Flying into a Storm

Although not a literal storm (this time), we got on a plane and flew into just about the last place I would want to be in January of 2021: home.

We have done so much traveling that when our kids refer to “home,” they mean whichever apartment or Airbnb we are currently staying at. As for me, I’ve considered Cambodia home for most of my adult life, but now after years away I have to think of New Mexico as home. It’s the place in which I grew up and the place where my parents live. But this sure felt like the wrong time to be flying into the United States. Not only were we leaving the warm Mediterranean for high altitude cold winter weather, we were heading into an out of control pandemic (more than 20 times the infection rate of Turkey) and an uncertain political situation with threats of mobs and violence.

From Turkey we planned to fly to Montenegro, but this changed when my father suddenly sold his house. He has lived in the remote mountains of New Mexico for the past thirty years, and despite loving the natural beauty and peace of being a mountain hermit, he decided that he is getting too old to spend the winters alone chopping wood and shoveling snow. I didn’t expect his house would sell so quickly, but maybe an isolated property in the mountains is more appealing in a pandemic. It sold and he needed me to come back to help him move out.

For some reason I often seem to get detained by security when I arrive in the United States. This time I was removed from my family on arrival at Houston and brought to a windowless room where dozens of travelers sat crowded together waiting for their names to be called. After thirty minutes of waiting, I started pacing the room, worried that I would miss my connecting flight to Albuquerque and wondering what my family was doing without me. Finally, I was called to the back and asked if I experienced any terrorism while in Turkey. That was all. I was released and sprinted to the baggage claim to find my family. With fifteen minutes until boarding for our next flight, I needed to find them, collect our luggage and check it back in, and then go back through security and find the gate for our flight.

Here’s where things got a bit strange. A customs officer with a drug sniffing dog asked Tola to open her suitcase for inspection. The dog promptly lifted its leg and let loose, urinating a heavy stream right into her clothes. With time running out, we closed up the dripping suitcase and ran for the gate.

Interestingly, the security officer at the baggage screening seemed to think Tola was Spanish speaking. He asked her, “Do you have any comida in your bag?” When she looked puzzled, he repeated “comida” a few times more in a Texas drawl while pointing at her bag. Texas is weird.

We made it to our flight running through the airport and arrived in Albuquerque from where it’s a three and a half hour drive to my father’s place in the mountains near the Arizona border along desolate highways and dirt roads.

His eighty acres are surrounded by ranch and forest lands so that there is nothing to see on the horizon but trees, mountains and the distant plains of Saint Augustine. The sun sets in a peaceful blaze and I hear the melancholy sound of coyotes on the hillside slowly beginning their nightly chorus. The house looks the same as it has for the past thirty years; a jacket draped over a chair, a cribbage board on the kitchen table, massive elk antlers leaning over the upstairs railing.

I ask my father, “Do you feel sad about leaving this place?”

He tells me no. It’s time for something different.

I agree with him. But, still, I feel a bit of lingering sadness seeing this place for the last time.