In Cappadocia Turkiye last summer, after a year’s galavanting around the globe, I had the opportunity to gain some perspective. High above July’s morning concerns, I floated with a few dozen other tourists in the Discovery Tours hot air balloon. Above us, our captain pumped mesmerizing tongues of orange-blue fire upwards into the depths of our balloon. Around us, other adventurers dotted the sky in their own supermassive inverted teardrops, floating without care here and there and all around. Below was transformed miniature: backyard-dirt anthills and felt grasslands sprawled out underneath our shadow, white die-cast Chevys scurried to and fro like insects, following the unseen queen truck’s orders and kicking up dust bunnies on sandy trails. A tiny family waved their tiny arms, shoulders light from their only ever holding up tiny, worldly worries.
This is it. I thought. I am living the Rick Steves moment. I am recycling air I had before now only ever imagined through a television screen. I am feeling the same feels, seeing the same sights, hiding my eyes from the same glaring orange sun. Years earlier, Rick had been a foundational inspiration for my wanderlust. His warm-fuzzy look at the world and desire for the “local experience” inspired my own warm-fuzzies, my own local desires. Up here in the balloon, far away from the ground, I had done the travelling, finally, which had been (for years) reserved for goal lists and the “when I am X I will Y” portion of my brain. I had made it across the uncertain and adventurous gap, stepped my way to the other side of a (wonderful) long year abroad.
Of course, before I had left the United States, I had kept in my heart a secret desire of what it will be like to be a traveller. My secret desire was that it will be, like, different. Rather than, like, different, I found that things were like, the same. Is this it? I thought to myself as I floated above the world, it feels the same as always. It is too warm this morning, and I regret bringing the sweater. The sun is blinding. Without Mom to nag remind me, I brought no shades. In the midst of things, after a year of climbing mountains, dozens of new friends, and enough experiences to fill a blog twice a month for at least a year— I am still just Steve in a balloon. I paid for the breakfast and champagne I didn’t want. I ate the bread that most Turks can’t afford from their own supermarkets. Soon I will go back down to the ground to buy more bread, reflect unfruitfully on the proper way to exist in this place, and worry about all the things I’m not yet and will never be and will wish I was regardless (now that I’m X, I will need to be Y so that I can Z).
I am hyper-aware of my Americanness on this balloon tour, my tourist status. Our balloon captain’s smile is extra wide, hammed up for the likes of me and the other floaters. The town we’re staying in exists only for us, has cut ties with any sense of cultural integrity or independence from the tourist whim (and for good $200-USD-per-balloon-ride reason!). I feel like a sellout today. Like a buyer of culture and consumer (rather than steward, observer, participant, respectable patron, etc.) of “the local flavor” which I undoubtedly am, a title which comes with the territory of quick travel.
It is interesting being here in (the) tourist country. In Iowa, there are no tourists, no reason to tour. Anyone who you might meet has a purpose, reason for staying in the flyby state. In Almaty, I was not a tourist but a resident. I contributed to the people and the place, shared in its benefits. Here in Turkey, I feel wrong for buying my way in, wrong for soaking in the warm waters, wrong for enjoying the “local flavor” I had– for so many years– longed for. I’m not sure about the whole touring thing, how to fit in, or whether I even can (or should).
Before I left Iowa, Princeton in Asia invited us soon-to-be-fellows to reflect on how our lived identities might impact our experiences at home and abroad. In hindsight, this exercise was like asking a mosquito to reflect on the itch it will give to an arm. After stepping off the plane in Almaty, I felt no different than I had before I stepped onto the plane. Rather than “new hemisphere new me”, it was SSDD. Gradually, I felt some material change in my life, new skills picked up, Midwestern-ness polished like a gemstone. But really, the change took a lot of reflection and intentionality. For whatever reason, I thought there would be a break in me, but instead, I was and am still floating down the same too-long-too-short river of life as I know it.
Ironically, now that I am back home it is harder to see all of the new identities I have taken on. My midwestern charm is lost in a sea of politeness and doors held open for the next guy. My traveller’s cloak is washed and folded by my bed. What skills I have picked up are hard to market, have helped not at all in convincing the (artificially intelligent) Indeed recruiters that I have a capacity for anything more than what I already have been. I am losing my Russian language that I fought hard to gain, finding it harder to reach out to my friends abroad. In truth, I am afraid of what they will see in me, that they will acknowledge the not-enoughness I see in myself (tiny violins).
On that July day in the balloon, on the way back to town, after toasting 08:30am champaign and cupcakes (why?), I overheard a mother explain to her daughter: “Do you know what you just experienced? Wasn’t that awesome? Many people around the world cannot have done what we did this morning. It is very expensive to be here, and we are very lucky to be able to do this. Your uncle could not do this, even though he would love to. Be sure to give thanks for what you have?” As always, from the hazy fugue of pondering and self-loathe, reality comes ringing out like the dinner bell.
Here is a proposition: the electromagnetic fields that encase Earth in giant spheres of influence are not the only ones. There are many more hundreds of invisible globes of power encasing us, clinging to our joints and pulling us this way and that, guiding our senses in unseen directions. Many of these energy fields are more human and more dynamic than physicists would like to give credit for. There are poles everywhere around the world: tourist and local, Westerner and non, Christian and Atheist (am I giving myself away?), huge smart big super cool guy, and humble modest guy. Like dogs or geese who have the sense to follow the geomagnetic lines deep inside, humans too must adjust to the tugging of these fields, migrate by their winds and orient to their changing poles. All of this to say: I went abroad, and still I felt myself pushed and pulled by invisible forces. In the end, I felt—feel the very same.
Here is a second inflammatory proposition about physics: the world is, in fact, flat. I had suspected as much before leaving, but it was revelatory nonetheless to see it with my own eyes. As it turns out, movies are movies, and life is life is life. What I mean is: everywhere in the world is just my backyard painted with different smells. There is really only one set of hills, one river, one mountain range in the world. Any amount of “otherness” is simply in your (my) head.
Let me draw a picture of the combinatory Iowa Steppe, the Great Plains of Kazakhstan:
I am at The Land. I am chopping wood for a bonfire, clearing trees at the fringes. Next we’re helping to replace a water tube for the outdoor spigot— Dad’s orders, I am told. It is a bright blue beautiful day in May: no sweatshirt for now, but the night will prove chilly. Apple, pear, and even a few cherry trees dot the overgrown greenspace around us. Downhill are the old spool and refuse piles, half-buried in emerald thickets. Uphill is the Дача: beds, sheds, and shitters.
Inside the living spaces, big brown spiders scuttle into dusty corners at the first sign of activity. A fence marks the boundaries of “ours” and the hills remind us all that there is more to Earth than we could ever see in a lifetime.
The grill is stoked and ready, charcoal turned dusty white as the five of us men lay our meat sticks down. A knowing nod from Tatar signals his mastery of English— innuendo is the first step to fluency. Jackson turns and proffers a potato, fluffy and charred from the flames. Ersin brings out the пиво, tosses a Busch Lite to Brian. The enormous Chinese-factory-made-drone-delivered speaker is brought out, and the night passes on into memory.
It was a Saturday in May, three beers deep, when I was (for the Brazillionth time) struck with the similarity of it all. In Iowa, my friends and I go to the land, we grill the meat, we do the chores for dad, we drink the beer and we shoot the shit and we buy the Chinese speakers and we make off-color jokes and we have a grand ole time. And yet…unless my eyes deceive me, those are mountains behind us. Big, sweeping, Central Asian mountains. Unless my ears deceive me, my friends are speaking Russian and Kazakh, and so too the radio. I have a feeling I’m not in Iowa anymore, yet there is less difference than I could shake a drunken fist at.
This was not the only sign of flatness: After a Central Asian culture fest, I am chatting with a Kazakh journalist. The horse-riding show has just concluded and we are back waiting for city buses. At the fair, the shashlik was faire-priced (not to be read as fairly-priced) as were the trinkets and local artworks displayed in yurts. On the mainstage, several acts went on just like anywhere: a tumbling act, young singers and dancers in sequinned uniforms. Now in his 60s, my Kazakh acquaintance is unphased at my American-ness, unbothered by the great green horns sticking out from under my ten-gallon with AMERICAN stamped on the front. He is a political reporter, has been covering Putin for years, as well as Trump now for the greater part of a decade. I remarked on the incredible horsemanship of the festival, something I’d not seen before. “You guys have the same thing in America. This is just a cowboy show. Same difference.” and so it was. So it was.
Okay, well maybe there is some special thread connecting Kazakhstan and Iowa that I had not noticed before. Maybe I just happened to be plopped in the one place that has the same feel as Iowa. Only here I am, sitting in Yu’s homestay in Xincheng, Taiwan. It is Christmas Eve and the local news is playing on the television. Some animal clips pulled from the internet are running beside the weekly weather: silly nothings which mildly entertain no one. The night is dark and unlit outside the windows, aside from a few field overhead lamps.
Earlier, the Catholics were seen dancing outside the town’s Church. A mere kilometer away inside the sunroom, Yu’s husband is telling us in Mandarin (is telling August, rather) about his rice meads. I sip the sweet stuff, and I feel myself relax. The flavor of this moment is the same as home. If I close my eyes, I am on the farm, sitting across from grandma and a paper sack of scrabble tiles. I know that if I look outside, snow will be falling graceful and slow. It’s not the ocean I hear, but someone shovelling the driveway.
Only here I am, sitting on the concrete sidewalk at the edge of the Tamsui River. Today is solo-exploration day and I am alone. Beyond me a group of old Taiwanese men cast out lines into the river. Their scooters and small off-roadsters are laden with bright blue tackle boxes and whiter, rounder lunch tins. To the left of us, I watch the bridge connect two halves of the city. It’s been six months since seeing one of Des Moines’ bridges, yet here is one in front of me. I know, because just beyond it is the botanical garden and skate park, though I can’t see them yet. I will visit them soon, when it is time.
I blink and am at the river again, looking out beyond the Baby Taj’s ancient walls. The Tomb of I'timād-ud-Daulah is as quiet as it gets in Agra, India. Across the wall there is the Yamuna river, old as any book, half shrouded in smog. Backgrounded by low buildings and trees, the river is wide and shallow today. The familiar bridge is still to my left, which means I am on the East side still. If I could cross it, I’m sure I would end up back near the Science Center and sculpture garden, both a short drive from home.
So it is a river then, the single blue thread that binds the world together. It is one river which goes by many names, which starts high in the mountains of the Ile-Alatau, flows down across Wisconsin and Missouri, and cools my hot feet now. What I had hoped, secretly, to find before I left was… I’m not sure. A world beyond my own, experience beyond experience. There was no way to know that the Mississippi goes on forever until I saw it with my own eyes. Now that I have seen, though, I know: I am simply a tiny little man floating down a very large river. I may paddle and fret about the rocks ahead, the fish left behind, but there is no stopping the current. So too are my friends, family, and everyone else I have ever known or not known floating down the very same river of humanity.
“Yes Siddhartha,” he spoke. “It is this what you mean, isn’t it: that the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?”
“This it is,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha’s previous births were no past, and his death and return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.”
-Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Thank you,
Steven
P.S.
Was the world always so flat? I can’t be sure. The matter is complicated by living in the twenty-first century, with satellites and broadbands creating more magnetic and human threads of connection every second. One day in March, our posse was driving through rural Kyrgyzstan. Mountains welled up in the distance as we passed shepherds, farmers, and other folk. As Henry dodged pothole after pothole, I looked out to see a shepherd, no more than twelve, squatting hunched next to his flock of sheep. He was watching his flock as his father had undoubtedly done before him. As his father’s father before him, and so on and so forth, for hundreds if not thousands of years. As we passed by on the road, I noticed a phone in his hand; he was scrolling! Tiktok, Snapchat, Facebook, all the same. He was connected through his phone to the entire world at large—albeit in a strange and minute-video-at-a-time way.
This moment, the shepherd boy in the Kyrgyz mountains, hours walk from any shelter, all the time in the world, and the beauty of ten zillion years of tectonic struggling surrounding him, and here he is scrolling on his smartphone. What to make of it? I’m really not sure. It just…strikes me. That moment strikes me, still.
P.P.S.
Riding across the open plains of Central Kazakhstan and later Kyrgyzstan, I am left to wonder: why don’t we do this back home? Ah yes, we…they, the indigenous, did do this back home, before they…we stopped them. At the re-introduction of the horse to the Great Plains region, nomadic life was practiced in similar fashion to how it has been in Central Asia for the past thousand years. So too do tipis bear a striking resemblance to yurts, great plains to great steppe, horse riders to horse riders, apples to apples ad infinitum. All the same!
Are you a flat-earther now?