II. In Preparation

Once you finally arrive on the other side of the world, you want to stay a minute. But how does one pack for five weeks in Papua New Guinea? My advice: pack less clothes than you think you need. Less clothes, and more chocolate. Chocolate is hard to come by, expensive if found, and a single square at the end of a long day has the magical ability to make life in a Third World country feel less daunting. I bring fifteen bars of the good stuff—Cadbury Caramello, Justin’s Peanut Butter Cups, Lindt salted toffee, Whole Foods dark cacao mixed with pear and almond—immediately endearing myself to my new housemates, Tina and Theresa, who’d been rationing their last remaining chunk. 

I further prepare for all medical eventualities. I pack pills for if you catch a cold but need to function in the day, or get the flu and long to sleep at night. Creams to combat fungus, and emollients that battle yeast. Band-Aids, tampons, and a panoply of gut remedies to cure every affliction from chronic constipation to raging diarrhea, plus the interspersing range of indigestive ailments. Sprays that repel bugs, ointment to treat the itch after they inevitably bite, and Doxycycline, an antibiotic meant to prevent malaria. Here, malaria is ubiquitous and comes in two forms: falciparum, the fatal kind, which kills at least one million unfortunates a year, and the less-threatening yet relapsing strain that everyone, including Pete, seems to have suffered and survived. “Even on Doxy, you might get malaria,” says Liz, the dive instructor. She’s been in PNG eight months. She first suspected something wrong one morning on the water when her body felt cold in the heat of eighty-nine degrees. Once her muscles started aching she turned the boat around and headed back to shore, and there began a treatment cocktail that includes doses of a drug called Malarone; Larium, which gives you vivid acid-trip dreams; and quinine, the same extract found in tonic water. At night in PNG we mix massive gin-and-tonic batches. Every mosquito bite might carry the same weight as that of sharks. 

Thus my suitcase is composed of one-third chocolate, one-third med kit, and in the remaining third I fold some clothes: two pairs of shorts, ten T-shirts, ten pairs cotton knickers, three light dresses, Crocs and flip-flops. None are clothes I care about. I’m ready for all of them to rot while on my body, and I only hope there are enough remaining intact fibers for the return trip home. Unlike Australia, its next-door neighbor that is flat and dry, PNG is mountainous and wet. The air is hard to breathe, because it’s viscous. It takes more energy to breathe this air, so by the end of every day you’re tired just from breathing. Walking in the grass feels like stepping on a giant sponge. Nothing ever fully dries, no matter how long it’s left hanging in the sun, which means all clothes and sheets and towels eventually sprout mold. And if the mildew doesn’t get them, field mice might. We share our thatch cabin with a particularly perverted group of rodents, small and brown and cute as chipmunks, whose favorite snacks are women’s knickers, especially those pulled from the hamper. 

Despite the dripping atmosphere, I’m always thirsty. It’s incongruous. Yet there seems no limit to the quantity of water I consume. I fill and refill my Hydro Flask, and at day’s end I calculate: I drank almost two gallons. The water must leave my body moments after entering, via pores dilated and forever dewy to the touch. 

I. Pre-boarding Announcement

The island of New Britain, in Papua New Guinea, is 8,844 miles away from Rockport, Massachusetts, another small place by a different sea, where I call home. To North Americans, Papua New Guinea hangs on the other side of the world. It’s as far from New England as you can get. To get any farther, you’d have to rocket up, towards the stars, or dive down into an ocean black that’s just as deep and unexplored. Even its geographical descriptors sound alarmingly alien: an Oceanian archipelago, Papua New Guinea is situated on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

It takes two days and four flights to travel from Boston to New Britain. My flight leaves Logan International Airport at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, and I arrive at Hoskins Airport, a former World War II Japanese airstrip that’s been upgraded in recent decades to a single-runway landing field, on Thursday at 5:00 p.m. It’s cold and raining when I leave Boston. When I deboard the puddle jumper at Hoskins, descending via metal airstairs and walking to the one-room shack that serves as terminal, the heat hits my chest like a living thing. It first knocks the air out of my lungs, then fills them back with air that’s wet. There’s so much humidity in the air it feels like lesson one in learning to breathe underwater.  

I should say, it takes at least two days. Two days is the minimum amount of time required. Two days if every flight takes off and lands when it’s supposed to; each connection’s caught without a hitch. It nearly takes me longer than two days after my flight from Boston to Los Angeles is delayed ninety minutes, first due to bad weather compounded by mechanical failure, and I have a ninety-minute layover in LA, exactly ninety minutes, before the second flight to Brisbane. After announcing our delay, the American Airlines agent asks all connecting LAX passengers to see her at the gate. I step into place following an Asian woman. A long line forms behind me, but a middle-aged man wearing a yarmulke and sweater materializes at my right, neatly bypassing the queue. When my turn comes, we both step forward. 

“Oh, were you next?” he says.

“I guess you can go if you want to.” 

“Thanks,” he says, already pushing past me. 

His name is Saul Goldstein and he’s traveling to Australia with his partner, Seth Goldberg, a middle-aged man wearing a yarmulke and sweater vest, and their daughter, a four-year-old with tight black curls. Goldstein and Goldberg take over the waiting lounge. While Goldstein talks to the gate agent, Goldberg talks on the phone, lining up emergency West Coast dinner plans. 

“But it will be Shabbat when we arrive!” Goldberg suddenly shouts to Goldstein at the ticket counter, across the crush of waiting passengers. “We can’t go out!” Then: “Oh wait, never mind, we’re talking about Thursday night, not Friday, thank Moses.”

Later, their daughter plays Candy Crush on a pink iPad, legs stretched stretched across three seats, shoes resting comfortably near my lap. In one fist she clutches a crunchy Kirby cucumber and half a bagel swollen with cream cheese. She goes bite for bite. When finished, she announces, “Finished,” and extends her arm to Goldstein, eyes still locked on the candies she’s annihilating. Her father accepts the gummed bread and gnawed vegetable, then offers dessert. 

“Pumpkin, would you like one of these incredibly delicious strawberries?”

They seem incredibly delicious; I can smell them from four chairs away, so ripe they’re almost caramel-sweet. 

“No,” Pumpkin rejects.

“Would you like a fig?” asks Goldstein, producing a basket of amethyst orbs. 

“No.”

“How about a Godiva-chocolate-and-macadamia-nut cookie?”

“No.”

“Perhaps a bit of Stilton on watercress cracker?” he tries, progressing to the cheese course.

“No.” 

He sighs, repacking their food valise. 

                                                                            *

Time is like a rubber band. It stretches for some while compressing for another. The six-hour flight to California feels interminable to the man on my left, he tells me when landing. He pops the earbuds from his ears, sighs all the breath out of his chest, looks at me and says, “That was interminable.” 

My experience is different. I spend the time sweating anxiously, attempting to meditate so as to stop sweating, berating myself for not having stopped sweating because by now I should be lotus-posed atop my seat, zen about the fate I can’t control—I may have no choice but to spend twenty-four extra hours in LA before the next trans-Pacific flight—willing my Brisbane flight to be delayed so I might still catch it, then looping back to nervous sweats. Six hours pass in a fog of fidget. 

On our descent, the captain says he caught a strong tailwind and managed to make up forty minutes in the air. Next I learn that Qantas Flight 16 to Brisbane is delayed by thirty. Now I’m sweating with the heat of renewed hope. I chew away three fingernails while we taxi to the gate. “Run like hell,” the flight attendant tells me, so I do. 

I shouldn’t make it. There are still twenty minutes of lost time to account for, but they get caught and volleyed in the reverberating rubber band, and I board the flight I was supposed to board and settle in for the next fourteen hours. 

                                                                          *

What’s in Papua New Guinea? Pete. We get engaged two weeks before he leaves for a four-month stint in the field. “The field” is where marine biologists go to spend intimate time with the animal to which they’ve devoted their adult lives. In Pete’s case, that means clownfish. He’s among the world’s leading Nemo experts. 

The night before he leaves, we go out for cocktails. We sit at a bar and drink martinis, knees and elbows touching. Back at his apartment, he says he wants to shave his head: “It’s just easier, for the field.” He fits a plastic garbage bag around the bathroom sink, pulls out clippers, and asks me to do the honors. I’m giggling at first, tipsy and buzzing zigzags, and the basin fills with blonde-brown hair. But once finished I look at Pete, and suddenly see my mother. Her big eyes in a gaunt face, the delicate contours of her downy scalp. I remember sitting by her bed, running fingers over her skull to trace and memorize her map of bones, while every day she left me and this world a little more, for somewhere even farther than New Guinea. 

When I start crying without explanation, Pete puts down the clippers and holds me close. 

New love doesn’t tolerate separation. By the time I begin my journey in Boston, Pete and I have been apart five weeks. I hurtle in space towards him. At times, I travel at the speed of sound, and still that isn’t fast enough. When I land in Brisbane, back in wifi, I text him, “It’s 7:00 a.m., and I’m about to sit down for a glass of whiskey.”

“It’s 7:00 a.m. here as well!” he writes.

We’re ecstatic. For weeks we’ve been fourteen hours apart, talking for a few fast moments at my dawn and his dusk, always sleepy, and now, finally, we’re back in the same time zone. 

For The Bird

Bird Heart

My mother has a bird heart

ferocious and organic

bloody like a severed limb, it bleeds

gashes dealt with a machete.

On the outside there are feathers.

There is no order to these feathers.

Once soft as down, they now sprout erratically

in plumes of pink, magenta, gold.

We watch without speaking.

Imperceptible, almost, the way they flutter as she sighs

an exhalation of deep, warm breath.

Now, when she is happy.

I don’t know how it was before.

With a person I love most—

the products of her bird heart imagination—

we see a world of animals; some sexy, some horrific.

Since we learned to laugh, everything is funny

especially the magpie with a slick, wet head

like at home someone licked it clean.

A ferocity of actions prompted by the pumping of a heart

gouged with feather-spears.

Saturday, July 5

Days Until Race: 120

Why I’m running (Part II):

I spent July 4^th with my family in Rockport, 40 miles north of Boston on the tip of Cape Ann. But Hurricane Arthur delayed events one day. Town officials rescheduled the beach bonfire and Main Street Fireman’s Parade, and in neighboring Gloucester, where years ago fisherman aboard the Andrea Gail went up against a perfect storm and drowned, they cancelled fireworks. Friday morning the clouds hung low like overinflated water balloons. And, when finished taunting us, exploded. Then the rains came: cold, relentless, drilling into the pavement. We pretended like we cared, but didn’t. Insincere complaints of being housebound, now we can’t walk to town for fudge, this isn’t summer beach weather, what happened to the heat? But then we just moved everything outside, under the protected porch. Bottles of wine and bowls of clam chowder. Sweatshirts, blankets, socks. iPads and books and August’s elaborate train set, reassembled on the white picnic table. That night I slept with balcony doors open, the sky my own sound machine.

I remember Christmas vacations as kids in Turks and Caicos. We loved making fun of Club Med, where they didn’t believe in daylight savings so never turned back clocks. That meant it was one hour earlier at their resort than anywhere else on the island. A mini time warp, delineated by sand lines. On New Year’s Eve their fireworks mushroomed at 11:00 p.m., and beneath palm trees in the Coco Bistro garden we giggled after every pop. What a cult! They were living a lie, and crazier: They liked it. But when Rockport moved Independence Day to July 5^th, it wasn’t funny. It was important, not illogical. And my parents celebrated with that unique lust only immigrants can muster.

Here’s my father: 31, absurdly young, married, living in a Bucharest apartment where the lights, heat and hot water are periodically shut off. No warning, no explanation, the length of time always indeterminate. I’m 2 years old, and he adores me. At night after a long, hard office day, he washes, boils and irons my cloth diapers. My mother feeds me, then stretches me belly down on his chest, where I bounce and burp. He has a dark brown mustache, and it always tickles my face, because he is always kissing me. He catches and collects those laugh sounds, many different samples, to retrieve when I am an adult and he is reminiscing.

My father is Catholic, which in communist Romania you are not allowed to be. So he goes to church secretly, in houses with unmarked doors. Prayers formed underground, all the more fervent because they’re buried. But one day there’s a knock at our door, bang, bang! Two Securitate officials, members of President Nicolae Ceaușescu’s secret police. They arrest my father. Beside him, my mother shakes. I watch her and shake too. Tug her skirt, what’s happening? Why are you crying? Where are they taking Tata? And what does my father do? He smiles. Kisses my mother’s mouth. Says, “I love you. See you tonight.” Like he’s off to work, or the market for more milk, which there isn’t any of either.

They take him to a very big building with uncountable rooms lining infinite long hallways. The doors to all the rooms are shut until one isn’t. The one you’re told to wait in. I know, because it happens again. And sometimes they take me and my mother, and sometimes pull me from her arms as I try with everything I am not to cry or scream, because then she’ll start screaming too. What I don’t know as a child and will only learn later is how many people suffer and die behind those doors. Thousands of people, but not my dad.

The Securitate says, “Why do you wish to leave Mother Romania?”

My father says, “How is it any of your business what I want or do not want to do?”

“Are you a Catholic?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that for this answer we could have you killed?”

My father laughs. Ha, ha. “If you could, you would have done it already.”

That bravery! Those balls! I want to be like him in some small way.

I ran nine miles on Saturday morning, following a path that snaked first along the ocean then spit me out on Main Street, where at 10:00 a.m. the mounting excitement was palpable. At twilight came the parade, and August shook at every fire truck, his body too small to hold so much happiness, shouting “One more, one more!” after each passed. Later, fireworks over the harbor. Not his first, but maybe the first he’ll remember. He called them “Rainbow, boom.” Not the same as what his mother, my 3-year-old sister, screamed at his age, but not so different from “Mini, pac, boom,” either. My father barbequed, like any good American dad. Except instead of burgers he made mititei, meat shaped like bullets rather than patties, mixed of ground lamb, beef and pork, and blended with his own secret spice concoction. Because he’s not just any other American dad. We wished each other happy Fourth of July, even though it wasn’t. Again and again we said it, clinking gin and tonic glasses. My mother led us in “God Bless America.” Her own hilarious version, since she can never remember lyrics. She sang:

                                               God bless America,

                                               Land of my home.

                                               Stay beside her, to protect her,

                                               When the light shines a light from above.

Never have I heard a more passionate rendition. She started sitting down, but bolted from her chair by the second line. Spine straight, eyes shiny, the fine hairs upright on her arms. Laura and I joined in, bellowing loudly, terribly, top of our lungs. Laughing our heads off.

Miles: 9

Time: 93 minutes

One mile. One true sentence.

I'm not the only one for whom writing and running collide!

http://chronicle.com/article/What-WritingRunning-Have/147193/