When I was a kid, I always found myself looking up at planes. Watching the massive objects float through the sky made me curious about where those people were going, who they were and what made them leave. Having never been on a plane, I imagined it as semi-transformative: being plucked from a place you know and dropped into the unknown, forced to rely on senses you take for granted. I became fascinated with that feeling, storing it away until I finally had the chance to follow it somewhere.
My first big trip was to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a group of close friends I’d known since my earliest years of grade school. On the 12-hour flight about 6,000 miles south, it was hard not to get a bit nervous. Argentina? What am I doing in Argentina? I hardly know any Spanish. I’ve heard it’s not the safest place, to say the least.
Butupontouchingdown, I was greeted with the wondrous feeling I used to get while staring at planes as a kid. The air immediately felt different. Smelled different. The haze that lay on the horizon was a hue completely unfamiliar to me. I couldn’t wait to start walkingdowntown,finding cool hole-in-the-wall spots, making friends, immersing myselfinaplacethatIknew nothing about and seeing how it played out. We were visiting a fellow childhood friend who had moved there, and we had not seen in some years. True to his nonchalant attitude, but to my friends’dismay, he had absolutely nothing planned for us when we got there.
I finally had my opportunity. We started off by going to BuenosAires’equivalent of a New York bodega, a neighborhoodconvenience store commonly called a “chino.” There, I quickly learned my friends were not as bought into the immersion as I was when they immediately purchased as many bottles of American liquor as the shop had. I opted for the Argentine special — a “fernandito,” which is a makeshift Fernet and Coke mixed in a cutopen 2-liter Coke bottle. Admittedly, it was not the most pleasant concoction at first sip, but after a dozen compliments from locals, it started to taste better. The rest of the trip functioned in a similar way, but with some details I’d prefer my boss not to read.
Bolstered by the confidence of this successful trip, I began to wonder why I don’t approach each new place and experience with the same wonder and desire for immersion as I did in Argentina. I realized what I learned was never really about Argentina, but how different life feels when I am actually paying attention. I had never really paid attention to Oklahoma City or Oklahoma in general. I took it for granted as the place I was born and raised, so obviously, I knew it like the back of my hand.
But did I really? That question has followed me more than anything from Argentina. It followed me on hikes through Arkansas, where unfamiliar trails made me feel the same kind of awake I felt walking through Buenos Aires. Now, it’s most prominent when I drive through small Oklahoma towns for work, picturing what they looked like before the highways passed them by, and trying to notice what I would have ignored a few years ago.
I used to think the feeling I wanted came from going somewhere far away. Maybe sometimes it does. But more often, I think it comes from carrying that same curiosity into the places I thought I already knew.