I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Some evenings around five, I start crying as I commute from Mercer Island to Seattle.  At that time, if you drive west on the I-90 Bridge over Lake Washington and into the city, traffic stops completely before clearing up again.  The cars all stop to look at a man—older, usually wearing a Seahawks jersey—marching a US flag on the pedestrian side path.  Under the giant US flag is a black POW MIA flag.  I don’t know who this man is, but the way he marches the bridge is beautiful.  One hand anchors the pole and the other braces it across his chest, pointing the flags over the water.  His whole body is completely flexed with effort, from the shaking of his forearms to his rigid jaw, but somehow there is no physical struggle.  He is composed.  Even when the wind blows hard enough I can feel it knocking against my passenger door, he kneels, flag pointed determinedly over the lake, his body a triangle brace until the wind passes and he can continue marching.

I tried to tell someone about it, how it made me cry because it was beautiful.  Beautiful?  A grizzled man in old clothes marching because he probably lost someone he loved?  Grief, pain, and the actions that we do to attempt to fill some emptiness, express some emotion, are beautiful to me.

I drove by him the other night.  He was not marching the flags or waiting for a gust of wind to pass.  The flags were propped up against the railing while he screamed at the cars.  We still stopped for him.  Stared at him.  But couldn’t hear anything he had to say.

Phuket, or Other Places

President Thomas Jefferson once cautioned his nephew against roaming.  “Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy,” he wrote in a letter.  “When men of a sober age travel, they gather knowledge, which they may apply usefully for their country, but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret–their affections weakened by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home.”

It was amazing, and I truly hope that everyone can set apart a time in their life to cross borders, learn another language, relate to another culture–even when it’s uncomfortable, physically and emotionally–because it is so valuable to challenge yourself and see what is under all those layers of yourself.  Strip away the identities and ideas formed by family, geographic culture, and media.

When I first began traveling, I never really thought I would stop.  My time spent studying abroad in Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Spain, then later translating in Nicaragua, was incredible.  Traveling with your spouse and living and learning together was also amazing.  But a huge part of us missed where we were from; we both love our friends, family, and the Pacific Northwest and we found that saying goodbye to all of our friends over and over again was difficult.  We started craving community, roots, and stability.

Even though just hours before we came home we were wondering where we would go next, we decided to stick with our decision to put down some roots.  It’s hard though, when in the back of your mind you always know there’s another option.  9 months in Spain?  A contract in Saudi Arabia, and more and more places to go to.  The more of the world you see, the more you realize how much is out there.  The past year has been challenging in more than one aspect, but in August, we accomplished one of our goals for relocating back to the US permanently: buying a home.

No easy task when you have foreign income, no tax history for two years, are relatively new to your jobs, and trying to convince a bank to give you a loan!  We found someone, and then we just needed to find a house.  The home search story can get pretty lengthy pretty quickly, but I will say that we still are just now finding out how lucky we were.  The same day a short sale went through, we started looking at other houses in our price range in the Seattle area.  It was depressing.  The houses were often sinking into the Greenwood bog, had all the appliances ripped out of them, and one even had an addition slowly peeling itself away from the rest of the house.  Finally, we visited a house that had no interior photos posted (scary!) that was bank owned and had recently dropped $50,o00 in price.  In fact, $50,000 below what we were expecting to pay for a house!  It is also unusual to have bank-owned homes make any repairs, but this one did, although they refused to put anything in writing, so it was a little nerve-wracking, not knowing whether or not they would do that.

Here it is:

Front of the house

A little Tudor for two in Maple Leaf.

living room

It’s an older home, so it comes with older home problems, like some weird wiring and a teeny kitchen, but it also comes with some beautiful details, like oak flooring with inlaid mahogany borders and windows; picture frame molding and coved ceilings, and a fireplace.

dining room

It also has built-in bookshelves and an arch leading into the living room. Do you see the little wood square in the wall? That’s our mailbox!

kitchen

And here is part of our small, sometimes functional kitchen.  But at least we have a gas range!  And as my lovely, talented aunt told me that all cooks have horrible kitchens.   It does rather remind me of small European kitchens in packed cities.

Really, a more appropriate time to write this would have been 2 weeks ago.  At about that time we were, as my pastor so appropriately put it, caught halfway between hope and fear.  Kelly was working construction on the house for my parents as a temporary job and I spent most of my days unpacking boxes that we hadn’t looked in for two years, sorting unopened mail, and attempting to (still) get Korea to fulfill their end of the contract.  Everything was in limbo and on the brink of success or failure.  Even though Seattle’s economy continues to rebound, people are underemployed everywhere.  It was difficult to get an apartment because we had no local references and no official jobs.  Suddenly, the comprehension of why people who didn’t have a positive experience in Korea would go back a year after the came home dawned on us.  Without having the ability to stay with family, borrow a car, and like the city we were in, the simple day to day motions of life would have been impossible.

So, where are we now?  We live in Madison Park in a an older two story brick building next to Lake Washington.  I–somewhat affectionately–call it the English War Compound because of the squareness of its layout and roses growing everywhere.  After a year of staring at skyscrapers and smog, waking up 20 feet away from the lake I grew up next to has been incredible.  I like waking up to the sunrise over the ridges of trees on the Eastside, or watching the water at night making the dark look like it’s shimmering.  Every time we drive over either the 520 or 90 bridges, especially at sunset, we are blown away by how beautiful it is here.  The apartment itself is old, but well-maintained.  It’s a stark contrast from our ultra-modern and new studio in Gangnam, full of hallways, picture-frame moldings, and an oven.  The bike trails are nearby and so is a bus to Capitol Hill, Downtown, and Pike.  We also found a car: a 2003 Subaru Forrester.  No options, manual, and green, of course.  So now we have joined the thousands of other Subarus on the road, feeling fairly unoriginal, but pretty happy with the car itself.  Unfortunately, it is a stick, so I am still learning to drive it!  It is bizarre how cars and American culture are so tightly intertwined: the environmental part of me hates it, but I love that feeling of driving on the highway, whether it be over the mountains to dry hills and valleys of eastern Washington to visit my family, or through the marshy Skagit farmlands onto Whidbey Island.  The independence and loneliness of it are so beautiful.

Coming home has also meant walking back into the lives of our friends and family.  Simultaneously, we have felt like we never left as well as feeling like we have missed out on some pretty important events in their lives.  Picking up the pieces and fragments of a past life and beginning again.

Now, after I’ve said that we were caught between hope and fear for about 2 months, here are some of the things that make us realize that we made the right decision to come back home:

-Kelly was hired at the downtown North Face store as the Sales Supervisor.  His first day is today and he is pretty excited to work with people he respects and likes as well as be a part of the 4th busiest North Face store in the US.

-I have been offered two quasi-permanent freelance writing positions:  one at Suite101.com, where I will be primarily writing about travel and the field of teaching English, also I will be the Seattle Ski Examiner for Examiner.com.  I am hoping to build up my credentials as a writer and make this my career.

-We have the aforementioned awesome car and will probably have no need for a second as I am working from home and Kelly works downtown and takes the bus to work from outside our apartment.

-Our neighborhood and apartment itself are peaceful and wonderful.  I can walk to the local cafes and delis.  Trader Joe’s and the food co-op are short drive away, and the apartment itself it peaceful and quiet.  Our favorite place that we’ve lived in since we’ve gotten married.

Our income has halved.  Our bills have doubled.  There is no more relatively casual plans to take trips out of the country or spend the weekend running around to various restaurants.  My position as an English teacher does not grant me any kind of automatic quasi-prestige.  BUT.  I would not trade our “new” lives for anything.  Driving up to the pass to ski in the new snow after work.  Making my own curry blends and stock in my kitchen.  Laughing with my family over our ridiculous baby pictures at the Thanksgiving table.  Having a casual meal with family after church.  Celebrating a marriage with old friends.  Checking out new books from the library.  Wandering around the markets to feel the city.  Wearing my techie gear at all functions…and having it be perfectly acceptable.

Perhaps the scariest thing about moving home was getting rid of the terrible “my life is on hold” feeling that would sometimes creep up on me in Korea…as if everything I did there was lost into some black hole of memory and geography.  That nothing I did there was propelling myself in a way that I could measure my success against society’s definition.  Or my own.  In some ways, I have compartmentalized our time in Korea too much, sectioning off that part of my life as if it never happened.  The past 3 months, since leaving, I am trying to stop that  and let it be a part of me, just not the overriding definition of me.  Maybe I’ll get the balance right, someday.

I posted a quote once about calling the PNW home from a guy from National Geographic, and here I’ll post it again:

“People who found their footing in the Pacific Northwest are elitist, that we are forever ruined for all other places…nowhere else can satisfy us, that we have a surreal vision of what home is and what home ought to be.”

It feels good to be home again, and yes, Seattle is fulfilling that surreal vision of mine.

WWOOF:  World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.  According to their Web site:  “WWOOF is an exchange - In return for volunteer help, WWOOF hosts offer food, accommodation and opportunities to learn about organic lifestyles.”  The only requirements are that you show a genuine interest in learning about organic growing, country living or ecologically sound lifestyles and that you help your hosts with daily tasks for an agreed number of hours.  The host farm’s obligations to you are that they  grow organically, are in conversion, or use ecologically sound methods on their land, provide hands-on experience of organic growing and other learning opportunities where possible, and provide clean dry accommodation and adequate food for their volunteers.

WWOOFing: participating in WWOOF

Neo-Peasant:  A little term that Kelly and I came up with to describe our hosts, Katia and Thibault.  Generally speaking, a peasant is an agricultural worker who owns or rents a small plot of land.  Traditionally, they have often been at the bottom of social hierarchies.  A neo-peasant, is one that reveres this tradition and views the working of the land as the highest possible calling.  A healthy dose of Socialism/off-grid living/general fight-the-man attitude is also needed.  And, when in Europe, an obsession with pastoralism and dreadlocks is often included

So, since this post also holds the possibility of getting very long very quickly, let’s break it down:

Setting: rural France, Maritime Alps

Housing:

Our WWOOF Farm

People:

Katia, age 38ish, born in a nearby village, left for London when she was 18 to study photography, dress-making, and pottery.  Quickly fell in with the local Jamaican-Rastafarian population, had 3 children (now ages 12-15) with one, then left him to come to France because he got cold feet about moving to a Rastafarian commune in Ghana.  She worked in a nearby village at a nursing home before buying her property (2.5 acres) in 2005.  Her current interests are: Hinduism, the color purple, being a peasant, raising bees, and baking bread.

Katia Baking

Thibault: age 28, grew up 10km away on a sheep farm, he’s only been on a plane once–and hated it.  His interests include: anti-modernity, playing the guitar, his 15 month-old son, cooking food, not participating in “leisure” activities, and Tibet.

Thibault and Etoine Sifting the Grain

Now, let’s begin.  Kelly and I were first inspired to WWOOF thanks to a farm called Rio Muchacho that we visited while backpacking the coast of Ecuador. For me (Kristin), especially, opened my eyes to the world of permaculture-based land management. Also, the adventures of Christy and Lewis, a Christian couple with a very similar outlook on life as us WWOOFing through South America was very encouraging. So, when coming to France, we thought we’d give it a go. Also, coming from the very densely populated Seoul, we thought it was about time to breathe some fresh air and get out into the country.

I must repeat: we signed up for WWOOF primarily for learning about how to grow things responsibly with the land, so it was a little odd, when we found ourselves in a tent with 11 people on the farm (their friends came over to visit) and working about 2 hours a day.  The first day we straightened out the raspberries in their little garden patch.  Total time duration: 1 hour.  The rest of the day?  Hiking near the national park and playing with the dog.  The next day:  watch Katia make bread.  Knead a few loaves.  Other duties included braiding onions and wandering around medieval villages while she sold bread.  None of them took us very long, and we got pretty excited when we got our hands on some scythes and chopped some branches.  So, a lot of hiking in the mountains and helping them in their subsistence-farming methods, but not a lot of learning…which we came to do.

About the time we were taking a chainsaw to some fallen trees on the property, we started learning a bit more about their philosophy.  One that is pretty European and that I had completely forgot about from my post-colonialism Caribbean literature class: Pastoralism.  Katia started explaining that we were cleaning the land.  My face was rather blank and confused…Growing up in the Northwest meant that any “cleaning of the land” means fighting rain, marshlands, hacking rather futilely at a lot of underbrush and blackberries and everything is rotting anyway.  In my mind, the environment doesn’t need people picking up branches off the ground for it to function.  But then again,  my ideas came about from some ideas from the turn of the century (Roosevelt era/national parks I think) that we don’t need to interfere for life systems to function.  The other view–more of an agrarian one–is one Katia and Thibault subscribe to more.  California might be a good example in the US:  in order for people to live in forest-fire areas, they must maintain the areas.  They have to clean up a lot of brush so that people’s homes (and people!) don’t go up in smoke.  But, if the people weren’t there, even the fires would have a place in the circle of life.  Cue Lion King music.  (Also cue my college roommates, Lindsey and Joelle singing this in masks in the basement of the LP).

Another key difference:  Kelly and I like learning about this stuff because we think it’s important for the environment and, ultimately, for us.  Katia and Thibault do it so they can be self-sufficient.  They want to be self-sufficient so they don’t have to be a part of an organized system.  AKA fighting the man.  Being a peasant.  They were pretty into being peasants and it was pretty inconceivable that we weren’t into being peasants, too, you know, being into the earth, medieval farming practices (blowing chaff away from the grain with nifty wind machines, terracing hillsides, using heirloom produce/seeds, etc.), not bathing, using bartering and trading of goods vs. buying.  While for us it was pretty inconceivable that they liked organic farming, but were dumping non-biodegradable soap and waste into a creek that other people used as a water source, weren’t really handling the human waste situation that well, a lot of their staple food was not organic, and they had extra parts cars laying everywhere, with black oil slicks beneath the cars on the earth…to us meaning they weren’t that dedicated to the environment and more dedicated to traditional peasant practices, with the important twist that they were not dependent of a feudal lord.  Or a part of a society with traditional peasant roles.  And that despite their independence, they were entirely dependent on government welfare for schooling and medicine.  They reaped the benefits of a system that they refused to pay into.  Needless to say, although we had organic farming in common, we came at it from two totally different points of view.

Also, Kelly and I are Americans, if you haven’t noticed.  We’re pretty legalistic, as far as the world’s cultures goes.  So, when we heard about WWOOFing, we understood it (please see definition from Web site above) as working a few hours for them (willingly!) in exchange for accommodation, food, and learning.  Cultural exchange would be the icing on the cake.  For them, they didn’t really need us to work (they only needed WWOOFers about 2 weeks out of the year, but had them much more frequently), gave us lots of food when they were happy, little food when they were grumpy (they were quite moody), and pretty much just wanted us around to share new recipes with them.  We felt like it was kind of a weird exchange.  Add that to the incredibly awkward family meals, with Thibault butting heads with girlfriend’s 3 teenage kids, screaming matches in French, and the general disrepair of the farm, we were ready to go when the time came.

So, in sum, what we learned/what we enjoyed:

1.  Every WWOOF farm is radically different.

2.  Blueberries like the acidity in pine wood chips.

3.  Pastoralism is really big in Europe.  Even bigger than in the colonies that they populated.

4.  The Maritime-Alps area is insanely beautiful.  An area that I doubt we would have explored if not for the farm.  One that we would probably not have explored as extensively if not for the particular farm we stayed at.

5.  You can use sourdough as a starter for bread instead of yeast.

6.  My hair has huge potential for dreadlocks.  It started clumping after week one.

7.  French is less close to Spanish than I thought.

8.  Weeding is necessary in non-permaculture conditions.

9.  France is old.  Really, really old.

10.  The word “partner” really means the person that you have a kid with before leaving them for another partner.

11.  Eastern European hatchback 4×4s put up a hell of a fight.

We weren’t sure how we would find them, but they assured us, rather cryptically and in broken English, that they would find us.  We sat perched on the meandering cobblestones that is town square and watched 3 older women in teva sandals and without makeup hanging a homemade sign in French, that we gathered protesting adding another tunnel in Tende.  We found it a little funny to watch.  They had made the 20 foot banner without having any ideo of where to hang it, so they scurried around with a chair trying to match the banner to various lamp posts and trees with twine.  It is funny to discover positive attributes of us ugly americans abroad.  We are lazy, true, but in this laziness we are only willing to do things once.  Planning, execution, and process are American specialties.

After watching the ladies hang the sign, men and women in various states of patchy clothes and dreadlocks with lots of small children and dogs showed up, it slowly started to dawn on us that Katia and Thibault intended to meet us at the protest.  Soon, a woman in a purple plaid kilt came up and introduced herself to us.  I’m guessing we weren’t too hard to pick out from the crowd.

Villagers came out for the spectacle, peering over their smoking porches and re-opening a couple of shops.  Soon, we began marching through the village, stopping traffic.  The sleek Italian motorcyclists looked angry; people smoking cigarettes in cares puffed furiously and jabbed them emphatically at the protest; a few people waved at the neighbors they new.  Unfortunately, the protest seemed to be alienating almost everyone not directly involved in it, perhaps due to the angry shouting at cars, very reminiscent of Michael Moore videos, really only serving to rally people who don’t really need much convincing.

Soon after, we piled into into their van with their 4 kids (whoa) and headed back to their “farm.”  It s a valley, woods on one side, terraced pasture on the other.  The terraces must be from agriculturalists centuries earlier.  There are also remnants of WWI and WWII on the farm, since it is a few kilometers from the Italian border: stone wall barricades and machine gun pill boxes in the cliffs.  We are staying in a tent not far from the house.  They actually lived in it for about 6 months will building their house, which is made from the ruins of a stone building, wood frames, and limed walls.  It is not up to building code by any stretch of the imagination.  Their farm has long rows of raspberries, eggplants, tomatoes, basil, herbs, corn, and we even found marijuana growing in the green house.

So, things I will miss:

• Massages, everywhere!  Massages at school, massages during yoga class, great, cheap massages professionally.  For someone who really can’t live without them, I will miss the touchy-feelyness (in that regard) of Korea.
• Food.  I can’t profess to be the biggest lover of Korean food, but I do find it refreshing that you can get healthy, reasonably-priced food fast no matter where you are.  Something that is pretty much almost impossible t get at home.
• Safety.  For a myriad of reasons, it is safe here.  Safe like you can leave your laptop, cell phone, and car keys on a table in the street at night with crowds of people walking bye and it won’t get stolen.  I have witnessed this. WHOA.
• Noise level: Seoul is huge and crowded.  I live on an apartment that is on a 10 lane road and it is not soundproof.  Do I hear anything?  A car beep on a rainy day, a collective cheer when S. Korea scored in the World Cup, and that’s about it.  People are pretty respectful of noise in such tight, crowded spaces.
• Public transportation.  It’s cheap.  It’s fast.  It’s easy.  It’s eco.
• Sacredness of food.  Once again, I’m not the biggest lover of Korean food, though I can always find something I like, but I love how people are really involved in the preparation, eating, and community of food here.
• Cheung (jeong?  I don’t know how to anglicize this).  Self-sacrificial kindness.  This one goes deep and probably beyond my understanding.  Sacrifice for someone else, big or small, isn’t often seen in the US and it was pretty special to witness it here.

There is probably more, but I can’t think of anything at the moment.  3 days until France!