There’s a little place in Upstate NY, nestled along one of the most pristine 17-mile-long Finger Lakes (the seventh cleanest lake in the world, in fact), surrounded by woods and farmland beyond that, dotted with lake cottages, a few still relying on outdoor “plumbing,” where everyone fears the onset of hydrofracking. There, you won’t find cellphone reception, many cars in the winter, or a way to avoid a running route without climbing a mile-long incline with rolling hills beginning at the start. There, cable and high-speed Internet connections are amenities that have only recently been made available, yet ones that a few area holdouts nevertheless opt to do without, still teaming over the government’s switch to digital television. There, childhood days are lost picking black raspberries in the brambles along the oil and stone roads, sailing small dinghies, and fishing off the dock.
There—Skaneateles—is the place that I call home.
This summer, I travelled some 19,000 miles. First, for two months to Russia to intern in a research firm advising the Moscow City Government for two months where I grew and simultaneously confused myself immensely, learning the complex system of Moscow politics, the urban planning problems of a huge metropolis, and thinking about what I might want to do with my life. Then it was an adventurous trek through Central Asia, to see the beautiful madrassas and mosques of the famous Silk Road cities—Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand— and to hike in Kygyzstan in the Tian Shan Mountains, while passing through Tashkent, Bishkek, and Almaty, Kazakhstan among other cities along the way.
I saw unbelievable sights and have memories to last for years from this summer. From talking politics with old men playing cards outside a maddrassa in Bukhara who insisted that Osama Bin Laden was a myth of the West, to living with a “babushka” highly critical of the Russian Government (to the point of nearly a conspiracy theorist) in a tidy Soviet-style Moscow apartment, to an unbelievably friendly old taxi driver in Bukhara who to our amusement, unexpectedly jumped into his van packed full of Uzbeks, blasted the horn, and yelled in Russian with his hands out the window as he took off: “America! Let’s go!”
As I write this I have a smile on my face and an unbelievable sense of gratitude for the good fortune I had to experience such things this summer. I’ll never forget the girl I befriended in a square one day in Bukhara who told me about her husband working in Moscow and the economic plight they faced, or the young Samarkandi boy who unquestionably told me that his president—the notoriously brutal Karimov (known for his heinous boiling alive of political prisoners)—was the best and that Uzbekistan would be nothing without him. And discussing development policy with various advisers in Moscow furnished me with a more nuanced understanding of the future of such an economically vital city.
Of the past 36 months, I’ve spent roughly 18 abroad. In some ways, the concepts of “home,” and “abroad,” have at times gotten confused in my mind. On the other hand, travelling this summer gave me a heightened sense of what “home” can be—some combination of Skaneateles and Moscow and maybe even Central Asia at times, or Europe, and of course, Harvard. I don’t know exactly.
But here is something else. I once was told that there is only one place in the world that you can never go—surely you can go all around the globe, to places undiscovered and to places separated by a world of differences. But you can never go home, the saying goes.
That may be true.
For what is home if it is not some combination of the memories and experiences you bring to it and time, among other variables? Am I the same girl who wandered the lane with her two dogs, dreaming up plans that she would never carry out for a pine-forest fort? It’s strange to remember such trivial things from home, to try to relate to them, and to contrast them with talking in Russian to sheepherders in the mountains a few days hike from civilization in Kyrgyzstan, or with worrying about a possible attack against Americans in the region as the State Department warns, or even with the idea itself, of going so far away, let alone of being scolded at by a furious soldier with an AK-47 at an airport in Uzbekistan for taking a photo of the landing strip. My travels this summer made me strangely very conscious of where I am from.
Yet for certain home is constantly changing, due in part to who you are when you go back to it, and in part on its own accord. Luckily though, home, too, is something you take with you around the world.
Call me nostalgic (as has been done in the past) or call me just plain homesick. But being away this summer taught me something I’d forgotten for 36 months: if home is a place that you can never go back to, it’s best not to ever fully leave.