It’s difficult knowing where to take this blog, now that the horses are gone and I spend my days among Hamptonites. There is a lot more to say about Chile, about Antilco, my adventures, the horses and the Bosses, so I’ve decided to keep writing, though I’ll probably worry less about sticking to any overriding theme.
A week ago I was excited to come home. The promise of family, friends, a visit to Dartmouth, and briny Montauk lifted me through the drawn out goodbyes and endless “lasts.” Now, I find myself perpetually on the edge of my seat, with the bizarre sensation that something is about to happen, though I can’t remember what. I’m expecting something, but it’s a phantom longing and I’ve no idea what it is.
Perhaps this is the inevitable letdown- the clichéd culture shock. But I’m not shaken. Standing alone with my backpack while throngs of suits and stilettos powered through Penn Station’s rush hour, I was hardly rattled by the sudden rural idyll to urban chaos transition. And that’s what people usually talk about, isn’t it? They note how trees become skyscrapers; lean, rattling trucks morph into monstrous SUVs; and the meandering farmers are replaced with forward-leaning New Yorkers who hold their coffees-to-go high as they push through crowds.
I nodded along as my friends sympathized with my transition, and agreed that, yes, the culture shock is difficult and it’s been a hard transition from Pucon to New York to parties at Dartmouth. But it wasn’t true. The jarring difference in setting is hardly troubling. No, what is harder to figure out is why, for the first time, there feels more like home than here does. It’s not simply that the two places are different and I’m struggling with the change. The real issue is that there feels right and here feels, somehow, wrong.
Maybe that feeling will ease and fade away. I sure hope it doesn’t. Life in Chile, in rural Pucon, wherever “there” was, is something I inherently and fully understand. I get it. The daily rhythm, their perspectives, and their core values are all scripted in my native, natural language. Everything makes sense there. And maybe that’s the sense of peace I tapped into. When at Antilco, I feel like a mislead character who’s finally wandered back into the right play.
Here, however, is starting to feel like one of those bizarre dreams in which everything is familiar but just a bit off. Friends’ conversations, strangers’ interactions, discussion topics… I find myself made anxious and physically uncomfortable by a lot of it. Because, it seems to me, still in my Antilco mindset, that none of their chatter matters.
And then something occurred to me. I didn’t realize that the inspired, idealistic dreaming my peers and I did in college was only dreaming. I didn’t know their liberated fantasies were, for the most part, just fantasies and that they were giving themselves four fun years before getting right back on the mainstream track for the rest of their lives. That realization made me wonder if what I’d been thriving off in Chile, that electric, raw lifestyle, is really just a different sort of temporary sojourn from society. Maybe “college” means the same thing to America’s youth as a “backpacking” means to the rest of the world: they both provide a temporary hiatus from wage-earning life where participants can experiment, dream, seek thrills, and pursue happiness. Maybe those buoyant people with whom I sunrise hiked, and shared cramped hostel rooms, and bummed around winding city streets, and motored across turquoise glacial lakes, and went into the woods for weeks at a time with nothing more than a tent, a horse, and some food will all go back and spend their life doing things they don’t really care about.
I’ll guess I just have to see… and in the meantime I’m hoping this slight, persistent anxiety will stay and remind me that, for a short time at least, I found a place where it all made sense.
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| Sam, Remo, me, and Mara in front of Villarica volcano |
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