All Roads Lead to Home

Lakeland Motel was a hovel. And that's being a bit mean to your average, run-of-the-mill hovels, the ones that don't have smoky rooms and rusty merry-go-rounds that revolve in the wind on autumn nights as if it was the kids from “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II).” Still, the low building was something you'd pass anytime you went down to the beach in Pasadena, and when we walked along the scrubby grass and weeds the other day where it once stood, it was hard not to miss it a little bit.

It's great to be home. In some ways, the reason you leave it in the first place is so that you can appreciate it the more when you get back. My buddy grew up just on other side of the woods from me, but this was the first time I'd seen him since January, and we talked a lot about leaving. How when you're away, “home” can still exist the way you remember it when you were young, but every time you come back you realize what's changed, and how that romantic idea gets farther away with every passing year. Change isn't a bad thing – there's a good chance those who are left behind notice the changes in you, too. But if you let yourself stay stuck in the past, then the entropy that goes along with that nostalgia will never let you truly go back. Only for a visit.

I left New Zealand three weeks ago. New Zealand was my life for 2013 – it wasn't some trip, it was a reality, something I lived and breathed and understood. Now, it's a country on the other side of the world, a place that holds a lot of memories, but that is part of the past now. And, much like home, it hangs onto some romantic half-truth, a fragile essence that in all likelihood would crumble if, years later, I were to try to revisit that place from my youth.

But am I ever glad it happened. And, even though it only took three weeks to get back into the rhythm of the life I left behind, it's impossible to live out the rest of my time as if New Zealand never happened.

There are plenty of stories in the interim. The vegetarians on the redeye trans-Pacific flight who decided they wanted the normal breakfast after all and nearly staged a coup; the sunny waterfront of Vancouver in stark contrast to the extreme poverty; buying that homeless guy his groceries; running through Trudeau Airport to make one last connection to get back home; flying in over St. John's, having not slept since somewhere near Hawaii and collapsing in bed until 4:00 the next afternoon; drinking and watching the sun rise from a hot tub, two evenings in a row; realizing that clothes on the line in Old Perlican really do look like a Newfoundland tourism commercial; sleeping in my own bed. There are a lot of stories like that, but they don't really belong. This is the story of the New Zealand adventure, and that one is at the end.

I'm home. And what a change, to go from living out of a suitcase . . . to packing another one up again. One load is already in transit to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the rest is going with me, at the end of next week. From one adventure to another. My comfort zone has been pretty malleable these past seven months, but I'm still pretty sure that I'm going outside of it again. And, at last, I'm ready for it.

The blue backpack is in the crawl space under the stairs, and that's where it's going to stay, filled with maps, pamphlets, a pair of sneakers with the bottoms out of them, and scuff marks straight from New Zealand.

My pounamu is coming with me to New Brunswick. A reminder that maybe, just maybe, you can't ever really go back . . . but that doesn't mean that that never happened. Because it sure did – and it was great.

Cheers,

rb