I must have gone into some state of shock on the flight departing Sydney, and it has to have been the fastest trans- pacific flight I’ve ever been on.  I shut my eyes after the nasty plane meal and tiny bottle of wine, and wake up as we are landing in Los Angeles.  Concrete jungle below us, everything is grey, well, that of which we can see through the layer of fog.  Urban sprawl blankets the land for as far as we can see.  No green jungly life, trees, or emerald sea.  Getting off the plane, passengers shove past us in a rush to get through immigration and customs quickly.  Customs quickly - well that’s an oxymoron.  I love it when I come back into the states, the immigration officers always wish us “welcome home.”  Today’s officer takes special interest in our antiquated passports that were reissued in Fiji after having them stolen in 2000 on our honeymoon.  Mine’s tattered, with threads pulling through the number holes punched in at the top, and bulging from the seems filled with three added sections of new pages over the years.  He’s wondering how we could have managed a 14 month “holiday away” as he termed it.  One look at our scruffy carry on’s slung over our back, and comparison of slick corporatized passport photos with what we now look like standing before him, and I think he gets it.  Oh, you were backpacking it.  “Weren’t using any of these business visa’s while you were out there Mrs. Marshall?”  “Nope,” I proudly exclaim, “no work for 14 months!”  “Well, you’ll need to work now, wait till you see the price of gas,” he says with an air about him.  

 

We thought we’d make our last segment of local transport in our home country a local one - capping off our journey with a train from LAX down to Solana Beach.  A bus ride to central station in Los Angeles quickly brings back memories of the developed city infrastructure we’d left far behind.  The train station is shiny and clean, not to mention safe compared to where we’ve been the past 14 months.  Imagine that, calling LA safe?  We walk through the station in a haze, snap up two tickets and a couple of bagels with cream cheese to go.  Nothing like a little comfort food for our two and a half hour ride.  

 

City sprawl whizzes by the windows, I’ve got a funny feeling in my stomach and my heart is beating fast.  Excitement to see family, combined with the shock of being back in the thick of fast paced developed country life.  No escaping the capitalism here - although we’ve come to realize that even some of the most remote places in the world have succumbed to wealth of nations and “need” to accumulate things.   Cars chock-o-block on the freeway, big huge SUV’s and luxury convertibles sit in stand still traffic.  All the familiar beach scenes roll by, it’s like a summer day, people out tanning and surfing.  Life as we knew it hasn’t changed, it’s all the same... people moving, shaking, buying and showing.  Young kids and adults in seats near ours are gabbing loudly on cellphones, unable to deal with even a two minute break of silence in between calls they compulsively make.  One man has a huge headset with sponge covered microphone that wraps around his head like one of those “old school” orthodontia apparatus for kids - yelling loudly at his business colleague on the other end, as if the world is about to end for him.  

 

I tilt my head back, close my eyes, and think back to the little bamboo stilted huts we stayed at in Laos, trying to bring back the peace and tranquility.  When I opened up my eyes again, I hoped I’d be right back there in that tiny village.  Instead, there’s a train conductor yelling over the loudspeaker, “Be sure to leave your seats and move to the front of the doors of the bottom level carriage at the first call for your stop, we only stop for 30 seconds, and in order to avoid unnecessary anxiety and stress as you miss your stop, or see the train leave the platform while you’re out having a smoke, you need to collect yourselves and your belongings early, otherwise you will suffer great anxiety as your train goes into the sunset without you at the right stop, or without you period.”  Darrin and I both look at each other, wondering how “anxious” we’d really feel if we were on this train, didn’t speak English as a first language, and were struggling to comprehend just what the heck this guy was trying to say, perhaps getting meaning from a couple of words here and there.  Perhaps we’d freak out, thinking we needed to get off immediately at the next stop, or suffer an attack.  We reeled back our memories to buses, planes and trains we’d struggled on - especially in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil and India, to figure out what we were supposed to do, and what the rapid fire messages blurted out by conductors meant.  Just a few simple words would do, not a dissertation to freak us all out or try to be funny when one can’t understand the language to begin with.

 

We’re at our station, Solana Beach, and disembark, with hesitation and reservation.  The beginning of the next adventure is about to happen.

 

-L