Hold to the now, the here

The other day a friend of mine who has also been traveling for a while said something that struck me while we were taking a walk. He’d just come back to Istanbul after spending a month in western Anatolia and Georgia. He thought that a lot had changed since he’d left. One of the shops near his old apartment had closed and he’d noticed the streets seemed much quieter than they were in October. As we were talking we turned off the alley we were on and onto one of the city’s main boulevards. “Nevermind,” he said.”It’s amazing to think that every place you leave just continues going on and existing after you leave.”

This was far from a revelation, and he knew it. Of course places remain after you’re gone, and they don’t remain as static entities. They continue breathing, all their dynamic parts jiving and pitching in unconscious concert. It’s easy to project how the individual parts will continue moving. The fishermen will continue to crowd every pier. Kids in Fatih will keep charging tourists with toy guns and chants of “Hello! Hello! Money?” And every young person in the city will still go to drink and dance at Peyote*. Winter will come. People will abandon the streetside cafes which are so crowded right now. The tourist neighborhoods will slow down, and without seasonal jobs, people will return their hometowns until next spring.

New neighborhoods will be developed, rough parts of town will get gentrified. Develop, grow, change; cities are not statues. We know this. They burn and consume all the kinetic energy from millions of moving parts. Every Student, street vendor, and old man playing backgammon in teashops, covered floor to ceiling in white tile. The people only  passing through carry their own energy, and tourist areas try to catch as much of that energy as they can, drafting off the whiffs and snaring it in the form of dollars spent on hotels, carpets, and kebap.

Of course the city keeps on moving, all cities and places keep on moving, but what my friend was trying to say is, we forget this. When we look away they seem to stop and stand still, but that’s not really the case. Just think about them again and all that energy and motion is conjured right back up.  Since May there are so many more of these towns, cities, and landscapes in my head. Thinking of them all at once is an impossible feat of course, and when I try, it makes me shudder. The world is built on a much bigger scale than I will ever comprehend. But when I try now the picture I conjure is so much bigger than it ever was before, and even though I know how far away I am from my goal, it makes me feel better that in a non-infinite period of time, I am able to get that much closer.**

 

 

*Every new friend I’ve met in this city, and there have been many of them – Turks are very friendly to foreigners, has suggested that we go to this bar. Sure… it’s a cool bar, but in a city of 18 million people and in a district of hundreds of bars, I find it hard to believe, everyone goes to peyote.

** Right now I am watching an old man help two little girls play jump rope. Directly across the street, a family of cats are sleeping on the tin roof of the grocery store below. Istanbul’s tamed stray dogs keep passing by the grocer’s looking for scraps in the garbage, and people, dozens by minute, pass, in twos and threes under the balcony I write from. I am going to miss this city.

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Homeward Bound

In less than one week I’ll be boarding my first eastbound flight on my slow trek back to the states. I’ll be arriving to a purgatory of sorts, since I’m leaving again for Israel and Africa in January. A month and a half is certainly more than a weekend stay, but it’s not exactly an opportunity to start looking forward. Staying places for only a month or two at a time is really starting to wear on me and it’d be nice to get a little more established somewhere. The drive to be productive has really been striking me lately, but I’m not ready to head back to the US for good yet. I’m worried that I’ve opened a pandora’s box of wanderlust and I won’t be able to satisfy either of these two forces without sacrificing the other.

When I leave again I’m not sure if I want to leave for two months or twenty, and that makes it pretty hard to decide what to do with my time when I get back. Do I look for a job in Neuro? Keep on trying to write?* If I decide to keep writing do I want to do it in the US or abroad? It’d be nice to work on a farm for a full season, but that’ll just leave me displaced again in another 6 months.

This all sounds pretty bitchy, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. Despite all these questions I’ve been feeling really good lately. I just got back from a month long hike along the coast of Lycia in Southwest Turkey. Camping out every night, I made my way along the coast weaving  in and out of the inland mountain range through large expanses of pasture and down exposed cliffs towards towns and isolated beaches below. Most of the towns along the route were small goat herding and beekeeping villages. Steady water is unreliable in the mountains making irrigation difficult and pushing most agriculture down towards the coast taking the people of these small communities along with it. Greenhouses and communities of cheap temporary housing have sprouted up all along the coastal lowlands and produce fruits and vegetable that find their way all over Turkey.

Away from these greenhouses and the boomtowns that have built up around them, the entire coast is littered with ruins. Lycia was a powerful and wealthy area in Greek and Roman times, but hardly at all afterwards leaving many of the ruins undisturbed and largely intact: whole cities shrouded in forest, and fortresses long since gutted on the inside and grown over. Much of what remains are funeral monuments. Lycians were meticulous about burying their dead and giant sarcophagi lurk in the underbrush around almost every turn. One city, Aperlae, has largely sunken underwater and overturned sarcophagi descend from the hills into the water, where some lie half submerged poking out of the reeds near the shore.

One of the more striking things about many ancient cities are there incredible locations. Set up on hilltops and ridges for defensive purposes, they have incredible views of the countryside and the ocean. One night, I camped in the ruins of the city of Belos, which sat 900m above the coast on a ridge overlooking the sea and was used as a refuge from pirates into the 6th century AD. I lingered in the morning, packing up my tent  while I watched the sun rise high over the mediterranean in warm oranges and reds. Another night I was at the eternal flames of Chimaera, a natural gas reservoir constantly burning and shooting flames out of holes in the ground.  Bellerphon is said to have defeated the Chimaera here. It’s easy to see this place as the setting for an epic battle, and it carries with it a strangely foreboding warmth, especially after the sun has set, and the flames light the hillside, dancing along barren rocks in warm eerie light.

The whole trek was a welcome escape from Istanbul, where I’d started to settle into the general malaise that seems to strike me in most cities. I’m enjoying being back for now though. I have some really great friends here, and sadly have already said goodbye to some of them as many people have returned to their hometowns this week for the festival of Bayram. With the city feeling empty it’s clear just how many people have come here to find work. Talking the past couple nights with friends going home to Eskisehir, Cappadocia, and Cyprus it’s clear just how much people feel for their hometowns, but underneath all these conversations lies the implicit assumption that they’ll never go back. The jobs just aren’t there. It seems if you’re serious about making something of yourself, you need to be in the city.

*This has not been going well lately. I’ve only finished 3 stories since coming to Istanbul. I’m pretty happy with the quality, but that’s just not enough output for 3 months where I was supposed to be writing full time. I’ve had distractions including a week in the US and month trekking in Antalya , but that’s still just not enough.

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