It’s too rare that we’re drunkenly aware. Aware of our surroundings, that one conversation in a busy street or the first conscious, deep breath you take upon stepping out of baggage claim and arriving outside, in a new place. We’re reminded that life means discovery. Yet, the word discovery is trivial. Did Christopher Columbus really discover a land mass that was already there, with its own inhabitants, flora, fauna, kings called chiefs and Jesus Christ named Mother Nature? It’s trivial. If Christopher’s ‘discovery’ had an angelic twin, it would be a species that a college student’s semester abroad encounters. It’s some kind of aware.
I discovered the idea when reading and loving Rachelle Falk and Layne Piper’s blogs, which followed them from their hometowns in New York and Texas to Australia. Fate placed us and many of our best friends in a celebrated Davidson College freshman hall called Base Belk, a basement level dorm that was unique in not having a boy’s hall on the opposite side and for housing a great group of girls that would be most statistically lively to live in a basement. Base Belk brought us close in times of academic rigor, rowdy fiestas, fashion dilemmas and many, many other issues.
"Base Belk by Birth, Eating House by Marriage." January 2009.
We discovered each other for a year and played as undefeated Flickerball champions. We became a tighter family in sophomore year’s 1st Knox building, a story reserved for multiple entries. Now we’re separated, but together in travel, in discovery. We’re spinning away in different locales and circles of friends, but when a beautiful sunset dissolves, your Skype makes that galactic beep and the night sky is lit with awareness. We pour stories into each other’s cups and add the little ingredients we’ve collected together over the years. Years that somehow turned plural from those weeks and months after our first nervous days of moving in.
We were beyond the fact that Anna and Jadry’s 4×4 room window was enclosed by a gutter’s rusty jail bars and the perpetual pizza box contained inside. We grew together, beyond the fact that the building’s vending machine room was in our hall–frequented by Belk Lab lifers, 2-4am plastered people, and the occasional nap-arousing rage when a Honeybun got stuck.
Flickerball Champs 2008-2009
Rachelle, Layne and Kiana’s first week in Australia is the soul of pure. We travel because inherently, we want to feel like kids again–an enveloping innocence that’s brought out just because you’re under the shade of trees or in the push of Pacific waves, a feeling and place that’s new and familiar to your traveling feet. Discovery is every place that you’ve never been. On this In: India is an ancient civilization that welcome newcomers to ride modernity and change its history. It might feel like playing chicken in Chennai’s streets a month and two days from now, but with thanks, their hilarious insights and inspiration from my friends abroad, I will make that dusty, beautiful, chaotic, serene nation into a second home.
“Right there in the Ocean,” Chelly reflected on her blog Rachelle Goes Down Under, “I was overcome with a great sense of joy! Not only because of the realization of how fortunate I was to be in my position, but also of just the sheer natural beauty of the earth.” The United Nations should unite in adding two words to a letter’s addressing: 28117 U.S.A. Planet Earth. Cultural cohesion shouldn’t end with Michael Jackson.
I love my best friends, beautiful examples of our generation’s rugged new culture of together. Layne Piper can never be summarized in a book, maybe a memoir with lots of clever rhymes and staccato phrases, but a sentence from her blog, Piperations Down Under wake me up after breakfast: “I’m sitting in Hoochie Mama’s right now, and I just had the most delicious chai latte. Really really really good.” Or, “It’s so different from Davidson. Today when I was walking through the main part of campus near the library I couldn’t believe how many people were there. For the past week it’s been basically deserted in comparison. Ok Hoochie Mama’s is closing so that’s gotta be it for now.”
That’s enough for exploring discovery. Hit the beach ya’ll.