Dental Hygiene

From the back of the cab lurching through I-101 San Francisco rush hour traffic, I notice the tagline “Superior cloud computing architecture.” Oh yeah, people here think it is normal to mass market enterprise software platforms on freeway billboards. I am not in New Zealand anymore. 

Photo Credits to Tony Wasserman

Fighting off backseat taxi car sickness, I symbolically swap NZ$ for US$ from my sweaty money belt to my wallet. I silently recall where I was when I woke up this morning. (Or what seems like “this morning” after traveling for 20 hours straight). A blazing pink sunrise flushed my cheeks and the wind woke me to alertness as I brushed my teeth with my tooth brush stub and hydration bladder. (By now, I had broken off the handle with my bare hands to save weight and more easily fit the toothbrush in a zip lock. Is it not annoying that tooth brush handles are perpetually just a tiny bit too long to fit in the baggie?).  I could have used the rain water catchment sink around back. But why perform routine personal care at a sink when there is a grassy hill overlooking the bay and Christchurch’s Banks Peninsula to stand atop?

I saw the San Francisco skyline and looked back through time and space into this moment of dental hygiene bliss where I had observed myself from 20 hours and 10,000 km earlier. I awed over the incogitability that I would soon be on the other side of the planet in another season and metaphorically in another world. A little toothpaste dribbled down the side of my mouth to punctuate the point. Stray scraggly mountain sheep witnessed that instant in the sunrise. At the same time, the other 50,000 people trying to crawl up and down the 101 corridor also bear witness to this moment here.

My commute to the Christchurch airport consisted of a short two hour hike from the Packhorse historic backcountry stone hut built the year my grandfather was born, in 1914. From there, I hitched a 45 minute ride with my tramping mate to the international airport. I felt a little like I was cheating the system to tramp straight out of the bush and into the airport. But this was in New Zealand and of course there was an amazing trailhead less than an hour from the runway.

Fortunately for the passengers of Air New Zealand flight 8, I found an airport shower before heading through security. I even had a clean square of towel left over! (I had cut my already small pack towel into smaller squares to save weight when tramping and to ensure that I always come back from the bush with a clean towel to work with). Unfortunately, the only shower I found happened to be in the handicapped restroom. I felt anguish about occupying this stall. I should know better. After all it was not all that long ago that I spent two months in a walker. I learned firsthand that for a handicapped person it can take every ounce of available energy to move a short distance. What if a handicapped person needed the toilet and could not get to one on time because of me? But then again, would it be any kinder to the world at large if I were to get on the airplane unwashed? Oh, these are the moral conundrums I seem to find myself in.

So here I am, washed and back in the United States of America. I proceed to walk on the left side of the terminal, thinking “why does everyone keep walking into me?” I realize my mistake, switching over to the right side of the walk when it hits me: I am in America and I am an American. I know this should not seem like a revelation for someone born and raised in the land of the free, but it is. I don’t normally think of myself as an American. No, I don’t think of myself as being from another country, either. But when I think about my identity as a human being, it normally does not occur to me to list “American” as one of my defining attributes. I just take it for granted.

I struggle to remember which side of the escalator I’m supposed to pass on. I have to wait for someone else to do it first to be reminded. I consider what it means to be “American”. I’m not sure I have an answer that would stand the test of time, but now that I am seeing my home country for the first time after being away, I have made a few observations, which you can read about here.