Refrigerators at the End of the Road

At the end of every dirt road in Alaska, somebody has abandoned an appliance—dryers, fridges, washing machines, rusted hunks of highway equipment. My own yard is full of such decorations. When I moved in, the previous tenant had left a serviceable, if rusted, woodstove to rot in the driveway. I found fifty gallon drums, stacks of tires, lumber, firewood, and a snare drum strewn across the yard. There were a couple of cars and an old rusted refrigerator. To this collection, I have added a freezer and a several inoculated shiitake mushroom logs.

I drove up the Alaska Highway to Fairbanks a few years ago with a woman I wanted to marry. The cabin we moved into had no running water. Wires dangled from the ceiling. At night, squirrels chewed through the insulation in the roof, and when the temperature dropped that first autumn, the logs leeched so much heat I had to use a car scraper in order to look out the window.

The woman I loved stayed a full month before she bought a ticket back south. At first, I assumed she just didn’t want to be with a man who spent winter months concocting schemes to circumnavigate the globe by bicycle and canoe, and who relished the idea of keeping a rusted truck hull as a yard decoration. She had different ideas of adventure. She wanted a different sort of stability than Alaska could offer. I believed she simply wanted somewhere warmer, somewhere closer to her family, somewhere that didn’t include me.

But a couple months after it ended, I discovered she had moved to a town in western North Dakota, a place— if anything— lonelier, windier, and colder than Alaska.

It had never occurred to me to ask: What did she want? I’d invited her on the journey, but failed to include her in my plans. In looking always to the next trip, the next big leap, I had already left the relationship behind. The breakup, I discovered, had been my fault.

The broken refrigerator in my yard reminds me that obsessive wanderlust has consequences. It marks the tension between the rooted and the roaming, between nostalgia and expectation, between a life of domesticity and a life of solitary wandering. The forgotten machinery at the end of those cul-de-sacs creates a boundary between the familiar world and the wilderness.

I know. This stuff is junk—appliances dumped by some wanton guy who just didn’t give a shit. But we tend to forget—too often—that everything is connected. At one point, the refrigerator at the end of my driveway functioned. So did the Volvo. For a while, so did my relationship.

I had applied the same philosophy to love that I applied to the rest of my life: that if I kept moving I could force my way into a happy ending. I had placed my faith with the nomadic, had believed in the power of a packed bag. I had never accepted that life requires a delicate balance. If I was to discover what drove me to wander, I first had to learn to be still.

After I graduated college, I moved to South Korea to teach English. I still wonder why I took the job. Korea is high on the list of most densely populated places, and crowds overwhelm me—I once had a panic attack in Costco because the lines were too long. In Korea, every corner had internet cafés, business dinners were part of my job description, and the mobs of people were inescapable.

So when I couldn’t cope with the madness, I took a vacation to Mongolia. I bought a flight out of Seoul, and a few hours later I landed in Ulan Bator.

The jeep that I rode in from the airport smelled of mutton. A herd of goats bleated and crossed the potholed road. From the hill overlooking the city, I would have never guessed that a million people lived in the valley below. There were no lights. I could see stars overhead. I hadn’t seen a star in three months. The city seemed practical and rough as sandpaper. Despite the Soviet architecture, Ulan Bator felt almost transient.

The next day, I took a mini-bus, packed with more people than seats, to Karkorim. The original highway had long since crumbled away, and we bounced across the steppe on a homemade road. I leaned out the open door for a better view. Nothing broke the horizon but a few sand dunes and a peppering of horses.

Always, there were horses. Mongolians have perfected the art of horsemanship. Their horses are tiny things, smaller than some ponies, but tough enough to race for days across the Gobi. A Russian man in Ulan Bator who had spent a month in the country, said to me, “These Mongols, my friend, they even screw on horses. I know. A woman taught me.”

I ate horse jerky and horse stew. Every place I stopped, people offered bowls of yellowish, fermented mare’s milk called airak.

I’m not much of a horse person, but I wanted to see the countryside. In Karkorim, I found a bunk behind a coffee shop, and I gave the store owner 40 dollars in tugrug to rent a horse for a week. Even coffee shop owners kept horses.

The owner’s cousin arrived that afternoon with my rental horse—a mangy roan whose ribs rippled like waves along his sides. I saddled him with what looked to me more an assortment of rags and wood blocks than a saddle. When I climbed on, my feet nearly reached the ground. But the horse ate plenty, drank enough, and was as docile as a puppy. We rode the hills for nearly a week, and that horse never once faltered, never balked at my amateur handling; he could gallop flat out for a kilometer without breaking a sweat.

I didn’t know where to go, or what I was doing, so I enlisted Chuluun, the owner’s cousin, as a guide. Several of his horses had gone missing a few valleys over, and I was informed by the coffee shop owner that I would help Chuluun in the search. Chuluun was my age—twenty-three—and he smiled with his gums. Most of his teeth were rotten. In the week, we would become good friends.

For three days we rode along high scree slopes and out across windswept valley floors where yak, goats and horses had chewed the steppe into a lawn. We stopped in to visit gers—round, movable houses insulated with wool, known elsewhere as yurts. The families fed me fresh yak butter (quite tasty), curdled yak yogurt (not as good), and dried yak cheese (tasted like sandstone and ammonia). I drank so much homemade vodka that I almost fell off my horse.

Occasionally, other men joined us in our search for the missing horses, which after a while didn’t seem like much of a search at all. We would race to the top of a rise in the trail. We skirted around a Buddhist shrine, fluttering with prayer flags, and when I wasn’t skilled enough to direct my horse in the right direction, the men waited for me to show the proper respect. We descended to a fenced-in spring, where we dismounted and after several shots of vodka, a few sniffs of snuff and a pipe passed around the circle, Chuluun smacked my horse abruptly on the hind flank. It reared up on his tether and tore the fence apart. The men fell over laughing, and I spent ten minutes chasing the horse across the steppe. He calmed when I caught him, and together, Chuluun and I repaired the logs on the fence.

We stopped one afternoon at the ger of a man named Baldaarch. His wife offered us airak. I had come to like the sour boozy flavor of the drink.

We sat in silence for several minutes. Neither Chuluun nor Baldaarch spoke English; for the past week I’d communicated with sign language. Then Baldaarch crawled under the bed and pulled out a car battery, connected to a solar panel outside. He brought me outside with him, around the edge of the felted wall, and fiddled with the connections.

He had a satellite dish mounted on the side of a broken wooden cart. He rotated the dish, shouted through the walls of the ger to his wife. When I walked in, the entire family looked proud.

Next to the incense holder, Destiny’s Child sang “Bootylicious” on a black and white television. We watched Beyoncé dance, enthralled as hips shook harder and harder, as outfits grew skimpier and skimpier, until the entire room looked at me as if to say, “You live there? In that world?”

And suddenly the broken wagon and the television powered by a car battery reminded me that I was just a tourist, that I didn’t understand what it meant to be nomadic at all.

After I quit my job in Korea in early June, I wandered for several months through Southeast Asia. I started in Hanoi, traveling with another ESL teacher.

I had my itinerary planned out. I knew what I wanted to see, where I wanted to go, how much time I wanted to spend in each city. I was sure of what to expect. I’d read guidebooks.

After three days in Vietnam, I’d been robbed twice, ripped off during a money exchange, had a postcard vendor offer to sell me heroin, and I’d spent the night on the floor of a slow moving train, surrounded by villagers who smelled like mildewed garlic.

We traveled to Mt. Fansipan, on the Chinese border, with a plan to trek to the summit. But our guide didn’t know the first thing about hiking. He lagged behind us, he chain smoked, and when I asked him once whether he liked guiding in northern Vietnam, and he replied that no, he hated it.

“I lived in Malaysia. That was the best job, at the factory. They gave me cell phones.” Near the end of our climb, the guide got heat exhaustion and collapsed. It took two of us to help him down to the road, where we flagged a ride back to town on the back of a logging truck.

The idea that a person could prefer work in a cell phone factory to walking through the woods unhinged me. I was young and sure I had the world figured out; I knew for certain that wilderness was our only salvation. It didn’t make sense that someone, anyone, especially in so exotic a place, could believe otherwise.

I think that was when the trip began to unravel. Asia became a muddled memory before I bothered to make sense of it. In Laos, my friend discovered a guesthouse that sold “happy pizzas” and pot-laced milkshakes. After a week, I left him in a hammock on the banks of the Mekong River. I couldn’t handle such catharsis.

I moved quickly, retained only snapshots. In Vietnam, a water buffalo on a terraced hillside; a postcard vendor who screamed “Fuck you!” when I declined his offer of opium; the traffic. In Laos, the Mekong River. In Myanmar, pagodas; a sand painting of Buddha that still hangs on my wall; cane liquor; cars burned to protest the junta. Beautiful photographs, skewed memories.

Perhaps the search for a life’s meaning is like this: You are walking on a path through a forest, or maybe you are floating a braided river. Side trails and tributaries lead off in many directions, and constantly you are plagued by choices. A wrong turn could leave you stranded. When the side channels trickle back in, or when the upper path returns to the main trail, you feel pleased with your decision. Thank God I didn’t choose that route. Look at those brambles, imagine the log jam. But suddenly you emerge in the parking lot at the trailhead, or you reach the landing, and find that you aren’t ready to leave yet. You wish to remain in the woods. After all the effort to discern the correct path, you realize suddenly that self-discovery and self-destruction trace the same route.

In Bangkok, I shared a bottle with an Irishman and his Thai girlfriend, and when the booze was gone, I stood up on my plastic chair and demanded the musicians play “Freebird.”

“Skynard! Skynard!” the crowd of expatriates chanted.

The next morning I woke up on a plywood floor in a two dollar hotel room and didn’t remember how I’d gotten there.

The fact was, I had no interest in learning about Thai culture or Burmese culture or about the atrocities committed during the Vietnam War. I didn’t care about temples. I had no burning desire to ride around on elephants or laze on an umbrella beach or volunteer at an orphanage. I saw myself as a modern day prodigal son, who could survive a crawl through the gutters and show up on my parent’s doorstep to fanfare and a roasted pig.

None of my family knew where I was. I hadn’t spoken to my parents for weeks. The friend I’d traveled with through Vietnam had returned to Canada. My backpack contained a little climbing gear, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, a pinstriped wool suit, and a bottle of moonshine stuffed with pickled scorpions.

I listened to other tourists talk about their visits to healing temples. I watched an American girl attempt a leap through a flaming hula-hoop at the full-moon party on Koh Phanang. She suffered third degree burns on her legs and crotch.

In Kuala Lumpur, I ate lunch with a woman who claimed to be a nurse. She coerced me into a gambling scheme that left me stranded far out in the suburbs.

While hitchhiking to Kota Baru, I was picked up by an imam who gave me a ride on his motorbike. He refused my money and bought me tea while he tried to explain that the tenants of Islam were not so different in philosophy from Christianity.

I hopped buses and tuk-tuks, took a ferry out of Surat Thani to the islands, and eventually I moved into an abandoned jungle shack off the east coast of Malaysia. I slept for free on a plank floor. For most of August, I stayed in my shack, reading books borrowed from vacationers at the resorts further down the beach.

I met a woman from New Mexico at one of the resorts and brought her back to my abandoned shed. We followed foot paths out to where limestone bluffs met the sea. At three in the morning we trusted the moonlight and leapt from a twenty foot cliff down to the reef, hoping we were jumping during high tide. The next afternoon, a nine-foot long monitor lizard moved onto the porch of the hut; we crawled out the back window to escape.

The journalist and novelist George Alfred Townsend, who spent the last half of his life building an enormous estate in rural Maryland, wrote in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1891: “I took eight years at least, if not twelve, out of my life and invested it in experience, saving nothing, but going many a thousand miles that I might learn how to see; for the eye is to the writer what the hand is to the mechanic.”

I wonder if this was what I was doing during those months on the Southeast Asian backpacker trail, bouncing from one hostel to the next, eschewing the locals, studying the Lonely Planet Shoestring Guide like a bible. Did I learn some deep truth about my place in the world? Or was I just another drunk kid on holiday, looking for a good story to tell folks back home?

Years have passed since my Asia journey, and I still haven’t found a way to slow my need for new landscapes. The magnetic spin of the compass continues to blur for me the line between stability and chaos. I have learned only that to be human is to take pause, and to be reminded that sometimes we need to fail in order to make meaning from the worlds we have known.

Travel often seems less a search for the exotic than a search for a home, and the sights along the way serve not to show where we should be going, but to remind us of where we have gone.

I spent a week visiting the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. One day, at a bar called the Magic Sponge, I met a guy from northern England who offered me a drag of his spliff. His body was a solid swirl of tattoos. From throat to ankles, dragons and tribal symbols and hidden meanings bled together in a mass of color. His name was Mark. He proclaimed himself the only trustworthy tattoo artist in Cambodia.

“Why’s that?” I asked him.

“Well, quality and safety don’t come cheap. If you want a good tattoo, you have to pay for it.”

“How much are they?”

He said, “I start at twenty dollars.”

The next day I visited his shop along the riverfront. Mark reached into an ancient refrigerator and pulled out two liters of Angkor Beer. He smacked the caps off on the side of his workbench and handed me a bottle.

“You want a tattoo?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve never really given it much thought.”

I thumbed through a few photo books. Mark complained about his Khmer competitors. He complained that there were too many regulations for tattoo artists in Britain. He punched the cap off another beer. I showed him a navigator’s compass design I liked. He sterilized his equipment, drew a fresh needle from a sealed envelope.

A couple hours later, I stumbled out into the street, drunk from a half-dozen liters of Angkor, the ink turning to scabs between my shoulder blades. Even though I knew there would be hell to pay if my parent’s ever found out, I still felt safer with the tattoo than I had without it. The navigator compass, I had been told, acts as a talisman for sailors who fear they will never return. It could point me toward the familiar, to my father’s shirts draped over a kitchen chair, smelling of sawdust; to the garden planted on the side of the house I’d grown up in, filled with a hundred herbs. I felt sure this tattoo could get me home.

*

I flew back to Chicago in late September, hopped the El to downtown, and wandered into a coffee shop. There, I sat down next to the first friendly face I saw, a large woman tacking away on her computer. I asked to use her cell phone. We talked for less than ten minutes before she presented me with a pyramid scheme; she said that with just a little up-front cash, I could make a fortune selling time-shares. It was the same story I had heard from every tout between Hanoi and Yangon, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

The exotic, I had assumed, must be located somewhere else. I believed, stubbornly, that adventure required movement, and for a long time I ignored the signs telling me otherwise—the friends who settled into full time jobs, the frustrated lover who just wanted me to listen, the permanence of the ink on my back.

It took moving north for me to realize that there is little difference between the forest and the city, between the tavern and the church, between the dead end road and the tangle of thorns beyond it. In the end, a life well lived isn’t discovered on the surface, but somewhere deeper, along the boundary between the foreign and the familiar.

I ran out of pages in my journal on that Asia trip, and ended here: “The greatest conceit for a traveler is that the traveling never ends. There is always another place beyond the horizon that hasn’t yet been treaded.”

Sometimes, that place is nearer than we think.

*

There is a moment between sleep and the awoken day where I cling to my dreams. I lie still in my bed, and if I focus, I can linger, just for a moment, in that fragmentary moonscape where past and present intertwine.

The instant I roll over, I find I have ascended into a more graspable existence. I pull on my clothes, let the dog out, and fall into the routine of my day.

But I retain images of that other world, where I once lived in a surety of ignorance: I see a cigarette rolled with graphing paper, shared with a farmer at a stupa in Laos. I can taste the chemical burn on my throat. I remember my friend Jim playing guitar for an American woman who proudly showed us her recent breast augmentation. “I saved like, five thousand dollars on these,” she said. I remember when one day it dawned on me that the women who carried loads of firewood on their heads were not exotic. They were just poor.

When we reach outside the grey edges of the place where we protect our comforts, it becomes impossible to crawl back into that familiar world and find peace. Perhaps this is how we understand memory. Like the flashes of bright prayer flags on the steppe or the rot smell of durian fruit on a diesel bus or the yellow light in a birch grove when the frost falls, memories are fleeting. Once context fades, the remembered past soon follows. One morning, we snap awake, we turn on the coffee, we make an egg and toast, and as we sit down it occurs to us that innocence is gone and no amount of reflection on the past can teach us how to proceed.

*

In Mongolia, Chuluun and I never found those missing horses. The coffee shop owner figured that probably somebody found them wandering with another herd, and, needing meat, butchered and ate them.

“It is too bad,” said the coffee shop owner, “but among the nomadic peoples, when life is difficult, we starve. That is life.”

A few months after I left Phnom Penh, I used a mirror to look at Mark’s work, and I noticed that the compass was crooked. Suddenly, it dawned on me that a compass can point in a thousand directions, and that it was as likely to lead me into wastelands as to bring me home.

I’ve come to love my birch grove—inhabited as it is by junked kitchen appliances— for its ability to teach stillness. In January when the temperatures drop to forty below and my car doesn’t start and my water jugs freeze to the floor, I often step out onto the porch to contemplate, and after years of travel, it feels like an ending, as if the only way forward is to turn back.

I do get restless. Sometimes I strap on a pair of skis or snowshoes and just head out. I check on the voles that live in the seats of the broken Volvo. I follow moose trails; flush ptarmigan; look for the tracks of fox or lynx; wander into the black spruce and muskeg along the north slopes of the Tanana Hills. Small pleasures that contain great rewards.

Movement can lead us inward as well as forward. I have a new lover now, a writer who dreams with me of long canoe trips and endless walks. Together, we are discovering that a life well lived is a journey both wild and grounded, marked with memories and prayer flags, with an inked compass and a refrigerator shot full of holes.

Sometimes, in the fireweed summer or the yellowing autumn, we sit on our porch and listen to the wind move through the trees.