One Way, or Return?

  The thunder and rain howled as if it were an angry giant trapped in an old Pong game, bouncing back and forth in our canyons and unable to scale the mountains that awaited at their ends.  I counted the seconds after the flashes...three, then four, then three, then one, then three, and so on.  The storms and grumblings would rumble away and then return, as if madder than ever.  One of my  dogs moved to my side, the lights as vicious as a madman photographer just outside our windows.  It was spectacular, at least as viewed from inside our protective bedroom, the rain outside peltering the remaining plants on the deck (my tropical cactus now safely inside and ready to hibernate) while the colder temperatures announced that they too had arrived.  It was as if I were back in Cornwall.

   Of course I wasn't, the long flight back being all in daylight but the jet lag sticking to me like a bad piece of lint (the jet stream or prevailing winds blow west to east due to the rotation of the earth, thus the flights coming west generally take longer than those going east); once home, being awake in the wee early hours made me feel more productive, at least until the early afternoon hours arrived and sleep would call as powerfully as Sirens.  Back to the States the English would tell me, the United part never entering the picture (among the first question you'll be asked. once you begin to speak there is, "You from the States?");  one comes to accept the terminology when there as if it emphasizes our fractured and independent country.  But it would sound odd to ask a British visitor if he or she were from the Kingdom, even though their country now seems as equally partisan and equally far from being United; besides the word Kingdom might have already been usurped by yet another American icon, Walt Disney (okay, born in Chicago to immigrant parents but perhaps a true representative of what the American fantasy would soon become).  There are other phrases one learns to accept there: fag = cigarette; fries = chips; chips = crisps; dark beer = ale; fart = trump (had to throw that in once again, but it is truly the slang word for the release of body gas in England; "pardon my trump" took on an entirely new meaning there).  But even now I am a bit unsure as to what is or isn't acceptable when describing a citizen there...British, English, the UK, a Brit?  I never asked, just laughed and got away with my errors being written off as coming from a somewhat clueless and forgivable Yank (with a pint of ale in my hand, of course).

   There was another misconception that emerged for me and it was that of their beaches; having seen so many spectacular coastal views one had to naturally feel that they were all accessible; you know protected by the crown and all that.  But we quickly discovered that as with most touristy areas, there are designated footpaths for both the fields and beaches (you'll discover much the same in Hawaii and other places as well).  Said a rebuttal letter by Canterbury law student, Anne Bottomley in the London Review of Books: Certainly, most beaches are open, because they are held as crown property and a convention has developed to allow free public access, unless public rights of way or a right to raom have been registered.  That there is no general right of public access to beaches was established in an 1821 case, despite a very strong argument by the dissenting judge that such a right did and should exist in common law.  The Supreme Court with a touch of reluctance confirmed this position in 2015.  The decision concerned a private beach in Newhaven in East Sussex to which public access had been withdrawn.  An attempt was made by both the local public and the local authority to register the beach as a 'village green' in order to establish and protect rights of access.  This was not the first time such a strategy had been deployed, but the 2015 judgement has now made it much more difficult to use registration as commons or village greens as a means of keeping access open.  While this case dealt with a privately owned beach (even in the UK a good proportion of beaches are privately owned), the judgement makes clear its application to crown property too.*  In perhaps our only sour encounter we were both yelled at for being on the driveway of an apartment complex, my wife apologetically trying to explain that she grew up as a child in the house next door and only wanted to see if the backyard and shed had changed (it hadn't, other than being surrounded by "doubles" as they're termed, homes now allowed to build upward since space for expansion is now severely limited in many areas); "you're on private property," the woman yelled from her upstairs window.  Yikes!  Many of the small ublic footpath signs are a bit faded these days, perhaps a sign of what's soon to come.  We discovered that in crossing the road to get to the coastal trail, our proper and existing public footpath abruptly came to an end.  Now where?  We jumped across the street, climbed the short embankment and saw before us a series of worn trails giving us confidence that we would not be the first to tackle this quandry; had we encountered a fence across the way we would have likely had no choice but to turn back and retrace our steps.

   Another English term commonly used in booking travel is the use of "return" vs. "round-trip."  Both make sense.  But for my wife, the word return struck home for she felt that she was indeed home after so many years away.  Granted, our visit back to Cornwall was a series of emotional ups and downs for her for she had come back to scatter her mum's ashes onto the land she walked countless times as a child, this when her fear of heights and steep cliffs and roaring waves was still in its infancy.  Sitting with her dog she would brave the rain and cold and likely wonder why adults  consider it so strange to do so (even as we saw children still walking home in the rain, sans umbrellas).  She was being pulled back, her trip slowly weaving its way from a one-way to a possible return.  Ironically, I had just finished a piece in The New Yorker, a dual British-U.S. citizen making her own decision to give up her friends and family and comforts and head back to England, a decision not made lightly but almost as if drawn on one side and pushed away on the other as noted in her subtitle, "but England isn't home."  As she notes: The difference between the political climate in the U.K. and in the U.S. these days feels like the difference between depression and psychosis.  I'm opting for depression.  

   A home, in any sense, can emerge from many sources.  Childhood can be the main influence but mainly if it's is one of good memories for it might be led in a land totally different from that of one's birthplace.  Home can be a hovel or a mansion, a place or a country.  And someday when we venture out to Mars and beyond, home might simply be defined as our planet (few of us, despite knowing earth as our only home, would answer that way if asked "where is your home?").  But often the feeling of being home is different from visiting or returning to a place.  Many of us have stumbled onto a place or city and declared unabashedly, "I could live here."  But could we?  Seeing a place while on vacation or when visiting a friend or relative can temporarily shift our perspective.  The environment is new, the food is good (mostly because we are either eating out or being prepared meals by family) and everything seems doable...paying the bills, moving, changing cultures and and changing jobs.  After all, we rationalize, a change would be good.  The grass is always greener, that sort of thing.  But the reality is that "going home" can be vastly different from a feeling of "being home."  To my wife, her mum was now "home."  And who knows, perhaps as all of us breathe our last breath, we will also discover an entirely different meaning of "home."

   Writer Rebecca Mead in her essay noted that for her and her husband, the decision to move back to the U.K. hasn't been an easy one.  It's been a wrenching decision: we are leaving not just a country and a city and a home but also friends and close family, most of whom don't have the options that we do.  London is not a utopia: housing, in particular, is debilitatingly expensive for many of its residents.  Similarly, I am under no illusions that the U.K. is a beacon of progressivism.  This is a move from the fire into the frying pan at best.  The Brexit vote, which took place five months before Trump's election, was a harbinger and not an aberration, and has encouraged hostility toward perceived outsiders.  A friend of mine who moved from Budapest to London as a child, more than half a century ago, tells me that he no longer feels British.  And my British-born peers and I, having assumed that the freedom to live, study, and work in Europe belonged to us and to our children, have found ourselves and our offspring facing the imminent prospect of being stripped of European citizenship.  Our loss is not remotely comparable to that of others elsewhere in the world -- we haven't lost Aleppo, seen our homes and nation turned to rubble-- but it is a loss nevertheless.  My son already has fewer choices that I had.

   It is commonly said that you can never go back; we won't grow any younger, our memories and places that we remembered as a child will inevitably change.  And the phrase is about as Buddhist in thought as the past is past.  Too late in life, starting over, don't look back, etc. the phrases are many, stumbling blocks all it would seem.  We make our own decisions and perhaps the only thing that changes as we age is that the ticking clock seems to grow a bit louder.  Live life for today, live life to its fullest.  For some, that might be as simple as returning home, whatever the definition or image or location.  For some, the return might be something that comes as simply and as suddenly as a whack on the head.  And for others, life might simply be a series of exploration...all one-ways.  We're each our own person and all decisions are right at the time; it's just that some might come tinged with a bit of guilt or regret a bit later while others might remain quite settled for what seems an eternity.  My wife and I were fortunate to have glimpsed a bit of both, long-time residents who were quite content to live the remainder of their life in this coastal town and new people coming in but not yet certain that this was the end of their search.  Going home, coming home, returning home, my wife may have experienced every single one of those emotions.  But whatever her thoughts then, when we walked through that door and saw the animals all run up to greet us, the only feelings both of us had upon returning was that it was nice to be home.


*Her letter was in response to an article on the rising sea levels and the destruction of coastal properties.  But she goes on with this: In Florida, as in other American states, the proactive development of 'public trust doctrine' has emerged as one line of defence against enclosure.  Caribbean islands (not included in the Supreme court survey) such as Barbados, Antigua and St. Lucia which, unlike Jamaica, have a history of open public access to all beaches, are now so shattered by the economic fallout from hugely destructive tropical storms that many find themselves caught in a rapid shift towards the privatisation favoured by overseas investors and tourists seeking 'exclusive' enclaves in paradise.  By now, you've likely read about Saudi Arabia buying a chunk of Arizona land, this particular area with loose water regulations, to grow their alfalfa for their cattle and horses; water is severely restricted in their country so they are buying land elsewhere, growing and the shipping the product, perhaps an indicator of where the true battles for the common people will emerge...water.  Said the Christian Science Monitor, agriculture accounts for 90% of water usage in Saudi Arabia, something the country is now working to reduce.