I say. (As though she doesn’t know this.) “We can’t ask you to do this. Please let us pay you.”
“Nonsense,” she says. “Pete is already waiting at the cars in the garage.”
Bez picks up one of our packs and walks. We follow her, deliriously murmuring thank you until we arrive at the cars.
“Hello! Welcome to Sydney!” Pete exclaims cheerily. He pulls the packs off our backs, tosses them into his trunk. “Climb in, climb in!”
They’ve brought not one, but two vehicles to cart us to the westernmost outskirts of Sydney, more than fifty miles and an hour’s drive away. Our eyes are saucers. Kyle climbs into Pete’s car with Reed and Tate, and I clamber into Bez’s, where Finn has a booster seat waiting in the back seat. They won’t let us open our wallets for the parking garage. We pull out on the highway, heading west.
“This is truly above and beyond,” I slur, fighting travel fatigue sincere with indebtedness. “We haven’t yet had an airport pickup on our trip. It feels . . . nice.” I blush at my tinny, juvenile response and gaze out the passenger window. Finn has slumped over asleep.
“We’re truly happy to do this,” Bez says. “Not sure if Brooke’s told you, but our family are big fans of something we call the Westbrook Effect.” Brooke has mentioned this, but I can’t recall its meaning. She explained it to me months ago as the reason she wouldn’t let us pay for our extended stay in her house.
“Years ago, Pete worked for a man named Westbrook. He was from San Diego, and we got to visit him a few times. Every time we did—and it turns out he did this for everyone who came to visit—he’d pull out all the stops. He gave us the master bedroom, the full use of his car, paid for all our meals. He’d clear his schedule to take us all over the city. Westbrook insisted we pay for nothing during our stay, since it was his town and we were his guests. He went above and beyond, making sure we had the absolute best time in San Diego. We loved it so much, his take on hospitality and giving over and above, that we vowed to always do the same as a family. Now, anytime someone comes to Sydney, we pull out all the stops and do what we can to make ’em feel at home. No paying, no feeling weird about asking for something, no tiptoeing around or shushing kids. This is what we always did when our kids were still at home, and now that they’re out of the house with their own families, they’ve kept it up and are still doing it. Westbrook Effect.”
We pull into Brooke’s driveway behind her car, clean and waiting for our use. Pete and Bez climb out of their cars, open the front door, carry in our packs, give us a quick tour. Pete hands over the keys, insists we make ourselves at home and to not hesitate to call if we need anything; they are just a few minutes away.
Twenty minutes later, after they’ve left and the kids are entranced with the backyard trampoline, there’s a knock at the door. Kyle answers, and in saunters Pete, with two coffees and a paper bag.
“We thought you guys might be a bit hungry and in need of some real coffee,” he says. “So this is from the bakery a few blocks away. Hope your kids like grilled cheese.” He sets the bag on the counter, gives a quick good-bye, and shows himself back out the door.
I glance at Kyle. “Oh. We’re so doing the Westbrook Effect, forever and ever.”
Three and a half months of nonstop backpacking, and we are giddy at the thought of unpacking. We can buy real groceries without worry whether they’ll stay fresh in a backpack for more than a few hours; we can lounge in a real living room to watch Netflix. The exotic and mundane have switched places.
It is December 23 the morning we arrive in Sydney, and we want to finally celebrate Christmas. There is little point in setting up a tree or stockings, but we want to schedule a few cookie-baking sessions, watch A Christmas Story with popcorn and cocoa. After a night of sound sleep, we drive to the suburb’s center to buy a few gifts at the mall.
We hardly recognize ourselves. We aren’t mall people, and we’ve actually already visited malls in both Thailand and China. Needs for a pharmacy, an English bookstore, clean socks kept pulling us magnetically toward malls the past few months. In today’s case, the pull is Christmas shopping, and it is an odd, disorienting dose of reverse culture shock. “Frosty the Snowman” pipes through speakers, shoppers wobble with stacks of bags on each shoulder, and Santa perches on his throne parked in cotton-candy snow and surrounded by disgruntled elves. Christmas is in the air, and yet the air-conditioning blasts and the crowd is in shorts. I detest shopping in any season and my feelings on the matter are heightened this time of year, but I am determined to find things I can wrap in paper. They must be lightweight and small enough to cram in our packs. I am limited by our backpacks and by the stores’ ransacked shelves.
I wander into a department store and am disoriented, like a girl on the wrong aisle who’s lost her mom. My current personal belongings consist of a laptop and a converter for electrical gadgets; my current wardrobe consists of garb fit for washing elephants in Thailand, hiking in the Queensland bush, and, eventually, shopping in a Moroccan medina. Brushing past womenswear while George Michael sings about his last Christmas causes dizzying culture shock. The toy section is completely picked over, so I leave.
I find a craft store, disheveled from harried shoppers. An idea has hit me. I find everything I need but Scotch tape, and I ask for its whereabouts.
“Sorry, love, we sold out of Scotch tape weeks ago.” The employee walks off. I shrug and opt for green painter’s tape from a nearby kiosk, and decide this will work even better.
I find a Target at the end of the mall and shuffle through its remains to unearth a few workable gifts. They’re nothing I would buy in our normal life, but life isn’t normal right now. I add a roll of pink-and-gold wrapping paper and a tin of obscure-brand chocolates.
Three hours later, we walk through the front door, and I toss bags of leftover Lego kits and multicolored pens on the bed and close the door. I empty my bag from the craft store on the dining table and call out, “Kids! Come here!” I spread out the construction paper, markers, and painter’s tape.
“What’s this for?” Tate asks.
“We’re going to decorate the house. Starting with giving ourselves a Christmas tree,” I answer.
The kids slice green paper at sawtooth angles, cut out mismatched circles of red and blue baubles, a janky yellow star. I return to the bedroom and wrap the gifts, then set them under our two-dimensional tree, which Kyle has taped to the wall in an outline of green tape.
We watch A Christmas Story tonight, eat popcorn for dinner, and cover cereal boxes with the remaining construction paper to transform them into makeshift stockings. The kids tuck into bed, each in his or her own bedroom—a luxury. Kyle and I sip late-night cups of tea in the backyard under the stars. The neighbor’s sprinkler comes to life, sputters its cadence. A nearby kookaburra laughs. It is summer solstice: the longest day of the year.
O holy night, indeed.
Australia, like the United States, is a country of natives overtaken by its European immigrants. Its origin as a penal colony is widely known, having started as a dumping ground for Britain’s worst of the worst (meaning, typically, nine-year-old chimney sweeps and Irish women caught stealing butter), and the original Aborigines have struggled to reclaim—and maintain—their identity. Sydney is where this British colony began, and until 1971 the government restricted immigration to white settlers only in order to preserve a British ethnic identity. Since 2005, however, it’s estimated that 40 percent of the population has at least one parent born overseas, and as of a few years ago, over a quarter of Australians were born overseas, most likely in Africa or Asia. It is still a country of immigrants, living among the 3 percent of the population hailing from Aboriginal tribes.
If you weren’t born here, statistically you were most likely born in Britain, New Zealand, China, Italy, or Vietnam. But around ninety thousand immigrants are from the United States. This includes my friend, Adriel, who lives in Sydney. She is a native Bendite, which means she hails from the small Oregon town from which we left, and married an Aussie several years ago. I met her months ago when they were in the Pacific Northwest visiting her hometown while we were packing up our life to begin our trek.
Here, they live in a ninety-five-square-foot travel trailer with their two small boys. We invite them to come see us and to park their home in the driveway for a few days.
They have recently relocated to Sydney from Queensland, and with this decision they have taken on a sizable increase in expenses. Sydney has the fourth highest living expenses in the world, and they have channeled their limited funds into a thirty-year-old renovated trailer. With a few refresher coats of paint and a spark of creativity, they have made a tiny home. Two days before the New Year, Adriel and her husband, Ryan, pull an orange extension cord out from the side of their home and plug it into the McAlarys’. (We asked first; they gave hearty permission. See, supra, the Westbrook Effect.)
Their two boys scamper to the backyard to meet the chickens and trampoline, and Adriel invites me into her home for the grand tour. To the left of the door are folding bunk beds for the kids; to the right is a bijou swath of kitchen counter space with a miniature stove and fridge. There is a dining table, which also serves as office, art station, and living room, and behind a kitschy sliding door, their master bedroom miraculously houses a queen-sized bed and corner closet. I flash back to our first guesthouse in Beijing.
We sit in the dining room/living room/office, and Adriel confesses, “Just a few months here and I’ve learned so much about myself. I know what I’m like when I don’t have a place to call home, how I feel out of sorts. And yet I have a liberation and freedom from the burden of those things that come from a real house. They sometimes get in the way.”
Like me, she is in her late thirties and feels misplaced. She is a fellow nomad; her travel trailer is the same as my backpack. I tell her about Kate, a fellow American mother I met in Thailand, who with her husband is taking her ten-year-old son to every continent this school year, including Antarctica. Kate also confessed that stripping away the idea of home feels like swinging midair on a trapeze with no net.
Without a foundation underneath four walls, we identify with everywhere and nowhere. We notice with razor-sharp clarity that grass is generally the same across the planet, and yet each country has its own variety of green turf, its own type of light switch, its own method for storing knives. Adriel calls Sydney home, but she perambulates with her walls every few weeks. My walls change every few weeks too. So do Kate’s. So do thousands of other earthlings, scurrying like ants across grass to movable homes, to tents and nomadic dwellings. Some of us have chosen this temporarily; others choose it indefinitely. Many don’t have a choice.
I feel at home in the world, and I feel like Alice falling down a rabbit hole. I cannot push a thumbtack in a map and say, “There. That is where I’m from.” There is nothing to grab onto, no anchor. A vagabond life provides stopgaps but no permanence. Our friends who have traveled the world before us suggested we keep our house during our voyage; we decided instead to sell. I think of them now and wonder if their wisdom would have insulated me from my sense of free-falling.
Because there is no escape hatch for dwelling on the possibility of home, I wonder if instead I have been given the gift of noticing. Are my senses enhanced, sharpened? Have I honed my discerning spirit, learned to take keen note of the differences in how prices are labeled in markets, how beer tastes on different continents? I feel as though I can smell the exhaust from a car in New Zealand, how it mingles with air molecules in a different formation than in Hong Kong. The Thai speak an octave higher than anyone else I’ve yet encountered. Australians elongate the cadence of their e’s. Finn’s left eyebrow arches higher than his right when he’s surprised. The southern Chinese have a different accent to their Mandarin than their northern counterparts, though I couldn’t pinpoint specifics. I just know they do.
Poet Mary Oliver writes, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”1 Perhaps I have been given this as a work assignment on our travels.
“Tea?” asks Adriel. “Or beer? We have both. Have you tried Beez Neez? It’s wonderful.”
Ryan and Adriel are staying with us through the New Year, which means traipsing our five kids to the fireworks display over Sydney Harbor. They know of a good spot, where we will fight crowds, yes, but where we can spread out a picnic blanket or two. Several days ago, they took us to Sydney proper, where Reed splashed in the hot summer waves of Manly Beach for his late December birthday, and where we took a ferryboat down the harbor and witnessed the sun set fire to the top of the Sydney Opera House. It was a relief, a lightness, to sightsee with locals. Sydney is pleasurable, but she is not easy to navigate.
The morning of December 31, a friend of Adriel’s calls from our anticipated spot for the evening festivities.
“She got there by ten this morning, and it’s already filled to the gills,” Adriel whispers with her hand over the phone. “She’s saving us a few feet of space, but she says we need to be there by three so she can take a break.”
My eyes widen; my heart heaves with the thought of five children parked on a blanket for nine hours until fireworks.
“Still want to?” she asks. I make a face. I mentally replay the Internet video we watched yesterday of last year’s harbor fireworks display and debate the merits of wedging the lot of us in three square feet and no bathrooms.
Tonight—the nine of our bodies bedecked with pajamas and glow sticks—we fire up the backyard grill and queue eighties music from our laptops. We cavort on the trampoline and laugh as our neon-glowing heads of pink, blue, and yellow swirl and jostle up and down. The kids giggle, and I bathe in the sound. I sing along loudly to songs from my childhood. We watch the display of fireworks from the comfort of the McAlarys’ couch, and we fall asleep at a reasonable hour.
There was a global phenomenon an arm’s reach away, and we chose instead to soak in the ordinariness of home, be it a temporary one. Tonight, I log in a day’s work of paying attention.
A new year has arrived, and we are squarely in the suburbs to welcome it.
Australia is didgeridoos and dingoes, deadly rain forest weeds and millions of endemic creatures. It is also Santa at the mall and commonplace lawn grass. It, along with New Zealand, is so distant from my native country and my daily awareness that it’s easy to forget about this corner of the world. They welcome the day first here, before the rest of us on the planet. They have given us refrigeration, Wi-Fi, and bungee jumping. Australia’s citizens primarily speak English, yet they christen places with names like Bong Bong, Boing Boing, Bungle Bungles, Bubble Bubble, Humpty Doo, Headbutts, Tittybong, and Nowhere Else. New Zealand sheep outnumber people six to one and adorn the rest of us with merino wool. Yet the people remind me of Texas, my birthplace—neighborly, proud of their heritage, salt of the earth. They are familiar faces, at home nine thousand miles away from my own.
The citizens of this corner of the world cherish their land. They love their waters. They cultivate both well, carve lightly into the topography, and delight in the natural world’s pleasures with aplomb. Representatives of the human race are sparse. Trees that once played with dinosaurs still run wild. Wildflowers frolic in abandon with livestock. People plow the dark soil and paint with earth’s rocks.
Asia forces me into the unknown; Australia and New Zealand give me the gift of retreat. Asia taps my Americanness on the shoulder and plays a new song with a novel beat, asks me for a dance. Australia hands me a glass of wine and invites me to take a load off in the chair on the back deck. My wayfaring half has been resurrected, yet my other half, the homebody, still exists among night market stalls and grass tucked at the base of the Southern Alps.
My full body, I realize, was always in my Oregon neighborhood, reading stories on the couch to my kids about faraway lands. I savor mango sticky rice from dubious food stalls in Chiang Mai, and I relish grilled cheese and tomato soup on my dining room table. Our last ordinary days in Australia whisper to me a secret: going into the unknown means returning to the known is a bewitching sweetness. Adventure doesn’t always require a sturdy backpack.
We feed chickens; we make soup; we go to the movies. We catch up on work and school. We spot kangaroos crossing the neighborhood road as deer do in Texas. We pay attention for two more weeks. And then, we fold our laundry, repack our bags, and replenish our deodorant stash. It is time to reengage with the planet in a new year.
Snows of seasonal cotton lie dormant till wind swirls its spell
Kisses ankles of children with ready walking sticks,
Tufts flit down, down, downward again.
Juvenile milky puffs emancipate from its mother branch,
Maypole-dancing down the bole.
December tides of late spring hearken new birth.
Leaves raise hands as celebrants of new life,
A nativity brought for all.
It is summer. Glad tidings to all.