travel weariness

We met an American couple on a songthaew tonight. A songthaew is a hop on-hop off "taxi" - a converted pickup truck with two (in thai = song) benches and a cover. It's the cheapest way to move around town besides the ol' feet. Anyway. Americans. The man used to live in the Roaring Fork Valley. That made me think of Colorado and, not for the first time on this trip, of how much I miss it. I see a photo of red canyons and my heart thumps. I realize I haven't eaten a toasted chewy bagel in months. I wonder what's going on with Obama and the healthcare initiative. I need calcium and miss my favorite source of it: yogurt. I am getting a little travel weary, I must admit, and I am homesick. I don't even know where "home" is anymore; I just know it's in America. and my ache is for American mountains and rivers and canyons and desert, Colorado and Utah, the Rockies and the Colorado Plateau, and Alaska, Alaska, Alaska. Montana and Wyoming. Lake Tahoe, Yosemite and the granite of the Sierra Nevadas. My family, my friends. Quiet mornings and evenings. Cooking and eating exactly what I want. My bed. Eight months is a long time to be on the move. The moments of feeling totally alive and exhilerated are there, but they are interspersed by periods of almost a dullness or tired reception to everything around. My brain is reaching saturation (is this possible?), and my body needs some tuning for sure. I desperately need my running shoes. I've killed my contact lens from the previous months of backpacking and trying to keep them clean in the backcountry. It's almost time to go home. I have a month and a half to go yet though.

I've been thinking about "identity" a lot lately. Mamie and I are often taken for Thais by Thai people, and when we tell them we're American, we get very puzzled looks. We're not "farangs", or blond and blue eyed foreigners. People talk Thai to us all the time. It's a little exhausting when people are constantly questioning what you are. It's not as dramatic as all that, but something like it. Does who you are have to be legitimized by people around you? What if you don't fit into this group or that group? Do you create a wall to protect yourself, or will it be a bridge? And what will this bridge be made of, what language, collective thoughts, histories? a song? And certainly there have been millions before me who have had similar experiences in straddling different worlds; how have they or do they deal with it? I have a feeling it may be as simple as, "one day at a time..."