How it all began...

Long ago, my mother used to tell me bedtime stories from her years in Africa -- of Fifi, who often wandered down to the Mkuzzi river and was one day eaten by hungry crocodiles. Of marching through the coffee fields, beating pots and pans to keep the swarming locusts from landing and eating the crop. Of roasting the finger-long insects and chewing their crisp, papery bodies like popcorn while the firelight danced across the white-toothed laughter of her Wakamba neighbors. My mother spent her childhood high in the Uzambara mountains, and didn't wear shoes until she was twelve. Her stories wove themselves inextricably into my childhood dream-wanderings and lent wings to my daytime fantasies, until our backyard New Jersey streambed became a tributary to the mighty Nile and our dainty Shetland Sheepdog a magestic lion, sauntering regally along its banks.
When I was ten my father was offered a position in Puerto Rico, and my mother related the delights of our new home -- mangoes and papayas, coral reefs, friendly natives, straw hats and sugar cane -- as we packed. On her face was the same expression she always wore when she was lost in her African memories. I knew my life was about to begin.

And begin it did. In the markets of Rio Piedras, where she haggled for dirt-encrusted vegetables in a language she had apparently picked up like a penny on the roadside. On platform ferries crossing brackish rivers, where only a frayed and knotted rope kept our rusty old station wagon from being swept out to sea. We learned to scuba dive, and tried to trick each other into touching the sticky anemonies that left a gluelike residue that stank for days.

But even this somehow didn't satisfy my insatiable longing for a real adventure. I devoured National Geographic with the intensity of an addict, mouthing over and over the lyrical palce-names that sounded like the beating of exotic drums. Bujumbura. There wasn't a photo that didn't seem to be missing that crucial element -- me; smoking a pipe with an old man in the Brazilian jungle, roaming the African plains with my hand resting casually on the thick main of a lion, or high up in the rigging of an Arab Dhow. At sixteen, I surreptitiously applied to the Peace Corps. They said no, my parents said no, and I went to college.

The next spring, while my brother was busy landing a prestigous summer job with a Swiss pharmaceutical company, I was hatching plans of my own. I was going to Europe, I announced, with a backpack. My mother, explorer extraordinaire, fearless adventurer, suddenly metamophosed back into a mother. "It's too dangerous," she said. After several months of wrangling, we agreed that I should find a traveling companion. I asked my boyfriend. "Well," he replied after three microseconds of thought, "It would be nice to have done Europe but I don't really want to go there." That relationship ended. I left for England. "I'll have my revenge," my mother told me, "when your eighteen-year-old daughter wants to do something just like this."

It was a minor miracle that carried me from London to Macedonia without tragedy. I floated through Europe with the wide-eyed innocence of a twelve-year-old. In Yugoslavia I staggered off the bus after a ten-hour ride and found myself in the beautiful but utterly isolated park of Zablak. There was no guesthouse and darkness was falling. A young man, a fellow passenger, approached me and with hand-signals invited me to his home. He cut an imposing figure -- six foot tall, with broad shoulders and strong arms, but seemed shy and eager to please. He had not harassed me on the bus ride, as the soldiers often did, and made it clear that a mother and sister awaited him at his house. I said yes.
Two hours later I was still following him up a goat path high in the mountains and far from any sign of human habitation. I could see nothing but the burly outline of his shoulders in the moonlight. Sanity dawned; I was an idiot. Before I had time to gather my courage and melt into the darkness we crested a hill and ran smack into a tiny woman with the broad, stocky body of a tree stump. She screamed, threw up her arms, grabbed all six feet of my young man and swung him in a complete circle before setting him down again. It was his mother. Over the next two weeks, while I learned how to knead ten-pound slabs of bread dough and gather sweet wild blueberries from the mountainside, I realized that this family meant more to me than all the half-remembered monuments and tourist traps from Italy to England. A country, I discovered, is the sum of its people. To see it I had to learn the language and share their lives. And so, when college was over, I joined the Peace Corps.
This time I was twenty-one and ready, or thought I was. Starry-eyed and brimming over with idealism, I rolled up my sleeves and strode forth to better the world. I tackled Filipino society with explosive energy firmly grounded in the belief that I knew what was best for everyone concerned. My village would be a model for the entire Philippine Archipelago, if not for the entire world. I squared my shoulders, walked into my squatters village and immediately began to scheme -- those areas near the palm trees would be fenced off for gardens, we'd build a school near the village square and for God's sake, would somebody tie up those pigs before they start rooting around in the latrines?

If one learns through failure then I acquired the wisdom of the ancients during those two long years. Landcrabs methodically snipped off the tops of my fledging tomato seedlings. My wells dried up. My rice co-operative grew exponentially, then failed even more spectacularly. My clams drowned. I cultivated all the wrong people, and inadvertently ignored the real leaders. And in the midst of the turmoil and tumult, my mother arrived for a visit.

I took her up to see another Volunteer, a young woman who lived an eight-hour bus ride and a hefty hike into the mountains away. The night before our departure my mother ate some bad fish, and the next morning seemed hesitant to join me on the roof of the bus. "What if I need to use the loo?" she asked.

"I'll knock on the roof of the bus and it'll stop and wait for you," I assured her.

An hour later we were speeding past miles of newly planted paddy field, the three-inch shoots poking through beds of brownish mud. My mother pointed out, with remarkable restraint, that there wasn't a tree in sight, or any other monument to modesty. I offered to ask an old woman to stand in the field and spread her voluminous skirts to ward off voyeuristic roadside eyes. As I watched them troop off I realized with startling suddenness that she was no longer the expert in all things exotic. Somewhere along the way we had become partners in the adventure of life.

Eventually she boarded the plane for home and I returned to my site, recharged and ready to get back to work, convinced that if only I tried harder then I couldn't help but succeed. My village responded with the elasticity of a rubber band, giving way initially but gradually building resistance until my own energy defeated me and the village was allowed to return to what it had been. Along the way they helped start me down the path to a completely different type of learning -- about myself -- in a new paradigm where nothing is absolute and there are few rights and wrongs, only ways of being.

When it was my turn to board a plane for home I was ready for something completely different. I donned stockings and became a management consultant.

My salary went up four thousand percent. I acquired an expense account and joined a gym, where I paid the equivalent of my entire Peace Corps pay to be allowed to sit on a bicycle and pedal endlessly, going nowhere. Two years later I quit to start an environmental labortory. Two years after that we sold it to a larger company and signed a non-compete agreement. I stopped moving long enough to breath.

It hit me, as it always did, with the momentum of a Mac truck. That irrepressible travel itch. But it was no longer enough to simply roam the world and experience foreign peoples and cultures; I wanted to bring it back home, to share what I discovered with anyone who would listen. I wanted to be a travel writer.

Most everyone disagreed. My father, who had watched my erratic career moves with a bewilderment firmly rooted in his orderly Swiss upbringing. My friends, all upwardly mobile and increasingly wrapped up in the joys of summer weddings and happy house-hunting. My dog, who knew that the key to life's fulfilment lay in a frisbee and a lazy afternoon. And myself. Writers are a hungry lot, and usually live in airless attics and basements. I had tasted the good life. If I threw it all away then I might never get it back.

But Iwas twenty-nine, I had saved enough money to keep me for several years, I had neither husband nor children nor mortgage. If not now, then when?

The decision made, the destination was pre-ordained. Vietnam, newly opened and available to Americans. No other country generated such an explosive mix of emotions. Merely uttering its name out loud invited a bewildering array of reactions.

"It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen," one vet told me with tears in his eyes. "The greenest green this side of Creation. And the children have such smiles..."

"Thieving, sneaky, dirty little yellow terrors," another growled, his back still rigid with anger twenty years after the fact. "They'd as soon kill ya as look at ya."

"We bombed them into the stone age and communism finished the job," a local journalist informed me, "Their average per capita income is no more than two hundred dollars."

"American companies are dying for the chance to invest," I read in a business newsletter, "Cellular phones are one of the hottest new markets."

Others were equally sure of my future in such a place. "You'll be raped," promised a rugged, 6'4' mechanic, an ex-marine. He jerked at a spare tire with his crowbar, his arm muscles twitching in time with his words. "The place's still littered with bombs. Malaria'll eat your guts." He hoisted the tire free. "Snakes and commies, snakes and commies in the grass. You'll disappear and no one'll ever find you."

"It's a Buddhist country," I said carefully, "a gentle people. The war is over."

He stopped abruptly and leveled his crowbar at me like a machine gun. For the first time there was real anger in his voice. "How the FUCK do YOU know?"

He was right. What did I know? I had nothing more tangible than my beliefs -- that war is the real enemy, not communism or Uncle Sam. That a man placed in an impossible position, whether he is an Ohio farm boy or a Hanoi shoe repairman, will do whatever it takes to survive. I couldn't begin to imagine the horrors the American soldiers had faced in the swampy jungles of a hostile, foreign land -- but they had come back and gone on to become loving husbands, caring fathers and steadfast citizens. Didn't the Vietnamese fighters also have mothers who mourned them, sweethearts and family and friends? They too must have returned home to their plows, their children and their ancestral shrines. I was ready to stake my health, my virtue and by my mechanic's accounting, my life on the inherent goodness of human nature.
My faith seemed trivial in the face of that accusing crowbar.

"If I came back and wrote a book," I asked timidly, "would you read it?"

"I don't read books."

"What about a film? Something you'd see on T.V.?"

He paused in the act of tossing away the tire and thought about it for a long time. "A movie?" he finally said. "Yeah, maybe."

Maybe. It was enough. And so, just two weeks before my departure date, amidst a hundred final errands, I bought a video camera. When the time came, I tucked it into my backpack, waved a cheerful good-bye and climbed aboard the plane.

In truth I was utterly terrified.

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