The Trip to Staging
I spent the five hour flight to Peace Corps staging reading an account of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber turned Karakoram-humanitarian-school-builder. Which is a mouthful. But so is his work: from 1993 to 2003, Mortenson raised funds for, then built, 55 schools for girls. The book, Three Cups of Tea, stylistically speaking, wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. I blanched at some of the purplish prose passages that obtrusively fetishize the man, such as:
“Dressed in a much-patched set of mud-colored shalwar kamiz, like his Pakistani porters, he had the sensation that his heavy black leather mountaineering boots were independently steering him down the Baltoro at their own glacial speed, through an armada of icebergs arrayed like the sails of a thousand ice-bound ships.”
But Mortenson’s story, and specifically his determination, was just the thing for someone about to begin Peace Corps service.
The final days before departure had been an odd psychic sandwich of frenzy and ennui. I would shuttle from anxious mental sorting and re-sorting of my packing list to blithe walks in afternoon park solitude with my parents’ Labrador. I’d already systematically toured all my favorite food haunts in Southern California (In-N-Out, Rigoberto’s, Angelo’s & Vinci’s, the no-name sushi place in downtown). And the weekend previous some friends had thrown me a going away pool party shindig where everyone asked me questions about the Philippines I didn’t have answers to and my dad went around snapping photos for posterity. I couldn’t recall him ever doing that before. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
But the junk food had been feted, the shindig had been shindug, and the pictures had been snapped. There was only one thing left to do. Wait.
For many hours I sat by myself in the park, or in my parents’ attic (where I was crashing) not so much thinking of my looming flight, not so much saying goodbye to friends and things and a part of myself. Just waiting.
And it was in those final moments that the reality came closer and closer into focus. The moments when I saw my dad lurking in the periphery, snapping memories. When I woke the night before my flight in mid-dream, dreaming about sharing a hotel room with fellow volunteers (all of whom, in the dream, seemed unbelievably schway). When I stood in the baggage check line, writing “Pasay City, Philippines” on my luggage tags.
And then I was on a plane, reading a book about a man who had given of himself everything there was to give. On a plane looking out the window, trying simultaneously to remember the Tagalog word for airport (“paliparan”) and superimposing the landscape of Northern Luzon on the Rockies down below.
And then, reading more purple prose about Mortenson pulling on his pants, ungluing his shalwar shirt from his chest, and opening a door to the early evening air no cooler than the afternoon but mercifully moving, my mind jerked away from the page. It was clearly unrelated to the passage I was reading. But in that moment, in my mind, I became a Peace Corps volunteer.
I closed Three Cups of Tea. I took out my mp3 player. Cued up my road trip travel mix. Listened to the voice of Leonard Cohen...
I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record
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