Back to Writing

I’m going to start this with the same line I use to start almost all of my journal entries. It’s been way too long since I last wrote. Around the halfway mark of my service, I started to lose ideas for this blog. Suddenly, everything that was new to me started to lose its novelty and became more of a mundane reality. That’s the catch of a 2-year service. You experience everything for the first time and then everything for the last time. 

The weather report forecasts a dip into freezing this week and we’ve begun the descent into winter. It’s the season when my playlists shift from sparkling pop beats to mournful folk ballads. The season when my glasses fog up immediately as I step inside a warm building. When my perpetual sinus-related malaise oscillates between mildly annoying and borderline unbearable. But most of all, it’s the season when I feel myself retreat into my head. Without the distraction of beautiful sunny days, I spend a significant amount of time inside my mind, escaping from the grey skies and creating my own interesting scenes. So I guess the approach of this season has beckoned me back to writing. 

This time last year, I felt a creeping anxiety about my first holiday season away from home. Now, I feel like a seasoned pro at attending family gatherings through WhatsApp video calls, sometimes even forgetting about American holidays that aren’t celebrated here. I’ve settled in really comfortably to my routine here. It’s a much slower pace than I was used to before. I used to get bored but now I’ve adjusted to my relaxed schedule. As it gets colder, sometimes I even feel inclined to slow down more. I’ve been working on actively reminding myself not to take this speed of life for granted. As I inch closer to the end of service and have begun making concrete decisions about what my life will look like after, it’s become more difficult to focus on the present. When everything was new, I had no choice but to exist entirely in the present and experience it fully. Now, I have to fight against how normal everything feels and force myself to really live in it. 

I’m teaching myself to try and be present even in everyday moments. My walk to school, which I’ve done a thousand times, is an opportunity to observe my neighborhood,and how it changes throughout the seasons. I always look for the stray cats and dogs that I recognize. There’s a litter of kittens that live in an auto repair shop I pass that I have watched grow up. I always see the little dog who hangs out outside the religious shrine and approaches every person who passes. A large group of dogs are usually sleeping under cars or playing with each other on a street next to a playground. I make sure to remove my headphones as I walk by the playground so I can hear if any of my students call out to me to say hello. After the playground, I can usually catch a glimpse of Mt. Hatis, which is more like a hill in my opinion. A few days ago it was sprinkled with frost for the first time this year. 

At school, I do my best to respond to every greeting thrown out to me in the hallway. I know which 3rd graders like to give me hugs at the beginning of class and I prepare for them to fling their arms around me as soon as I walk into their classroom. I let my 9th graders derail class with questions about America and take time to share things I think they would find interesting. I’ve been meaning to ask if I can sit in on one of their chess classes one day and challenge a few students to a game. I’m sure I would lose but I think that’s a sacrifice I am willing to make for their satisfaction of beating a teacher. When I have coffee in the teacher’s lounge, I do my best to translate the conversations of the other teachers in my head so I can keep up with the schoolwide gossip. More often than not my brain can’t work as quickly as they can talk, but I still challenge myself to try. 

As I challenge myself to be more present in each moment, I’ll also challenge myself to get back into writing and posting here. In the meantime, here are a couple of pieces I wrote over the summer that I never got around to posting. I hope posting them now will inspire me to write more this winter. 

On Mountains

My host brother asked me if I knew that Mt. Ararat was a volcano. When I said that I did he followed up by asking if that freaked me out. I couldn’t help laughing. I told him that I’m used to living in the shadow of volcanos. I grew up within the Ring of Fire, the large circle of volcanic mountain ranges surrounding the Pacific Ocean. My whole life, I’ve looked to the horizon and seen towering peaks trace the sky. We learned in elementary school about fault lines and how the mountains that surrounded us were sleeping giants. I’ve heard countless firsthand accounts of the days the skies turned black after Mt. St. Helens erupted. I’ve looked at a plane window and seen its sliced-off head. Driving down I5, I always trained my eyes to the south to see if Mt. Rainier would be making an appearance. On days it did, I’d think to myself “It’s a good day, the mountain is out.”

Since moving to Armenia, I’ve been able to keep this phrase in my vocabulary. On clear days, Mt. Ararat can be seen across the valley. Unlike the familiar sight of Mt. Rainier, Ararat has two peaks which are usually only capped with snow on the tops. As the mountain stretches down into the plains, the snow fades. The smaller peak on the left is Sis and the large peak is Masis. I usually know where I’ll be able to view Ararat; up on the hill by the Mother Armenia statue, on the drive down to Yerevan off the left side of the highway, or at a very specific point in my running route when I can just spot it between buildings. You’d think a 5,000-meter mountain would be fairly conspicuous, but sometimes, it sneaks up on me. I’ll be sitting in the back of a taxi or walking down the street with my eyes trained towards the sky when all of a sudden it will appear. I know it always stays in the same spot, but it can occasionally feel like it has just manifested in front of me like I’m watching a canvas being painted and the artist has just made a consequential stroke. The best time to see it is after a storm when the rain has cleared the haze from the sky like a wiper on a windshield. 

Mt. Ararat is an incredibly important cultural symbol for Armenians. The Bible refers to it as the resting place of Noah’s Ark after the great flood. This event is a common depiction in Armenian paintings. Noah and his family and all the animals two by two can be seen walking through parted water down the mountain and through the valley. Ararat is also a painful reminder to Armenians of lost territory and the genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire. The mountain itself sits within the political borders of modern Turkey. Armenians can see the mountain from their country, but due to closed-ground borders with Turkey, they can only access it by flying to Turkey and then making their way back east. When I think about this, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a member of the Yakima Native Reservation on a service trip in High School. She referred to Mt. Adams, another volcano in the Cascade range, by its Native name, Pahto. I had never heard anyone call it that before and it suddenly occurred to me that I had only ever learned the English names of the great mountains in Washington. Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, Baker; they all bear the names of white men who “discovered” them centuries after the Native Americans first named them; Tahoma, Loowit, Pahto, Koma Kulshan. Mountains can be symbols of history and culture, but they also frequently serve as reminders of tragedy, witnesses to trauma. 

Not only is Ararat a great mountain but it is also a volcano, like the great mountains from back home. Volcanos, to me, are the closest thing to a physical God we have on earth. The collision of tectonic plates created volcanoes which then created much of the land that makes up our world today. Active volcanoes are still at work spewing out lava to cool into new islands. They are creators but also destructors. An eruption can wipe out entire cities, and entire civilizations. Growing up, I tried to keep this thought far from my mind as I gazed at the majestic and somewhat terrifying form of Rainier. Most volcanoes I’ve seen have been dormant or even extinct, sleeping giants they’re called. They sit silently overlooking everything they’ve built and could easily destroy if awoken. Ancient people were keenly aware of this power. With far less technology than we have now, they were even more uncertain than we are about when a volcano could blow. For Native Hawaiians, this power was spiritual. They saw volcanic activity as the doing of the Goddess Pele. Often the mountain of Kilauea is depicted as her body and the lava as her long flowing hair. Whether mountains are seen as gods themselves or as central settings for religious legends, it is impossible to deny the inherent spirituality tied to them. So much of our ideas about God can also pertain to the mountains that watch over us. I wonder if we are projecting the characteristics of God onto nature or if our observations of nature have informed our conception of what God might be. 

Sometimes the sight of Mt. Ararat evokes all these musings in my mind about history, tragedy, and God. Sometimes it reminds me of home and makes me miss the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes it just makes me smile and think to myself “It’s a good day, the mountain is out.” 

Ode to the Avtobus

There are two bus routes that run from my site to Yerevan: the 259 and the 261. They come every 15 to 20 minutes and dependent on traffic can get me to my destination in Yerevan within 40 - 90 minutes. They follow the same path until the city limits of Yerevan. The 259 veers off towards the West and makes its way up and around the city’s outskirts before finally descending into the center. Once it enters Yerevan proper, it crawls through the city lurching to a stop at nearly every intersection. I much prefer the speedier route of the 261 which cuts to the East and streamlines into the center of town. 

The best spot on the bus is obviously in a seat. I actually prefer the seats at the front of the bus that face inwards as you don’t have to worry about asking your neighbor to move when you need to get off. There is a strange lone forward-facing seat near the front that’s coveted for its accessibility, so as a fit 20-something, I can rarely lay claim to it. There are 4 rows of seats in the back 2 on each side of the aisle and 4 or so along the back wall. These always fill up early, usually by the first or second spot. I try to only sit down if I see multiple seats open. The dynamics of who should give up their seats to whom stress me out enough that if there’s only one seat available, I’d rather stand than debate whether I really deserve to sit more than anyone else. The next best spot is to wedge yourself between a wall of the bus and one of the waist-height plastic barriers that separate the standing areas from the sitting areas. If you maneuver it properly, you don’t have to hold onto anything and can have your hands free. In the summer, there’s a bonus spot where you can lean against the wall and face out the open window. You have to kind of grip the edge of the window with the tips of your fingers like a rock climber. But in the suffocating heat, it’s worth it to capitalize on the opportunity for fresh air. One step below the wall-centered positions is to stand and hold onto a solid pole. Two hands is preferred as the motion of the bus can be violent and unpredictable, but one hand is fine too. The absolute worst position though is to be caught in no-man’s land in the middle of the standing section. Here you’ll be forced to reach directly upwards and hold one of the swinging handles that hang down from the ceiling. They sway with every shift of the bus and are barely better than just holding onto nothing and using your balance. After a few minutes of holding these, my bicep often starts to cramp up from constantly flexing to try and prevent my body from flying in any direction. 

On a crowded bus, the collection of bodies seems to take on a liquid state. Exiting riders slide past you like water through a crack. I used to see an overflowing bus and opt to wait for the next one until I learned that whatever next bus there was would be just as packed. It may look like it is physically impossible to squeeze one more person on but somehow you can always manage. It’s like those science experiments on surface tension when you plopped droplets of water onto a penny one at a time until it created a dome rising above Lincoln. One more drop, one more rider, and the surface tension seems to remain intact. When the driver hits the brakes or accelerates too quickly the ripple moves its way through us like a wave pool. You’re unlucky if you have a hard plastic wall in front of you to transfer your kinetic energy into rather than the soft mass of another rider’s back. 

I spend a lot of the ride focused on properly shifting my weight from foot to foot. I do this both to avoid being caught off guard by a sharp turn and to try and relieve the pressure of gravity on the vertebrae in my lower back. As riders depart, you have an opportunity to move up in the hierarchy of positioning. When a spot opens by a pole or even better the window you have to move swiftly and slide into any newly vacated spaces. If you were already in a preferred standing position, you could even make the jump to a seat. But I try to be grateful when I have a solid thing to hold on to while standing and only make the leap to a seat if the bus has mostly emptied or if the muscles in my back are beginning to mutiny. When I am not busy ruminating on the politics of positioning, I do get to engage in three of my favorite hobbies; listening to whatever hyper-specific Spotify playlist I am obsessed with that week, people watching out the window, and creating imaginary scenarios in my head. 

The social dynamics of the bus have also been interesting to learn. Those who are seated will often offer to hold the bags or even babies of those who are standing. When it’s your stop, you can retrieve your belongings confident that they’ve been well taken care of. Seats are typically given up to older folks or mothers with young children who can sit in their lap and free up some standing space. A crying baby is a problem not just for the mom but for every woman on board. Recently, I was heading back from Yerevan and an overtired toddler had decided to sit down on the floor underneath an occupied seat and scream. It became the mission of the adjacent passengers to solve this. Led by a particularly commanding older woman, the passengers arranged a series of seat changes and shifts of movement that allowed the boys’ mom to grab him and then sit with his arms wrapped around her neck. Even after the situation had been resolved there was ongoing discussion bouncing between passengers about children and the nature of their tantrums. 

I feel a camaraderie with young female bus riders. I know that they understand the difficulty of trying not to get elbowed by men stretching their arms or stepped on as they move positions. In a way, it’s an advantage to be smaller. You can take up less space and slide around more easily to new locations as you see fit. But it just seems like it would be easier if I were a hulking man. My very presence would demand movement from others. At just over 5 foot 5, I’m easily squished and expected to contort myself for those hoping to squeeze past. The larger men rarely seem to be bothered to create space and are content to occupy it. I’m never more aware of my physical body than when I am surrounded by other bodies, pressed up against them our personal space bubbles not just popped but obliterated. Sometimes I feel guilty that my stupid limbs are blocking another’s path and I wish I could just retract them into myself. As I am being pushed further into a corner while riders enter or exit, I wish I could exclaim out loud, “I’m taking up as little space as I possibly can! If I could shrink myself down or break apart my atoms so you could walk through me, I would!” Something tells me these kinds of thoughts don’t cross the minds of men. 

Rarely do my bus journeys take longer than 90 minutes, even when I am riding to the end of the line. But occasionally in bad traffic, they can drag on for seemingly ages. As soon as we tick past the 1-hour mark, I start to wonder if I’ll ever know a life beyond this metal box. Have I always been here? Breathing in the exhales of dozens of strangers. I begin calculating how far I’d have to walk if I jumped ship and got off at the next stop. Sometimes I try and meet the eyes of other riders and telepathically ask them if they’re as impatient and uncomfortable as I am. Then when we do finally reach my stop and I scurry to the front to deposit my coins and hop down onto the pavement of the street, that first breath of non-bus hits me and I’m suddenly embarrassed about my internal dramatics. I’m either heading home or off to somewhere in Yerevan and whatever was going through my head on the bus doesn’t concern me anymore, or at least until the next time I board.