Life in the Ring of Fire Part 64: Back in the US of A!

*Note: The title of this blog entry should be sung to the tune of “Back in the USSR” by the Beatles

Well, my flights actually did go pretty smoothly. True, I got a little hung up in Australian customs and had to surrender some of my Vanuatu wood carvings and ended up only just making my connection. And sure, one of my bags got lost on the way to LA and had to be delivered to me several days later, but I just kept thinking about how much more pleasant the whole experience was than the 48 hour hell ride on the Dante's Inferno, shivering and wet on an overcrowded refugee boat to Vila, huddling under a barely waterproof tarp in the rain. I mean, my flight to LA was air conditioned and had little TVs set into the back of every seat for Christ's sake. And the alcohol was free. Air conditioning, television, and free alcohol; that's kind of what I imagine heaven being like when I'm sitting in my shack on Malekula. I'll admit, however, that I was a little annoyed with Australian customs. I'd taken the time to get all of my wooden items chemically treated so that they could clear customs, and I'd already been allowed into New Zealand without question for my two-night layover. I'd flown from New Zealand to Sydney and was trying to catch a flight to Melbourne and then another onto LA, for a total amount of time spent in Australia probably under four hours. However, since I was making a domestic connection, I had to clear customs and thus was my first re-encounter with what western cultures like to call “laws,” and Ni-Vans like to think of as “people being jerks.” While most of my collection of Vanuatu trinkets were deemed worthy of spending four hours in Australia, they took issue with two circumcision rods. These are long sticks decorated with faces formed with tree sap and painted with colored soils. They're used when a boy undergoes a circumcision and are placed around the family's compound to denote the fact that the ceremony is going on. One of the rods was made for an average-Joe circumcision, but the other was for the son of a chief and thus was set with feathers and a pig's tusk. Although I'd picked up both for a total of about $40 from a guy on my island and could probably get an arbitrarily large number of them made for me upon request, I decided to really ham it up and make the customs officials feel really bad about confiscating them.
“These are interesting cultural artifacts,” I explained “you can only get them when there's a circumcision ceremony is going on (not true. I just have to ask my uncle), which happens, I don't know, maybe once every couple years (untrue, do you have any idea how many kids get born in my village? Lots).”
“This one here,” I continued, pointing to the simpler rod “can be used by any family, so I might be able to get another one of them, if I'm lucky. This other one, however, can only be used for the son of a chief. I was quite fortunate to be able to get it. There are very few people left from the chief family lines these days (also not true, basically everyone and their mother can claim to be a chief of something).”
My items were still confiscated, of course, but the customs staff seemed suitably guilty, distraught, and apologetic, so I considered it a moral victory.

I was in Auckland, New Zealand waiting for my flight out to the US for a couple days before my run-in with the Australian customs officials. Although it was supposed to be summer in New Zealand, the country's excessively southern location ensured that it was still somewhat chilly. This was my first experience with cool weather in a while, as November had been an exceptionally oppressive month in Vanuatu as far as heat and humidity were concerned. I hadn't packed any kind of warm clothing for my trip, as I really don't own any in Vanuatu, but I enjoyed walking around the city in the chill autumn-esque air with my shorts and t-shirt drawing inquisitive looks from other passersby. I also discovered this remarkable little device in my hotel room where you punch in the temperature you want it to be in the room and somehow it just magically becomes that temperature. I was so pleased with this device, in fact, that I changed my room from frigid ice box to sweltering sauna and back a couple of times just to prove that I could.

I set foot on US soil for the first time in over a year in LAX, where I was warmly welcomed home by a friendly US customs official. I also got paged for the first time in an airport (“Quantas airlines is paging passenger Daniel Moser. Daniel Moser, please see a Quantas airlines representative immediately”), which I was really excited about, but it turned out they just want to tell me that they'd lost my luggage. They seemed to think that this would be a huge inconvenience to me and apologized profusely and promised that it would be delivered to my house in Austin as soon as possible. I thought that this was way better than the standard method of hauling my bags through the various customs and security checkpoints myself and I wondered if I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just requesting that they lose my bags immediately and just delivered to my house a few days after my arrival.

Upon exiting from the international terminal, I was approached by a man who gave a short spiel about some children-at-risk aid organization and requested a donation, claiming to accept any currency. Since it was all I had, I handed him a 500 vatu note, which he took and stared at blankly for a little while.
“What's this?” He finally asked.
“It's vatu,” I explained, “it's from Vanuatu.”
“Huh.” He said. I nodded in agreement.
“I don't know if our bank will accept this,” he continued.
“Probably not,” I said.
He handed the note back to me.
“Thanks,” I said, “have a Merry Christmas.”
I wondered if he would consider rewording his “accepting any currency” claim for the next person he approached.

Having made my way to the domestic side of the airport and ascertained that my flight to Austin would not be leaving for another couple hours, I settled into an airport Chili's to have a burger and a few margaritas and muse about how far I'd come in the past few days. I'd flown halfway around the world, that much was clear, but there was more than mere distance at play here. I tried to picture Duncan's nakamal: the woven bamboo sides, the flimsy-looking thatch, the uneven beams that make up the support structure– complete with twists, knots and protrusions as only fresh-cut wood can be, the giant mango tree that somehow managed to grow in an “L” shape, thus forming a nice little bench for those wanting to sit down outside. I thought about husking coconut and peeling kumala for dinner and tried to make those memories mesh with the scene in front of me: a building larger than my village whose concrete, steel, and right-angle construction doesn't even hint at the existence of nature, the steady flow of people darting in front of my table, toting all variety of wheeled clothing-containing contraptions, and the cheerful Mexican waiter who somehow managed to produce all manner of food and beverage upon request. I felt like I was in a Star Trek episode and had just stepped off the holo-deck and was now wandering the Starship Enterprise LAX, ordering food from the food synthesizer. It was like my whole life for the past few months had just been one of those annoying “Gotcha! None of that was actually real!” gimmicks that the writers like to pull every once and a while.

Further cementing the contrast between the cultures in my mind, a television in the waiting area in front of me began looping a commercial for the Radisson, highlighting the hotel's use of sleep number beds which, if my understanding is correct, is a sort of robot that allows you to adjust your bed's puffiness via remote control, just in case your mattress is too soft for comfort.

It was snowing in Austin when I landed. This is pretty unusual. I can only remember it snowing in Texas once before, one Christmas when I was staying at my cousin's house in Houston and we got a light dusting of snow covering his palm trees. It was very picturesque. I don't think I was adequately able to appreciate the strangeness this time around, however, as everything I'd seen for the past 24 hours had seemed kind of strange and I'd sort of lapsed into a just-roll-with-whatever-happens-without-asking-any-questions mode.

My Mom and brother were waiting for me at the airport. My brother was wearing a red Santa Claus hat and ran up and jumped on me as soon as I passed through the security checkpoint, just like when I used to come home for Christmas during college, except this time he was a lot bigger and almost knocked me over. My Mom had gotten some kind of contraption in her car that allows it to hook up to cellphones, thus saving everyone in the car the trouble of having to guess what someone on the phone is talking about, as the whole conversation comes booming through the car stereo. We used said device to contact my Dad to let him know I'd arrived, and for some reason this freaked me out more than the snow had. As we promised me, our first stop on the way home was at a Mexican restaurant. The same Mexican restaurant, in fact, where I'd had my going away party a couple of Septembers ago. As I ordered a plate of nachos (which had somehow assumed the status of the holy grail of food items for those of us in Vanuatu. I'm not entirely sure why, but nachos are admittedly awesome) and my brother and I jostled for room on the restaurant booth, I could feel myself beginning to slip back into my life from over a year ago. It felt right. I almost felt like I'd never left. Almost.