I’m traveling again and it’s weird, and wonderful, as always. Being in one place and then
another place, so different from each other, and so quickly. Our great-great-grandmothers marvel at the speed of our culture collision.

I’m sitting in the Dubai Airport now: It’s sleek, spacious, futuristic and spotless, with an overabundance of smiling people with “May I help you?” printed on the their blue polos. They helpfully point toward waiting lines and sliding train doors. It’s surreal after contorting myself into a dark airplane seat for 12 hours. Now I’m sitting in an Asian restaurant and tried to order breakfast at 8 p.m. local time. I don’t know what time it feels like but breakfast seemed right. I ordered soup instead.

Just this morning I waved good-bye to my parents, yellow leaves covering the gravel driveway. Stopped for gas at the Kwik Trip in Winchester, watching bearded guys dressed in camouflage gas up their pickups that carried lumber or ATVs; in a couple of weeks they’ll be loaded with bloody deer carcasses. Drove on a spacious highway under Skeleton Bridge Road, billboards breaking up the plowed fields and nearly leafless trees. One for a store that sells 70 kinds of cheese & sausage, one with a smiley face made from bullet holes (“We sell silencers!”), one for Jug’s Hitching Post (“It’s the meat that matters!”). And one that says “You don’t use heroin; it uses you.” I pass by an electronic Mobil sign that optimistically proclaims that it’s 91 degrees. Maybe it is where I’m going, I think.

I pass a Love’s tanker truck, a port-o-potty on top of the Mercury Marine plant. I pass under Lost Arrow Road, thinking about all the places I’ve been this year — how they’ve all been back to visit places I’ve already been, except for this one. Wondering what all this revisiting is about. Like I’ve been using the gravitational pull of all these places to slingshot myself somewhere new.

I’ve spent so much of this year traveling, both externally and internally, and a friend suggested that my trip to South Africa might be analogous to new lands I’m trying to find within. I think there’s something to that.