Home Trees

I swear, the Pacific Northwest has trees like nowhere else on earth.

If these trees were people, they'd be supermodels in miniskirts.

Coming home on the ferry, I experienced a completely different green than I'd seen in a very long time. My eyes felt relieved. My home isn't the bright, tropical green of palm trees or ferns: it's a deep, cool green, brushed with the blue of juniper berries and the rust of red cedar bark. The mountains are snow-capped in summer, and underneath them, the forest is cool as a shadow.

My parent's yard

After seeing my parents for the first time, one of the first things we did together was to take a walk around their property in the Highlands. I had missed the smell of the woods in high summer, I realized - the particular smell of tree sap and dust, the colour of the wild grasses, and the snapping sound of grasshoppers taking flight. At this time of year, the Oregon grapes and the Salal berries are in full bloom, a feast for the deer.

I sat outside on my parents' shady deck, watching the woodpeckers and the hummingbirds. The dog followed me to the chicken coop, where I collected the morning eggs; then I went inside to brew a pot of coffee and read the newspaper.

It felt good to be home.

*                *                 *

John and I took my parent's dog for a long walk, from their place in the Highlands to Thetis Lake and back - about five hours return. I love the life and decay of this forest, among trees and plants I recognize. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace. This is what I missed the most.

I missed the colours and the feeling of these woods. The red-barked arbutus and the white alder, the moss covering over everything, and the way the ferns grow out of the maple trees. I missed the little rivers I've known since childhood, the ravens, the eagles. Just everything.

Eventually, John and I came out of the mountains to town, down an old country road, passing woodsy parks and open fields where sheep grazed. I wondered why I ever felt so impressed by the scenery in New Zealand - this was definitely just as pretty, I thought.

We rolled into Victoria for the first time on the top floor of a double-decker bus.

I'm told that most towns look most beautiful from the upper deck of a bus. You can see the Victorian details of the shops, and everything has a new perspective. The bus tends to careen through overhanging branches in an exciting way.

But Victoria was not the town I remembered.

As I sat watching my city all around me, I wished I could take a rag and wipe away the layers of dirt that coated everything, especially the sidewalks. There was bird shit everywhere, black spots of gum, spilled drinks and vomit and urine and layers of black grit so deep in the brick sidewalks that the cement was no longer grey.

I got down off the bus and tried to remember why I once thought this place was pretty.

I walked down to the harbour where tourists were taking pictures, and started to feel better. Black crows squabbled in the rooftops, and the wind carried away a scrap of newspaper. The crowds were enormous, but not as big as I remembered. I looked at the ivy creeping up the sides of buildings, gardens and baskets of flowers, pretty shopfronts (ignoring the shit-splattered awnings and the murky doorways). I walked to Chinatown, to the park, to the pub, to the book store.

Everywhere people asked me how it felt to be home.

It felt infinitely strange.

I had this unshakable, illogical dread. Nothing was as it should be. New Zealand wasn't how it was supposed to be, and neither was coming home. I faced a variance between my expectations and my reality that was more enormous than I had anticipated.

I began to suffer from anxiety, insomnia. People told me it was jet lag.

It wasn't.

It was more than that. I had this growing conviction that something very bad was about to happen.

Was I having some kind of nervous breakdown? I'd never felt so strange before. Jittery. Depressed. I experienced paranoid premonitions of my death, strange nightmares. I lost sleep. I began to fear for my loved ones. There was no reason for it. It was a limitless, inexplicable, unfocused nervous anxiety about nothing and everything at once.  

Here I was, at home, no responsibilities, a good job, no need to worry about rent or groceries. My parents even let me borrow their extra car. Something wasn't adding up. Something was going to catch up to me, any day now.

Only it didn't.

I shouldn't say I had no responsibilities. I went straight to work full-time, and I tried to fill up all of my free time doing the things I should be doing. I saw my friends as much as possible. There were weddings and birthdays, dinner parties, visits to grandparents, movie nights, pub nights, dog walks, and catching up with our families and friends in the evenings. In fact, I began to feel that every day was rapidly booking up. I began to feel that time was filling up and slipping by in a way that was so far out of my control it was scary.

I began to think that maybe what I needed was a week to myself.

Eventually though, the anxiety subsided, inexplicably. I began to feel marginally more comfortable socially. Something inside of me began to slowly switch off.

New Zealand became a dream that no longer exists. Sometimes I make a joke or a reference to that time, but those instances are growing less and less. It is exactly the time of year in which I left, as though I have woken from a long coma to find that only a week has passed. Everything that I experienced was only a dream.

What I gained from my trip, though, is perspective. I gained an appreciation for my place of birth that I didn't have before - and also a more critical eye. I've gained more awareness about what it is I want in life, what it means to travel and what it means to be home.

And the trip will always be real to me. I'll remember the faces of those people who were kind to me, the friends I met, the experiences we shared. I will always be real to those people in that moment, the snapshot of my life in which I knew them, in a way that the rest of my life can never have been real to them. In the same way that the snapshot of my life in New Zealand will never be real to my friends here at home.

It is as though leaving home caused my life experience to fracture, as though I was able to break off from everyone and everything I knew; coming home again has made me face up to that fracture, has made me glue the pieces back together. I can only marvel at how well they fit. Sometimes you can't even see the crack.

Last night, John and I got the keys to our new apartment. It's in a character house, with hardwood floors and stained-glass windows, a cast-iron sculpted fireplace, a big kitchen. In the yard there is an apple tree dropping fruit onto the cobblestones. Underneath it there is an old bench, and as I sat there I realized that this will be my new home.

This will be my new home tree.

The End of an Adventure

I don't really expect twenty hours of straight travel to be easy. 

By the time we're packed and ready to leave the Cooks, though, I begin to feel a deep-seeded panic somewhere in the hollow of my chest. It is small, but it's insistent.

I realize that I'm not ready to go home. It's strange. After all this time I've been homesick, dreaming about my city, missing my life, and now it comes down to it and I am changing my mind. I'm not ready for this trip to be over.

I'm afraid that, once I arrive home, this entire past year will seem like an insignificant dream. Arriving in Auckland, hiking the Cape, the road trips, living in Wellington, Blenheim and Tauranga - the beaches, the glaciers, the people I've met - all of it will dissolve in ten minutes, as though it never existed. I'm not ready for that to happen.

We pay our departure fees and collect our boarding passes, but part of me feels like a cat being dragged to the bath, leaving my scratch-marks in the carpet. John looks at me and I smile. We board the plane.

My favourite part of flying is the take-off. I love the way the plane speeds up along the runway, the feeling of the tarmac disappearing, the tilt of the cabin and way the plane teeters in the air for a moment before finding the right current. It is also scary as hell. I clutch John's hand every time.

From the Cook Islands, our flight to LAX lasts about nine hours. Neither of us sleeps, we just watch our little television screens; and we are served two meals, neither one with a vegetarian option. At one point, John peeks through the blind to reveal an intense fuchsia sunrise. Grey clouds on the black ocean ripple across my view, like snow-covered ice floes in the Arctic. Then the sky seems to split open, and a red light cuts through everything. We chase the sunrise down. Thanks to the time difference, we arrive in the afternoon, more than twelve hours after our take-off. 

Next we settle in for a seven-hour stopover, which we spend broke and bored in the airport, fidgeting and watching the clock. To be fair, several hours of our wait is spent in a line-up, shuffling slowly toward a customs counter. When we finally step up, I'm told to wait my turn - since John and I aren't married, we're not considered a family and therefore have to suffer through customs individually. Later, we circle the entire airport on the shuttle, looking for our Air Canada gate - only to find that it is Gate 2, the gate we arrived at. The departure area is upstairs, and although I'm glad we're in no hurry, I do wonder why there's no sign about that.

Finally, we board the flight to Vancouver - the final leg of our journey. It's over in three hours.

My favourite part of coming home is the moment I see my sister Amelia. She is waiting for me at the airport, and I can hardly wait to drop my bags and hug her, and she dances me around the airport like we are kids and nobody is watching. I see myself in her eyes. We are spinning around ballroom-style, looking at each other with the exact same expression, thinking to ourselves: she looks so different. Her eyes are more feline than I remember, more green.

We spend the night at Millie's, which is a beautiful apartment, clean and comfortable. There are hardwood floors, shadow-boxes, framed photographs, instruments, a terrarium. The walls are brightly painted and the many houseplants are vibrantly alive. I feel strangely proud of her. The next morning, my sister serves up the best breakfast I've had in at least a year: perfect crepes with fresh fruit salad (it's summer here - there are local berries, peaches, figs), yogurt, real bacon (none for me), real coffee (French-press style). Then Matt drives us to the sky train, and we all promise we'll see each other soon.

Standing on the deck of the ferry, the panic I feel increases. I am almost home. It is all over. I'm home.