Coming home

My friends here have a specific term we use when talking about the act of returning from a long trip: re-entry. I’m not quite sure who coined it (Sam? Lindsay?), but to me the breathless descent through the atmosphere that astronauts make when returning to Earth is the perfect allusion. Coming home is hard, and in most cases, inevitable in some form.

We have been home for ten days now. The three of us arrived home safely Friday afternoon, the biggest hitch being a four-hour delay (and threat of flight cancellation) on the Miami-San Francisco leg of our journey home. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it hadn’t been for Milo, who— surprisingly fresh from his ten-hour flight from Buenos Aires—had been returned to his kennel and was sitting on the sunny tarmac as the temperatures climbed in Florida. Then, moments after my parents picked us up at SFO, we blew a tire! It was our first flat of the trip, and Juan changed it with the speed of an expert pit crew.

But when we talk about re-entry, we’re not really talking about the actual journey home, but the gritty process of reacclimatizing yourself to life back home. While we returned from Argentina in about 24 hours—little more than one hour for each month we’ve been away—we are still readjusting to life here. For the first few days, it felt just like a visit home, and getting to know this area felt almost as novel as exploring any other new culture. Although we have moved in directly with my family to an area a mere 40 minutes’ drive from where we used to live, it’s a bit of a culture shock—both coming from San Francisco and coming from the road. It’s sunny. It’s suburban. It is so, so rich.

California is the land of plenty, and where we have landed for now in Silicon Valley is one of the most privileged places in all the world. People here are inventing things and making tons of money and living very well. The first things that struck me when we returned home was how fancy and new all the cars are, and how clean and well-maintained the built environment is. In many ways, it is the very opposite of Argentina, a place that is largely founded upon nostalgia and tradition. Here, everything is about looking forward. Every day is sunny. Everything is new. And considering my mental clock pretty much stopped in late 2012, I feel more than a little behind the times.

It is bewildering to be around all this wealth when you are coming from a mindset of scarcity. But this is just one of the many things that you have to adjust during the re-entry process. Another is being able to understand everything, all the time—and, furthermore, being expected to understand everything, all the time. For the past almost two years, I have understand only a fraction of what has been going on around me in terms of language and cultural context, and that has been understood and pardoned by mostly everyone I’ve met. Here, people mention the new apps that they’ve been using to track the new services/diets/trends and I’m…just…like: huh?

Part of me is urging myself to get back up to speed here at home, and the other part of me is desperately trying to resist the urge. In many ways, the most valuable part of the trip for me was beginning to understand one key personal truth: that life can be as complicated or as simple as I make it, and the more simple it is, the more enjoyable it tends to be. I’m not quite sure yet what this means, or how to apply it to a more stationary life, but I do feel that hurrying to realign myself with what everyone else is doing is probably not remaining true to this new understanding. I know that consuming less is one big piece of this, and that another is learning to be more in control of my time. I have learned that I do not have to be busy all the time, and that the feeling of idleness that I mistook for boredom is not really boredom at all, but just the sighing of a mind accustomed to constant stimulation. On the road, I usually had at least two hours a day where I got to just think—and after I got over the initial hysterical feeling that I was bored and wasting my life, I got to some good thinking.
I’ve got a lot more to figure out, but I’m in no rush at the moment. Right now, it’s just good to be home. And even though I feel a little twinge of wistfulness whenever I think of our travels, we are anxiously awaiting our reunion with the van and some good local road trips…

 
PS: For anyone flying from Buenos Aires back to the US with a dog, flying with American Airlines was pretty easy. We had originally booked through United Airlines, but then had to cancel our tickets when we were told that our dog would have to be handled by a third-party cargo booker to the tune of $1,000. This also meant that we would not be able to claim him during our layover, and he would not be walked or attended to unless we paid an extra fee. (They said pets were allowed to stay in their kennels for 18 hours without being let out!) On American Airlines, our dog was able to fly as simple checked baggage for a fee of around $200. We got to claim him and hang out with him during our layover as well. The only sketchy thing was that they did not seem to have any kind of pet protocol in place, so we had to keep an eye on him in Miami. Juan saw that he had been left in a sunny spot on a hot morning during mounting delays, and we had to ask the gate personnel to call down to the baggage handlers and have him moved to the shade. They also gave him water, which was very nice.