who knows what could happen
day 20: 100 days
When I was 17, I came home from school with a student exchange pamphlet. There had been a presentation at our school and I had gotten so excited and aflutter. Even though it was far-fetched, I knew I had to try. Just the idea of seeing the world had me feeling so alive and hopeful, I couldn’t stand it. It was absolutely not in our family budget, but my mother said I could try and raise the money. I mean, “who knows what could happen?” we said. I decided on Australia, and I made several coffee cans with my picture on them and a little hand-drawn caricature of a koala, with a plea, “help this student go abroad!” and I put them in various grocery stores nearby. The cost for the trip was a little over three thousand dollars at the time. Not bad considering I’d be there for six weeks, travelling all over the country. Three weeks with a host family. Three weeks of travel. But this was money we didn’t have, and unfortunately, after a few months, I had raised barely $600 from working and donations from the cans. With the deadline quickly approaching to send in my paperwork, I remember my mother and I sitting down and having a choked-up, heartbroken conversation. When you’re a kid, you have this belief that when you wish for something, it has to come true simply because you’ve wished for it hard enough. And I was wishing so hard. Then, maybe the next day or the next week, like some sort of universe voodoo, I came home to my. Mom smiling, kind of shocked. We had gotten a notice in the mail. My father’s disability benefits from his time in Vietnam had finally come through. This was after years of struggling to get approved. The timing was almost unbelievable, and the benefits would be paid not just to him but to each of his children directly. This was important because he never would have paid his children or my mother any money; my parents were divorced, and he was, to put it mildly, a terrible father. There were three checks paid to each of us, and the amount was almost three thousand dollars. That night, I had Goosebumps, lying there, thinking about the timing of the check and the amount. My sisters and decided to pool a few hundred dollars each and buy my mom a gemstone ring at the mall first. We all wanted to give her something beautiful after everything she’d been through with my father. And then I sent in my paperwork. I was going to Australia.
And it was like a dream. My host mother was a teacher and so warm and kind and funny, you felt like you could just die on the spot. She made incredible breakfast potatoes, which in my book meant she was a candidate for the Nobel Prize. And my host father, a surfer and an artist, welded candelabras and sculptures into the night, orange sparks flying from beneath their modest but warm stilt house. They had three children and lived not just in Australia but off the coast of Australia on a little Island called North Stradbroke, Straddie by the locals. You had to take a ferry to get there. I remember the green smooth plastic seats and bouncing on the water, which was so bright and clear and blue. I had never seen anything like it. On the Island, we would take long, lazy, warm strolls to the sleepy main street. We’d sit at the beach and eat salty chips and rich gravy wrapped in wax paper, and in between bites, the sand would get in my teeth, but I didn’t care. I was so happy. Delirious with it. My host father taught me to surf on a stormy day. And for a while, we stood on the beach and we stared at the waves, wondering if we should wait for a calmer day, but he looked at me and said “you can handle it mate” and we went in anyway and for years after I’d hear his voice and it made me believe in myself. One day, my host sister and I swam far out past the breakers, and a fin cut the water next to us. We looked at each other, silent and terrified, thinking it was a shark and not knowing what to do. We saw the dark shadow under the water circle us, and then a head came up, and we were looking straight into the eye of a dolphin, who I think wanted to play because it bumped us a few times gently with its sides like a cat swimming circles around us. Soon it was time to go travelling through the interior (this is what they call the hot middle of the country), and I camped in a tent every night and saw the darkest skies with the brightest stars, more stars than anyone could imagine. I hiked at Uluru, and swam in Kings Canyon. I was a vegetarian at the time, and so every day for lunch and dinner, the bus driver, also the “cook,” made me a special peanut butter and honey sandwich. For three weeks, I ate these, and I never complained, and I never got tired of them. Something about living days filled with joy, I guess. I slept underground in a chilly opal mine, walls of smooth stone, in Coober Pedy, and explored markets in Sydney and Brisbane. I snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef and was dive-bombed by ginormous bats (which no one warned me about) in Cairns. After going out on a Catamaran there exploring the teeniest tiniest islands, with the whitest softest sand, I decided these men were geniuses, and the best thing I could do with my life would be to move back and become a ship captain. I took the train and spent the weekend with my great-grandparents, whom I’d never spoken to or met, where I ate lots of toast with butter and strawberry jelly. This was all they ate, along with coffee, and I remember wanting to be polite but also being so very hungry when I left. After six weeks of this kind of insane magic, I went home to Graham Washington. After coming back, I was painfully homesick for Australia for months, maybe years, thinking somehow I had to make it back. Thinking that I would live in that country when I grew up. I haven’t made it back; it’s on my list, but the country ended up living in me. It has talked to me in so many moments in my life and reminded me to always give it a try, because honestly, who knows what could happen?
I was soo very happy you got to have this experience! Trip of a lifetime!
Thanks for the journey! Wow, I’m so glad you were able to go. I would’ve loved something like this at age 17.