The end. Almost. I’m getting ahead of myself. First we have to go back four months to winter in New Zealand, where I slept in long johns, two pairs of pants, two long sleeve shirts, and two pairs of wool socks under three blankets with two hot water bottles in art deco Napier where it had previously been too hot to wear a t-shirt but it was now 40 degrees and without heat. New Zealand has an aversion to climate control. Natural gas is too expensive to use it for central heat, and the idea of air conditioning is frankly pretty silly to most non-Americans, even in places far hotter than here. It is nice to not have to go from scorching heat to the freezer that is the inside of any store during an American summer, but I was dang cold in Napier a few months ago. Now I’m back in Ohio. I completely forgot humidity existed until I stepped into the subway station in New York three weeks ago when I landed back in the United States. Someone should have reminded me of humidity when I was gushing about the wonders of America last December.
One place that I think is slightly less humid than Akron, Ohio, is Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids is my new favorite place in America. Why would I be in love with a small Michigan city? Because Grand Rapids stuck it to the Man, and the Man backed down. Newsweek, the major corporate newsmagazine put out a list of “dying cities” in America based on population loss. Grand Rapids was one of them. One 22-year-old event planner begged to differ and to prove his point, he put together a massive lip-dup to Don McLean’s “American Pie” featuring local celebrities, the high school band, university football team, musicians, a helicopter, and a whole lot more covering the entire downtown. Roger Ebert has since called it the greatest music video ever made, and Newsweek backed down from its claim. This is what is right with the world and right with America. Individuals rallying support for a cause they believe in, bringing people together, building community spirit, and taking back their lives from corporate control. My beloved Cleveland is also on the list. Cleveland rocks. Cleveland made no such video. Grand Rapids was national news. Cleveland made national news when the entire population got in a tizzy when LeBron James left the Cavaliers. We have a bit of a reputation for being passionate about sports…and nothing else. America’s passion about sports has left me a bit bewildered since I returned. Imagine what could be done if every American turned that passion for sports into passion for creating positive change. Sports bring people together and create community. We already know how to do this community organizing thing. We just need to do it ourselves. These are the places, places like Cleveland where big things are going to happen. Places that are down but not out, poised at the brink of monumental potential, ready to erupt. Places with real people, without the evils of gentrification, with abandoned buildings galore, waiting, waiting, for someone to love them. I love you, Cleveland.
I like, but do not love, Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a hill in rural New Zealand and record holder for the longest place name in an English-speaking country (85 letters), which means roughly, “the hill where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one.” In America, this would have come with a gift shop. In New Zealand, it a really long sign and a tiny gravel parking lot on a tiny gravel road. I traveled with a friend to get there from Napier. It was my first time in a car in ages and was surprised that I didn’t terribly enjoy being in a car. I generally like cars. I like convertibles especially, but any good-looking, fun car with a CD player usually gets me excited to be in it. Car design is a really cool thing. But I realized, and have confirmed since being back in the US and driving everywhere, that my love affair with cars has run its source. At first I missed never driving during my travels. When I did rent a car back in November, I wrote about how good it was, how it made me feel like a real Kiwi and not just a tourist. But something happened in the following six months. I just forgot about the car. I rode a bicycle, or more often I walked. I walked a lot. 50 km a day sometimes. And I really enjoyed it. And I never felt like it was a waste of time. And I could never be rushed, because I never knew how long it would take to get where I was going. Many times I didn’t have anywhere I was going. It never mattered that it took longer than driving because I never had the option to drive. I had to live places where I could get where I needed to go by walking. Out of necessity I was forced to slow down the pace of my life. I saw so much. I also had wet shoes much of the time when it rained. But I think I still prefer it. My car now is 21 years old and has rusty chunks falling off the bottom of it. I love that car. It deserves a break. I need a Vespa.
In the height of my realization that I don’t really like cars, I discovered something that made me more excited than just about anything ever has. It’s an urban design concept called “new pedestrianism.” Some people might not get excited about urban design concepts. This is why I need to get a job so I can earn money to go to school so I can be a professional teller of how amazing urban design concepts are. New pedestrianism is a radical offshoot of new urbanism, the idea that new developments should be built the way cities used to be built before the advent of cars, before zoning regulations compartmentalized our lives. It says development should be based on population density, with all the necessary needs of a community met within the community. It’s the anti-suburb. And its most miraculous effect is that it brings people together and makes them happy. So what’s the next logical step? Relegating cars as far into the periphery as possible. Even new urbanism still relies on car roads as central. Front doors and garages face the road, which is designed for cars. The front of everything faces the road. Cars are still central and pedestrian walkways must be built around them. What if it was flipped? What if garages faced the back? What if when you walked out your front door, you came to a pedestrian walkway without any cars? You might see your neighbor more often. What if the front door of a business faced a pedestrian path? You might be more inclined to walk there. If everyone is walking there, you might run into these people on the way…and talk to them. Conversation instead of isolation. Journey instead of destination. Moving instead of sitting. Meaning. Life. This is going to be big.
I’ve written a lot about the religious climate in New Zealand, so to conclude let me just encourage the good things that are being done there, even if they don’t seem to involve anyone between the ages of 18 and 40. It’s like a big Amish rumspringa for the entire country. Napier had five downtown churches in a city of about 50,000. I went to all of them and do you know how many people I met who were out of high school and not married with kids? One. I don’t know what has happened to this generation of New Zealanders that they are so uninterested in spiritual things, but there is definitely a need, and I think an interest. Because in reality it’s not that people are uninterested, it’s just that they have never been given the opportunity to think about questions beyond the temporal. And when they are, they respond brilliantly and genuinely. Also good was the complete absence of the plague of homogeneity that has afflicted the evangelical church in America. Evangelical churches here are well known for being mostly white, upper middle class, suburban, enormous, commercial, and judgmental. New Zealand has no evangelical churches that I came across but they do have Pentecostal churches, a slightly more emotional version of the evangelical movement. And these churches in New Zealand tend to be racially diverse and largely poorer. Traditional churches tend to be elaborate and beautiful, based on the idea that the house of God deserves to be top-notch and that beautiful surroundings can help us align more with God. Evangelical churches in America tend to be trendy, modern, and comforting rather than inspiring based on the idea that getting people in the door is the greatest challenge and something that looks familiar is an important way to do that. New Zealand Pentecostal churches tend to be bare-bones and dilapidated, and they sometimes feel the most authentic of all. Unencumbered by money, the buildings simply cease to conjure any thought at all, allowing the message and the people to take center stage. All ways have a place in the life of the church, as long as the motivation is love.
One experience I wanted to be sure to have in New Zealand before leaving was farm work. I have been getting more and more interested in farm work and supporting local and sustainable farming, so I wanted to get my hands dirty. I was able to do a little of this in Napier when I helped pick olives (a very time-consuming job) and clean up meadow muffins (not nearly as delicious as they sound) left over in the field my the horses. A horse makes eight meadow muffins a day. And they are quite a big bigger than a human muffin. This is an important thing to remember if you ever have anyone ask you for a pony. They poop a lot. But they’re also fun to ride, and I did get to take a ride along the beach and even in the waves in exchange for my help. I also worked for a longer period on a macadamia nut orchard in what was ultimately one of the best experiences of my entire trip. I was a bit nervous. I would be working there in exchange for food and accommodation, which I thought would be safer than the generally exploitative practices of many commercial farmers hiring seasonal work (Oscar Romero anyone?). I was right. Every morning we would go out into the orchard and use our tool (a long pipe with a hook on the end, all handmade) and pull down the nuts, which hung like grapes off the tree. It was almost like a treasure hunt. Then they went into a big machine and were de-husked before being bagged to dry. My farming family lived in a beautiful house with a gorgeous view complete with chickens and African guineafowl. They had always wanted to have a macadamia nut orchard and they took pride in doing everything themselves including raising the bees that produced the honey for their honey-coated nuts. It was all so…pure. And these people were awesome. They lived on a boat and traveled as a family with their two kids for 10 years. When they lived in South Africa, they had a pet python. Instead to paying oodles of money to feed them, they’d go to the animal shelter and get the dogs that had been euthanized and feed them those. He used to catch octopus in the ocean by his house and put them in the tank he built himself. He trained a raven to sit on the steering wheel when he drove and to come whenever he whistled. These people were so stinking cool. We all worked together every day. Their granddaughter came to visit one day and after we had known each other only a few hours she ran off the porch and jumped into my arms to give me a big hug when it was time to say goodbye. Their other granddaughter reached up to hold my hand when we went for a walk and held on tight when we rode on the back of the tractor from the shed down to the orchard. We had just met. It was pure, unashamed affection, and it was an absolutely beautiful thing. Even weeding was fun. There’s a weed. Where are its roots? Find them! Pull them out! I always expected there to be buried treasure at the end of one of them. Though I had never done this kind of work before, I think by this point I had learned the one thing that you take away most from an extended period of travel – adaptability. I really feel like I could do absolutely anything without any trouble at this point. You just learn to be comfortable and calm anywhere and in any circumstance when you travel. You have to. I got to be on the other side of a farmer’s market stand too, which reminded me of college Admissions. It was exactly the same dynamic as a college fair or a convention or a fair or anywhere where people stand behind a table and try to sell goods or pass along information.
It was so good in part because I was completely disconnected from the rest of the world. And I realized something about myself. My happiness and optimism are inversely proportional to the amount of advertising I consume. The more advertising I am aware of, the less happy I am. Media has the power to make people happy or sad; its power is really unequaled. I can watch “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” and be giddy, or I can watch “American Idol” and want to curl up in a hole. I have also been surprised to realize how little I like shopping. I generally enjoy shopping for things that I enjoy or for other people, but in New Zealand I simply had to train myself to not spend money on anything for myself. I didn’t have money and I didn’t have space to carry anything, so there simply was no way I could buy physical things. Even t-shirts, one of my favorite things in the world, held little interest for me. Perhaps that’s because I had a bit of overkill during the past few decades and I simply can’t justify buying any new ones when I have over 200 at home already.
I of course, spent most of my time in New Zealand in hostels. There’s no privacy whatsoever, but I liked that they were a great equalizer. No one ever knew or cared what you did in the “real world” or how old you were. Back here, the first question we ask people is what they do and categorize them accordingly. And of course it would be shameful to be friends with or become romantically involved with someone more than a few years your junior or senior. On the road no one cares. You make some good friends out there, and saying goodbye is always tough. I generally like long elaborate ceremonial goodbyes. When I left Napier I did the opposite. I just disappeared. I usually like the closure an “event” lends to a goodbye. I just got so tired of saying goodbye by that point. And it was the first place I’d been that I actually didn’t really want to leave. You meet people on the road and they are your entire life. Your world is no larger than where you can walk. And then you leave and everything in your life except for yourself is suddenly gone. And you do it over and over and over again. Starting over completely from scratch every few months or every few days. And most of the time you’ll never see them again. I am quite glad to be through with that lifestyle, and it may be my great takeaway from this trip (and one gray hair).
When I left Napier, I embarked on my last big traveling adventure. I found a free natural hot spring that was warmer than any sauna I’ve ever been in. It was amazing. I smelled pine needles in the woods. I don’t think there is anything in the world more comforting and lovely than the smell of pine needles. I rolled down a hill in a big ball. In New Zealand this is called Zorbing. It was the next coolest thing I did after skydiving, and about 1/8 of the cost. Pure fun. And the people were so nice. They offered to give me a ride home because it was pouring rain, and as I was waiting they gave me a free ride. After all, they ball was at the top of the hill and it needed to be stored at the bottom. This is what I loved about New Zealanders. They cared about things other than money. If you think the world is full of bad people, go traveling by yourself. It is notI met a girl who was on the Amazing Race Australia. She was awesome. I did the haka, the crazy war dance New Zealand’s rugby team does before every match to psyche out their opponents. As I was hiking one day, there were birds called fantails flitting all around me. They’d dive in and around me and generally look a bit spasmodic. Turns out that when I walk I disturb lots of tiny little insects and the fantails eat them. They follow you picking up all the disturbed insects your walking creates. I even saw a pheasant. I love birds that don’t fly unless they have to. They’re so wonderfully awkward.
Then I almost died. This one was intense. I love caving. I less love caving in a river. It was a humbling experience. First I tied myself t a rope and lowered myself 300 feet into a hole. Then I walked or swam upstream against a current flowing wicked fast that were sometimes so deep I couldn’t stand. And it was ice cold. And underground. And dark. I squeezed, floated, swam, climbed, jumped, and sat in utter darkness illuminated only by the glow of fly larva trying to attract grown up versions of themselves onto webs so they could eat them and gain enough energy to transform into flies themselves only to mate and then fly into someone else’s web and be eaten. At one point I simply didn’t have the weight or leg strength to get myself across the river and was washed away only to be grabbed and pulled back from the abyss by my guide. At the end we had a feast, I got to take home the leftovers, got a ride back to my hostel, and got some free pics of the whole escapade. I’m looking forward to paying it all forward. People showed me so much genuine kindness on this trip. People time and time again gave to me knowing that there was no way I could pay them back. I was often somewhat ashamed to accept their generosity. In America, we’re trained to do everything ourselves. To accept gifts is a sign of weakness, to accept kindness you can’t repay is unheard of. I was, however, not in a position not to. When it’s raining buckets and I ate a single PB&J sandwich all day and someone offers me a ride and some left over barbeque, I’m going to take it. And remember it the next time I see someone in need. Yes, it is my own fault I am poor. But getting that ride home in the rain doesn’t make me want to bum rides the rest of my life. Sorry Republicans, in fact, it makes me more motivated to get some money in my pocket in the future, so I can give it away to someone who can never repay me.
All of this was a bit much all at once for me. I think a better philosophy to spread out major events. Caving and bungy jumping and soaking in natural hot springs and doing the haka all in one week somehow may have taken to specialness out of each of them. It was still an awesome week though. It struck me about this time that while I don’t have any desire to play video games in the future, I’m glad I played them in the past. I really believe the types of games I played did a lot to help cultivate a healthy sense of adventure, exploration, and imagination. Games where you are free to roam and explore large, interesting worlds (and not with the intention of killing people) made me want to do it in real life. I learned about different cultures from Street Fighter. I learned about geography and car design from Cruis’n USA. I learned that eating flowers lets you throw fireballs from your armpits from Super Mario Brothers. The key for me was I played the right games at the right time in my developmental life and I didn’t play them so much that they took away from my interactions with the real world. They enhanced it. I think I also may have learned a lot about attention to detail and the importance of thoroughness from the Where’s Waldo books. I’ve already established that while I’m generally not very fast at anything, I’m thorough at just about everything. I can stare a building and just study the little intricacies of the architecture for ages. Where some people just glance by and don’t pay any attention to their surroundings, I try to fully grasp the complexity of my universe. I could have never found Waldo if I had just given it a quick glance. And here is another example of how we train children right and then have them grow up to a world where everything good they learned is sacrificed at the altar of efficiency.
I finished my time in New Zealand in the big city. I had hoped to spend a good portion of my time in New Zealand living the city life I’d always wanted to try out, and I originally decided to get that fix in Christchurch. Well, Christchurch is actually a pretty small city and had a big earthquake that took away a lot of its city-ness, so I found myself in Auckland a few months ago. Auckland has as much in common with the rest of New Zealand as New York City does with rural Kansas. New Zealanders who don’t live in Auckland hate Auckland, but Aucklanders make up 1/3 of the entire country’s population. On the end Auckland was good, not just because it was a vibrant and fun city, but because the people there turned out to be pretty awesome. I didn’t particularly like it at first, but now I miss it. I loved getting up early. There is nothing as magical as a city in the morning. The life just starting to return to the city. None of the crowds and chaos and drunkenness that characterize cities at night, just the bright sunshine and potential of a new day gleaming off the beautiful old edifices and the grotesque ‘70s slabs next to them. In Auckland I learned that the word “family” means, “12 and under” in New Zealand. It’s like Happy Meal. I like being happy. I want a Happy Meal too. I also learned that bubble tea is disgusting. Potato-flavored milk with sugarless gummi balls. Yum. One day in particular I thought perfectly encapsulated what makes me me: I started the morning at a farmer’s market and followed it with a performance aimed at kids of local hip-hop dance crews at the city’s major performance venue. After that I had a free lunch at a local church mission then walked through a historic neighborhood following a history booklet and stopping on the way to get bread from a local baker with a coupon I had. When I finally got home, I wrote a cover letter for a job application. What am I supposed to say when people ask me what my hobbies are? Everything?
I worked at a university bookstore in Auckland. While it was the most prestigious University in New Zealand, I felt like I was having a very different experience than I would working at Harvard’s bookstore. I was, as I always was this past year, a temp at the bookstore. The funny thing about being a temp is that everyone tends to treat you as if getting to know you is a waste of their time. This is largely a defense mechanism I think. I can understand it myself. If people are constantly coming in and out of your life and the majority of them are drunk the majority of the time, it takes something special to arouse interest. The trouble with part-time jobs is that people skills are largely undervalued. In lots of work I suppose this is the case. I would argue that it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference if you know much of anything about what you’re doing. If you have people skills you can do anything. I think there is a missed marketing opportunity at New Zealand universities from university-branded clothing. At Elizabethtown College, ¾ of our bookstore was clothing with the Blue Jay. At the University of Auckland there are two designs you can get on a t-shirt or a sweatshirt, they hang behind the desk in the gym, and they have to be special ordered. Then again, New Zealand universities aren’t in desperate need of revenue because New Zealanders pay taxes in accordance with a higher quality of life…but that’s a much bigger issue. New Zealand as a whole is anti-pride. They’re not necessarily pro-humility, but they are very adamantly anti-pride. Actually they aren’t terribly adamant about much. They are humbly and quietly anti-pride. In America our license plates have our state on them. They are decorated with some design representing what’s unique about that state. Many people choose to pay extra to have their license plate number personalized. New Zealand license plates are all white with black letters and numbers. The end. I missed decoration. Then there was the Civic Theatre. Strikingly un-New Zealand, the Civic is a mammoth picture palace in downtown Auckland that is the envy of any I have ever seen. It is second only to the Paris Opera House as the most unbelievable theatre I have ever seen. It was almost torn down and as usual, was saved by a group of concerned citizens. Seeing this theatre is worth the price of a plane ticket to New Zealand. It was life-changing.
And now we’re down to the wire. What follows comes from a place where I was about mid-July. It’s hard to put myself back in that place because I’m not really in that place now. It was a difficult place and a thoughtful place, and one that deserves to be heard. But it is the past as well. At this point in July, I was having a tough time with being in New Zealand and was intent on changing things when I got back. I’m glad I had a tough time in New Zealand and I am glad to be implementing some of the changes I dreamed up in New Zealand. I felt at that time that I had largely veered away from my original intention in traveling. I intended to pursue love, the love of people and the love of God. I ended up more focused on truth, on something more internal and academic. I had been alone in my travels for so long that I could only vaguely remember a time in my life when other people were an intimate part of it. For so long, I had been the only person to consume my thoughts. I was interacting with the world in a way in which I hoped to love and make a positive impact, but I was doing it alone and on my own terms. You are never as lonely as when you’re alone in a city with millions of people around. The presence of other people and the lack of genuine connection with them only exacerbates your feelings of loneliness. I made a decision at that moment that the next stage of my life must be focused not on exploration or peace or justice or authenticity or any other grand concept but on the individual relationships in my life that make those larger concepts a reality. I have been focusing on the big picture and I’m glad I did, but the time has come for me to focus on the little pictures. To forget about excitement and speed and enjoy savoring simplicity. To make a difference in the lives of individuals.
In a way New Zealand toward the end became a bit of a personal purgatory. I found a masochistic bone in my body I didn’t know was there. It was my 40 days in the wilderness, my spirit vision, my self-denial, and my solidarity in learning to do without all rolled into one. And I decided that if I was going to be poor, I might as well be poor. So I did without more and more to weed myself off of the need for things. At this same time I was reading “Into the Wild” and it scared me to death. And I realized, at exactly the right moment and with the help of the very genuine love of other people, that none of that really mattered. What mattered was not so much Love but love. I don’t know that I’ve mastered Love, but I’ve spent so much time fixated on it that I’ve come to a point where I’m beating a rock hoping water will come out. It’s better to just let the rock be a rock. And get water from the spring. People are the spring.
We all have our own way of setting priorities. Sometimes our very different actions can be the result of the exact same motivation. In traveling for so long, did I choose “career” over family? I don’t think so. But it was a typically counter-cultural way of bucking the prevailing trend of staying put for no reason. And one thing I never lacked was motivation. My motivation was always in the right place, and everything I did was always the result of careful thought and consideration as to what was the morally and ethically right decision. But the result was still a turn inward and away from relationships. It was not at all bad in and of itself, but it did result in a lot of worship of the God of exploration. I learned a lot about people and about myself, but I became less adept at fostering individual relationships. There may have been a point where I lost sight of the larger vision and instead got wrapped upon the sociology of all of it. I put the puzzle together, but I forgot to take time to get to know each piece. It’s a tricky business trying to ascertain your motivation after the fact, and potentially not worth the mental strain, but I think it does help to focus priorities and bring peace and closure after a monumental life event.
That may leave the unintentional impression that I had a bad experience in New Zealand or that I am sorry I went. Nothing could be less true. Everything that happened there and every thought that entered my head was there for a reason. And today I am as happy and optimistic and grateful as I have ever been. Not because I went through this difficult time in New Zealand, but because I went through this incredible time in New Zealand that here and there disguised itself as difficult. And that’s part of the big lesson. Trials are merely opportunities for joy. Abundance is an opportunity for joy. Exploration is an opportunity for joy. All of life is nothing more than an opportunity for joy. I had a goal in my two years of travel to understand, relate to, and appreciate all people, and be comfortable in any situation so that in doing so I could better reach out in love to anyone I meet. I was granted that goal. And I have been granted joy overflowing. The future is bright, as it always has been and it always will be. Thank you Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud. Thank you kiwi birds and kiwifruit and Kiwi New Zealanders. Have love. Give love. Be loved. Be love. Always.
The End.
Jeremy
