Coming home

Today, I feel lonely. I had free time and called a bunch of family and friends. It was nice to hear what everyone’s doing, but sometimes I feel like I have less and less in common with the people I’ve left behind. When I get back, sleeping inside is going to feel foreign. Having running water will be an incredible luxury, bordering on being unnecessary. Showering more than twice a week will seem wasteful.

I don’t want the power of my life out here to fade when I come home. For some people, outdoor living is a necessary evil required to go backpacking or climbing. For me, it’s enjoyable in and of itself. I like the freedom of not having to do anything but put contacts in when I wake up in the morning. I love seeing blurred dots of light above my head when I fall asleep. I love working a bit harder to do basic things like shower or make breakfast, because it makes the result that much more exciting.

Living like this for so long is making me think about things I want to change when I get home. I’m probably going to shower every other day, quickly, and only wash my hair every four or five days. I’m thinking about things like composting toilets in my future. I know a lot of my friends and family shrug things like this off or chalk them up to my hippie-ness, but I want to be taken seriously. I don’t want people to shake their heads at what they perceive as quirks or think that eventually, I’ll “get used to” civilization and forget how I feel out here. Living outside has its challenges, but it also makes me feel more whole and present than I ever do when I’m being civilized.

Going back to “real” school will be a challenge too. My mind will be occupied with issues of land management, ranching, fire policy, and climate change. I’ll have faces and personal stories associated with all possible sides of these issues. I’ve seen ranchers moved almost to tears describing what wolves are doing to their livelihood, and I’ve seen ecologists break down thinking about the devastation of riparian ecosystems. How can I go back to a textbook after experiencing this? How could a politics class hope to capture the essence of an issue in lectures and readings?

I’ve had culture shock before, returning home from wolf tracking after a week to find myself so perplexed by walls that I spent an hour sitting on my bed crying and wanting to go back to the forest. I couldn’t explain how I felt to anyone else, and my adjustment over the course of the next day was one of the loneliest days of my life. Coming home from two and a half weeks in Guatemala, I immediately left for England and found myself sickened by the excesses of being a tourist in a rich country—throwing away restaurant food, driving all over the country and showering every day. Once again, I felt isolated, powerless to explain how strange the world I found myself in was to the people around me.

I hope that by blogging, emailing and calling people I know, my return home won’t be as painful. I’m hoping to give people some idea of what life is like out here, a glimpse of how simple it is to be happy because of a full moon, a cozy sleeping bag or a delicious dinner of sweet potato and bean burritos. But I know there’s so much I don’t know how to convey, so many things I’ll never be able to show anyone else. And I worry that without that common ground, I’ll be left adrift, not able to recreate this experience, but not feeling home with the people I’m with and the places I’m in. So tonight, as I fall asleep under a full moon, tucked in the folds of a dusty silk liner, I pray someone will understand when I come home and don’t want to sleep inside.