The TravelJen Blog

In Antalya I make a plan to loop around ancient Lycia, heading west through the mountains on the northern border; south to Patara; east along the coast, where mountains and ocean meet; and then up the eastern border back to Antalya.

The Lycian culture dates back to at least the 13th century b.c., because ancient records say the Lycians fought with the Hittites (from what is now central Turkey) against the Egyptians under Ramesses II. If Homer is to be trusted, they then battled the Greeks alongside the Trojans, whose capital city was in what is now northwest Turkey. The Persians, the Greeks, the Rhodians, and the Romans all controlled the region at various times; nevertheless, most Lycians didn’t take kindly to foreign rule. The people of its capital city, Xanthos, committed mass suicide three times when faced with an approaching foreign army. Brutus—of Et tu fame—and his troops found fewer than 200 people alive when they took the city in the first century b.c. Later Romans were more successful in Lycia, because they heavily invested in the cities and ports during the first few centuries of the first millennium a.d. This period was, incidentally, the last hurrah of Lycia. One earthquake in 141 a.d. leveled most of the cities. They rebuilt, but a hundred years later another enormous earthquake shattered them again. And that was pretty much that.

My first stop is Patara, Xanthos’ port city, and the most important one in the 1st and 2nd centuries a.d. There’s so much to see here that I get stuck here most of the day, which means I don’t get to visit as many sites as I intended. But one amphitheater can keep me occupied for hours—hell, so can a sherd of ancient pottery with a partial fingerprint—so I guess getting to more than one site in a day is far too optimistic.

I check out the adjacent beach first. To get there, I may be doing something illegal when I accidentally (and regretfully) cross through a sea turtle nesting area. I don’t see any turtles, but there are animal tracks of all kinds. These are my vote for turtle toemarks.

Most of the beach bunnies are hoary hares long in the ears—European couples in their 50s. They have to make their own waves; here, the Mediterranean is so still and gentle that babies should be born in it. I head for a relatively uninhabited part of the beach. As I bob in the aquamarine waters, one couple nearby get comfortable. She takes off her bikini top and settles nipples up on the beach towel. She firmly secures a tennis visor over her eyes. He wiggles out of his Euro-style tightie swimmies but—and this is what throws me—leaves his shirt on. He sits with his knees up, and I can see the curve of his naked hip where it disappears under his shirt. All that sand on one’s bare ass seems terribly uncomfortable.

The women who live in the small agricultural villages around Patara are all covered up, but not in some bodies-are-sinful way. It’s more of a tuck-your-shirt-into-those- high-waisted-pants-cause-that’s-our-style way, a cover-your-head-it’s-freaking-hot -in-southern-Turkey-and-we’re-bent-over-the-fields-all-day-it-will-get-in-your-eyes kind of way. (There must be a German word that conveys this entire notion.) I wonder what they think of all this pointedly exposed flesh.

I climb the high hill separating Patara’s ancient port—now a marshland a kilometer inland—from the current shoreline. Atop this hill is a double archway that it takes me 45 minutes to reach. There are endless thorns and finger-slicing basalt rocks and will you stop touching me?! wisps of spider webs to navigate, making it a slow go. Eventually I climb into the arches. The Mediterranean peeks through.

From here I can see what I couldn’t have detected from below—stone Roman sarcophagi cracked open first by ancient looters and then by time. I duck and scramble my way down the cut stones gravity is taking bottomward until I am surrounded by the tombs. Some are open, tress-like moss the solo inhabitant. Others have their lids but are easy to peer into.

But here’s something new: I am creeped out. Jesus, I think. Everybody’s dead. The dead themselves are long gone, either cremated 1,800 years ago or having leeched back into the earth. Still, I’m surprisingly uncomfortable. I’m the only person as far as I can see. Nipple Toaster and Bottoms Up are obscured by the distance and the haze of heat.

I wanted the real people in the archaeology, didn’t I? Not that Inanma chick, with her fierce appetites and fertility rites and noncorporeality, but something realer. And now I have them.

Somehow I had forgotten what’s so appealing about gods: the eternal-life thing. The escape-from-the-rot-of-life thing. Inanma and her calls to “plow my vulva” (which sounds even more painful than having sand in your crack) seems not so disappointing after all.

Other Roman sarcophagi at Patara have inscriptions telling you who, what, where, and when (rarely why), but these hilltop tombs have none. Their identifying texts have disappeared over time. There is no singular life here. Just a culture’s death rituals, anthropologically interesting but hardly personally moving.

You can hear more about the site in this audio clip, in which I am possibly doing something illegal. Again.

I make my way down the other side of the hill towards the main street of Patara. From here you can see the majority of the ruins—Lycian inscribed panels, the Roman amphitheater, Byzantine walls. (This is but a fraction—most of the site is still unexcavated.) Furthest away are a gateway built in honor of a visit from Hadrian and Roman tombs built along the entrance road. People all over the world have been building their eternal digs in high-traffic areas pretty much always.

It must be over 90 degrees. I’m hot and sore, panting and need water. My legs sting from the sweat that has rolled into the jagged slices the thorns have made in my shins. This all makes me oddly happy. It’s verification that at least somebody around here still has a pulse.

A few minutes later, I emerge at an amphitheater, where after 20 minutes of having the site to myself to take photos, such as this one from the perspective of the emperor’s seat—

—I encounter a whole drum kit of heartbeats. A group of college-age kids follows a grey-haired but energetic man into the site. American or Canadian—it’s often hard to tell—they politely pretend to listen to him but are clearly eager to climb through the seating rows.

There’s another older man with the group as well. He wears the requisite Indiana Jones fedora of certain white men in hot climes. But while Indy’s hat is sweaty and dirty and just, um, superhot, this guy’s has the stiffness of retail-bought pseudo-adventure. He’s carrying a small video camera, which he only periodically brings up to his left eye. He seems intent and distracted as he nears me, scanning the site for some unknown quantity. If I knew what he was looking for, I might be able to fill him in. After all, I’ve researched this site. I’ve interviewed one of the archaeologists who dug up the stage he’s awkwardly scaling. But more than that, I just want to talk to somebody for a moment. It’s nice to see real, live people, and I feel a minor bond with them. They like archaeology. I like archaeology. Three cheers for archaeology.

“Are those archaeology students with you?” I ask.

He doesn’t acknowledge in any way that I’ve spoken, though the set of his jaw lets me know he’s heard me. Nor does he bother to make eye contact. I’m about to ask again when he finally answers me in the nastiest tone I’ve heard since the smacktalk event with Viking Girl in Kashmir.

And all it consists of is this: “No.”

You know what sucks about the living? The sucking part.

Christ. I’m going with the dead.

In Antalya I make a plan to loop around ancient Lycia, heading west through the mountains on the northern border; south to Patara; east along the coast, where mountains and ocean meet; and then up the eastern border back to Antalya.

The Lycian culture dates back to at least the 13th century b.c., because ancient records say the Lycians fought with the Hittites (from what is now central Turkey) against the Egyptians under Ramesses II. If Homer is to be trusted, they then battled the Greeks alongside the Trojans, whose capital city was in what is now northwest Turkey. The Persians, the Greeks, the Rhodians, and the Romans all controlled the region at various times; nevertheless, most Lycians didn’t take kindly to foreign rule. The people of its capital city, Xanthos, committed mass suicide three times when faced with an approaching foreign army. Brutus—of Et tu fame—and his troops found fewer than 200 people alive when they took the city in the first century b.c. Later Romans were more successful in Lycia, because they heavily invested in the cities and ports during the first few centuries of the first millennium a.d. This period was, incidentally, the last hurrah of Lycia. One earthquake in 141 a.d. leveled most of the cities. They rebuilt, but a hundred years later another enormous earthquake shattered them again. And that was pretty much that.

My first stop is Patara, Xanthos’ port city, and the most important one in the 1st and 2nd centuries a.d. There’s so much to see here that I get stuck here most of the day, which means I don’t get to visit as many sites as I intended. But one amphitheater can keep me occupied for hours—hell, so can a sherd of ancient pottery with a partial fingerprint—so I guess getting to more than one site in a day is far too optimistic.

I check out the adjacent beach first. To get there, I may be doing something illegal when I accidentally (and regretfully) cross through a sea turtle nesting area. I don’t see any turtles, but there are animal tracks of all kinds. These are my vote for turtle toemarks.

Most of the beach bunnies are hoary hares long in the ears—European couples in their 50s. They have to make their own waves; here, the Mediterranean is so still and gentle that babies should be born in it. I head for a relatively uninhabited part of the beach. As I bob in the aquamarine waters, one couple nearby get comfortable. She takes off her bikini top and settles nipples up on the beach towel. She firmly secures a tennis visor over her eyes. He wiggles out of his Euro-style tightie swimmies but—and this is what throws me—leaves his shirt on. He sits with his knees up, and I can see the curve of his naked hip where it disappears under his shirt. All that sand on one’s bare ass seems terribly uncomfortable.

The women who live in the small agricultural villages around Patara are all covered up, but not in some bodies-are-sinful way. It’s more of a tuck-your-shirt-into-those- high-waisted-pants-cause-that’s-our-style way, a cover-your-head-it’s-freaking-hot -in-southern-Turkey-and-we’re-bent-over-the-fields-all-day-it-will-get-in-your-eyes kind of way. (There must be a German word that conveys this entire notion.) I wonder what they think of all this pointedly exposed flesh.

I climb the high hill separating Patara’s ancient port—now a marshland a kilometer inland—from the current shoreline. Atop this hill is a double archway that it takes me 45 minutes to reach. There are endless thorns and finger-slicing basalt rocks and will you stop touching me?! wisps of spider webs to navigate, making it a slow go. Eventually I climb into the arches. The Mediterranean peeks through.

From here I can see what I couldn’t have detected from below—stone Roman sarcophagi cracked open first by ancient looters and then by time. I duck and scramble my way down the cut stones gravity is taking bottomward until I am surrounded by the tombs. Some are open, tress-like moss the solo inhabitant. Others have their lids but are easy to peer into.

But here’s something new: I am creeped out. Jesus, I think. Everybody’s dead. The dead themselves are long gone, either cremated 1,800 years ago or having leeched back into the earth. Still, I’m surprisingly uncomfortable. I’m the only person as far as I can see. Nipple Toaster and Bottoms Up are obscured by the distance and the haze of heat.

I wanted the real people in the archaeology, didn’t I? Not that Inanma chick, with her fierce appetites and fertility rites and noncorporeality, but something realer. And now I have them.

Somehow I had forgotten what’s so appealing about gods: the eternal-life thing. The escape-from-the-rot-of-life thing. Inanma and her calls to “plow my vulva” (which sounds even more painful than having sand in your crack) seems not so disappointing after all.

Other Roman sarcophagi at Patara have inscriptions telling you who, what, where, and when (rarely why), but these hilltop tombs have none. Their identifying texts have disappeared over time. There is no singular life here. Just a culture’s death rituals, anthropologically interesting but hardly personally moving.

You can hear more about the site in this audio clip, in which I am possibly doing something illegal. Again.

I make my way down the other side of the hill towards the main street of Patara. From here you can see the majority of the ruins—Lycian inscribed panels, the Roman amphitheater, Byzantine walls. (This is but a fraction—most of the site is still unexcavated.) Furthest away are a gateway built in honor of a visit from Hadrian and Roman tombs built along the entrance road. People all over the world have been building their eternal digs in high-traffic areas pretty much always.

It must be over 90 degrees. I’m hot and sore, panting and need water. My legs sting from the sweat that has rolled into the jagged slices the thorns have made in my shins. This all makes me oddly happy. It’s verification that at least somebody around here still has a pulse.

A few minutes later, I emerge at an amphitheater, where after 20 minutes of having the site to myself to take photos, such as this one from the perspective of the emperor’s seat—

I’m hoping to find real people in the archaeology. In the week since I was at the museum, I’ve done some research into Inanma. It turns out that she was a Sumerian goddess, something I would have figured out sooner had the museum used the more common spelling of her name, Inanna, or gotten immediately had she been called by her famous Akkadian name: Ishtar. She is the goddess of love, fertility, and war. She loves hot sex and bloody battles. She will bone you senseless, but if you try to leave her she will hunt you down like the dog you are.

You find that sort of hot, don’t you?

Both the “Oldest Love Poem” and “Inanma Prefers the Farmer”—more familiar as “The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi”—are mythology texts describing boisterous shaggings that were the template for keep-the-crops-growing fertility rites between priestesses standing in for Inanma/Inanna/Ishtar and kings or said priestesses and select young men. (If someone trots out something ostensibly feminist about the ancient tradition of “sacred whores,” there’s a good chance they’re talking about these rites.)

I find myself disappointed. I wanted Inanma to be a real person. Sure, you can glean a remarkable amount about a culture through its mythology, but I wanted Inanma to be just a little more mundane. I wanted her to prefer the farmer to the shepherd because of the quality of his flax or the chubbiness of his lambs, not because of the human need for metaphor to explain the changing of the seasons. I wanted her to have been someone who was born and then died, someone who was not the representation of something but the real thing herself. A single life unimaginably different in its details yet essentially the same as mine.

What’s strange about this urge is that I’ve been spending most of my time in Istanbul lingering over mezze and raki with flesh-and-blood people whose lives essentially fit the bill. Dogan, with his 43-hour work days and dream to become a historian specializing in early-20th-century Istanbul. Sercin, with her ongoing decryption of the bureaucratese on the U.S. Diversity Visa application form. Bahar, with her rowdy batch of photographer friends knocking back wine in a gallery where modern-day gypsies stare out from exquisitely beautiful photos. Fulya, with her memories of the 1999 earthquake that destroyed Izmit, her hometown, and killed so many people she knew. Mine, with her daily deadlines for Aksam and the longer piece about the occurrence of the year 2012 in apocalyptic literature.

We have different perspectives and histories and cultural backgrounds. Yet there is never a shortage of ways to understand each other. So why leave Istanbul for Antalya? Why leave now with the living for then with the dead?

Maybe it’s because I know the living don’t have any more answers than I do. Or maybe I’m full of shit and just want to drive a car for a week. Actually, all of these things can be true at once.

So I take a 12-hour bus from Istanbul to Antalya, where I rent a car and hit the road.a Amphitheater” />

—I encounter a whole drum kit of heartbeats. A group of college-age kids follows a grey-haired but energetic man into the site. American or Canadian—it’s often hard to tell—they politely pretend to listen to him but are clearly eager to climb through the seating rows.

There’s another older man with the group as well. He wears the requisite Indiana Jones fedora of certain white men in hot climes. But while Indy’s hat is sweaty and dirty and just, um, superhot, this guy’s has the stiffness of retail-bought pseudo-adventure. He’s carrying a small video camera, which he only periodically brings up to his left eye. He seems intent and distracted as he nears me, scanning the site for some unknown quantity. If I knew what he was looking for, I might be able to fill him in. After all, I’ve researched this site. I’ve interviewed one of the archaeologists who dug up the stage he’s awkwardly scaling. But more than that, I just want to talk to somebody for a moment. It’s nice to see real, live people, and I feel a minor bond with them. They like archaeology. I like archaeology. Three cheers for archaeology.

“Are those archaeology students with you?” I ask.

He doesn’t acknowledge in any way that I’ve spoken, though the set of his jaw lets me know he’s heard me. Nor does he bother to make eye contact. I’m about to ask again when he finally answers me in the nastiest tone I’ve heard since the smacktalk event with Viking Girl in Kashmir.

And all it consists of is this: “No.”

You know what sucks about the living? The sucking part.

Christ. I’m going with the dead.

Inanma prefers the farmer. I don’t know why. The signage doesn’t say, and I can’t read cuneiform.

I’m at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul looking at a small collection of Sumerian literature: about a dozen clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform (which means “wedge-shaped”). They are from various sites in Mesopotamia, or modern Iraq. Most are about 4,000 years old.

The most famous is the Code of Hammurabi, one of the world’s earliest set of laws, created by the eponymous Babylonian king in the early 18th century b.c.

Some 200 years older and more interesting, I think, is the “Oldest Love Poem,” which includes these lines:

Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me

Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies

My father, he will give you gifts

This is also perhaps the first parental endorsement of a child getting laid. Let me speak for the 21st century when I say, Eeeeeeew.

There is a letter from one Ludingirra to his mother. Huh. A Sumerian Momma’s Boy. There are numerous legal documents, including “A Verdict About Murder” and “A Judicial Decision Regarding the Breaking of an Engagement.” The hilariously named “Short & Terse Business Letters” apparently have a cold brevity that in light of our modern equivalent—Long and Bureaucratic Corporate Communications—sounds quite appealing.

Other tablets are educational (“Proverbs Book” and “Multiplication Tables”) or instructional. The “Medical Recipe Concerning Poisoning,” for instance, includes eight remedies to counter having been slipped a mickey, which was apparently a choice method of murder in the 18th century b.c. One prescription requires:

mustard

pistachio

nuts

sweet mixed drink

meal of roast grain

thyme

barirato [?] plant

wine

These ingredients are to be mixed in a small cup—don’t supersize that vessel, yo—and then smeared on the skin. Yes, that’s right—there is no actual ingestion of said potion. The mere application of this tincture, the tablet assures us, will save the victim.

“He will live,” it declares.

But I am most intrigued by Inanma. Why did she prefer the farmer? What did he offer her that all the other suitors didn’t? Who did he beat out? The shepherd? The scribe? The brewer, the priest, the guy who had a monopoly on ferry service across both the Tigris and the Euphrates?

Nearby are 4,000-year-old clay tablets inscribed with erotic scenes. There’s a lively variety to these tablets, which could be easily slipped into, oh, say, the pocket of a robe, and feature all the combinations that you might expect: men and women, men and men, facing, from behind, on some sort of angled bench…HOTT. They are almost cartoonishly pornographic, with fist-like eyes, scalp-yanking braids, and dopey smiles.

Aah, afterglow.

There’s nothing here that I haven’t seen before. There’s something comforting in that. We’re all the same, the world over, and we always have been. There’s nothing new under the sun.

“Everyone keeps saying about us, “Oh, look at the foreign journalists,” Sercin tells me gleefully as we squeeze between the flapping Turkish flags and yet another portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, revered founder of the country. This one is behind glass in a wooden frame, as if it had been hastily dehooked from the living room wall.

It’s Sunday, April 29, and Sercin and I are at Istanbul’s Caglayan Square. (Caglayan, like many Turkish proper nouns, has several accent marks that I’m not capable of typing in. Just for the record.) It’s of those beautiful cusp days in spring that confuses the skin—it tingles in the sun and gets goosebumpy in the shadows.

Sercin, a medical translator here in Istanbul, looks the part of photojournalist better than I do, with her olive green femme flak jacket, skinny mauve scarf, and jeans. (I have the jeans, but somehow my jacket is too soft, too afternoon brunch, and it doesn’t have the requisite number of pockets for all those film canisters we don’t use anymore, having gone digital.) She’s just finished a photography course and has a brand-new Canon she’s both eager and nervous to use.

Though new to the camera, she’s old to charming the pants off people. She fearlessly closes in on her subjects without making them feel uncomfortable. It’s something I’m still too timid to be good at.

Perhaps as many as a million people are protesting the current elections for the second time in as many weeks. (The first rally was in Ankara, the capital, and at least three more will follow in other cities in the month after.) It’s a complicated situation that becomes even more confusing, at least for this American, because of the nuances of parliamentary democracy and Turkish electoral law, which even the Turkish high court is confused about.

But at the heart of the debate is a simple question of identity (alas, without a simple answer): What does a Turk look like?

*******

It seems that for these protestors, Turkey is unveiled—even though some of the protestors themselves are.

The leading presidential candidate—the only presidential candidate—up for election before the Turkish Parliament is the current foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. He’s from the party that controls parliament, and is considered a former Islamist. Gul’s wife wears a head scarf, which sets up on interesting conundrum, as head scarves are banned in government offices.

Some, but by no means all, Turks are suspicious of how much Gul would incorporate sharia, or Islamic law, into Turkish law. Turkey has been staunchly secular since its creation in 1922. In a sort of reactionary twist, the military has been secularism’s guardian. Like its warrior breathren the world over, the Turkish military ain’t subtle: there have been four coups over the years. The last time was in 1997, when the military forced the breakup the Islamist-bent Welfare Party, which Gul was a member of. Now, with Gul’s election on the horizon, the military has been making noises that it might interfere once more.

The protestors seem disgusted with both the veil and the mil. They argue that both religious fundamentalism and military usurpation of the democratic process are equally at odds with a modern Turkey.

This is all on my mind as we wander through the protest. Despite seriousness of the issues, the atmosphere is quite jovial, with lots of laughter, music, and poetry (Communist poetry, apparently). Sercin keeps laughing at the wit and humor of the chants. She does her best to translate them for me. There’s one that puns on imam bayildi, a sort of dessert pudding. [Note: Sercin wrote in to say that imam bayildi is not a dessert, but a main course. Ack. I should’ve double-checked my source.] Imam bayildi means “fainting imam” in Turkish.

“Now they’re saying that for the imam to faint isn’t good enough, ” she says, delighted. “He should be dead! Ha!”

This strikes me as a bit bloodthirsty, especially as it relates to a mild-mannered dessert.

Around us stream people and their flags. The crescent and star wave from poles, drape across people’s shoulders, are patched on baseball caps. From beneath his quintessential fez, Ataturk looks out on pins, shirts, posters.

An enormous balloon bobs overhead like a strange sky luer. Beyond the balloon is a broadcast tower, a metal spindle probably beaming the sight of this protest all over the world. People are staring at it as if they might see themselves on TV.

But that’s not it, actually. “There’s a man up there!” Sercin yelps, pointing. His whole body sways as he waves extravagantly at the hundreds of thousands below him. No one waves back.

He has no safety attachments, no ladder, no sanity. Is this patriotic fervor or jumper madness? Or both?

Back on the ground, we pass a woman holding above her head a sign on which she has drawn a lightbulb, the symbol of Gul’s party. Among the Turkish words, the word “Edison” jumps out.

Sercin notices it at the same time and grins. “It says that Edison would be sorry if he knew what happened to his lightbulb.”

*******

“How do they know I’m a foreigner?” I ask Sercin as we pardonne our way through the crowd. Since arriving in Istanbul, I’ve felt incredibly comfortable, like I fit right in somehow. Just another face in the crowd. It’s been a relief after three months of being so noticably different from everyone.

She looks at me as if I’ve just asked to kiss Ataturk. “You don’t look Turkish.”

“Well, I know that,” I say, sheepishly. “But when I look around, everyone looks so different from one another. I don’t look like them, but they don’t look like each other, either. Turks don’t look like any one thing.”

Black hair. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Brown eyes. Tall and leggy. Short and squat. Patrician noses, nub noses. Hair uncovered, hair covered. The list goes on and on of all the ways Turks—at least ones in Istanbul, around which half of the Turkish population lives—don’t look like each other.

More than anywhere I’ve been, here faces reflect history. I won’t attempt to cover the enormous length and complexity of Turkish history when Wikipedia has the basics, but suffice it to say that as the crossroads of Asia and Europe, a large percentage of humanity, for a huge span of history, has been born in, come through, or settled down in Turkey. They’ve all left their mark on the landscape. Turkey is covered with an amazing array of ruins: Neolithic settlements like Catalhoyuk; the fortified Bronze Age city of Troy; the Greek settlement of Ephesus; the Lycian-Roman ampitheaters of the Mediterranean Coast; the gilded glory of Byzantine Istanbul; Ottoman mosques with their minarets needling the clouds. The list goes on and on.

With this sort of history, the question of what a modern Turk looks like is a complicated one. How do you establish a “national face” in a place whose history is a testament to both the diversity and unity of the human race—current national borders be damned?

So how does everybody know I’m a foreigner? After all, I’m eastern European. Russia and Ukraine are north, directly across the Black Sea. Poland borders Ukraine. There are plenty of transplants from these regions living in Istanbul.

It’s not the eyes, Sercin says as we slowly work our way towards the edges of the rally. It’s time to go. For hours, we’ve been shooting the red Turkish flag against the creamy blue sky—if gelato came in the flavor of sky, it would be this color and consistency—and we’ve exhausted its potential. The viewfinder on my camera shows that I have captured too many backs, too many tops of heads, too much flapping red fabric.

Nor is it the freckles or even the red hair, which she knows I get from a bottle. The upturned nose is unheard of on Turkish faces, she says, but still—the nose isn’t it either.

“There’s an individuality to Westerners,” she says. “I can see you are an individual in your face.” Her quarter-size hazel eyes scan me from hairline to chin. “There is a self-confidence. A way you move that says you don’t care what people think.”

Turks, she says, are curtailed by their obligations to family and culture and country and family. “In Turkey, we always have our families on our faces.”

I feel irrationally defensive, as if she’s just accused me of being indifferent to my family and culture. My upturned nose suddenly seems like the leaping-off point to the very heights of American self-involvement. I admit to Sercin that even for an American, I am fiercely resistent to joining a tribe, whether it’s national, corporate, ideological—or even geographic, roaming the world as I am. But that doesn’t mean I am completely disloyal.

“Here I am without context,” I protest. “In America you could see me with friends, family, my home, my city, my work—all the things that place me in the world, that I feel a responsibility to.”

“It’s not that,” she counters. “I’ve been to America. I’ve been to European countries. And it’s the same.”

I try to puzzle out what she means, and if I’ve seen it myself. “Americans have a big presence,” I suggest. “I can usually tell Americans from Europeans not only by the way they dress, but by how big they are,” I continue. “They take up a lot of space.”

Her eyes widen with recognition. “Yeah, yeah!”

I’m suddenly compelled to confess something I haven’t told many people, because I’m afraid I sound crazy. But I tell her anyway. More than two months before in China, one night I was hit by the strongest sense of disembodiment I’ve ever experienced. I was on my way to dinner in Lijiang when an overwhelming sense of unreality crashed into me. It was as if the veil had been lifted. I held my hands out and looked them. This is me? I thought. I watched, detached, as my hands began to shake. They looked familiar, sure: the ragged nails, the long knuckles, the increasingly prominent veins, the wrists going carpal tunnel from too much typing. Characteristics of an object I had seen before. But what did they have to do with me?

What was this “me,” anyway? Was “I” in here in this body, jailed in this meat? Or was “I” the meat itself? Did I—whatever that was—exist? Did anything exist?

Either I was having spontaneous spiritual realizations or the anti-malarial medication was finally kicking in.

Knowing the state was medicinally induced didn’t help to quell it. I continued walking towards the restaurant because I didn’t know what else to do. I moved the strange fleshed bones through the winding alley only because I understood that’s how locomotion occurred. I was puppeteer and marionette both.

At the guesthouse, I joined the family-style dinner, chewing and talking and drinking tea as if I hadn’t been cleaved like a gutted fish, grateful for the presence of creatures I didn’t entirely believe in. I was desperate to believe in them. Look at that, I marveled. I say something to these fantastic beings, and they respond!

The sensation continued the rest of the evening, even as I fell asleep. As I have on countless nights on this trip, I awoke in the middle of the night to see nothing but shadows, to feel nothing in the bed but blankets and my knees. At home, Steve and I make a mammal pile with the cats, limbs and snores in warm layers. But that was all gone. As I travel through country after country, the only real, consistent thing of material substance that I encounter every day is myself. This body. The meat.

In the darkness, even my body had become of dubious reality. When that happens, you know the lack of context is really pushing your buttons.

By morning the sensation was mostly gone. But it’s persisted since then, even though I stopped taking the anti-malarial medicine at least a month ago. Periodically, it yanks me 45 degrees perpendicular to reality. This “foreign journalist” with her camera and upturned nose, shouldering her way through the crowd in that space-greedy American way: that’s me? Am I this thing?

******

Sercin looks thoughtful, but she doesn’t have much of a response. She looks at this traveling “foreign journalist” and sees freedom, an independence from the constraints of country and culture. But the moorless existence of long-term travel—immersed in alien family, country, culture—sometimes doesn’t feel like the epitome of freedom. Sometimes it feels like a dangerously untethered existence, like a balloon gotten loose, taken by the wind in whatever direction it feels the whim to pursue.

Being without a place can feel like having no safety attachments, no ladder, no sanity.

The election complexities will continue long after this rally, long after I leave Turkey all together. There will be more rallies, and even a suicide bombing in Ankara, the capital. The courts will weigh in, and so will the politicians, the military, and the public. Turkey will consider using the popular vote to decide the next president—a monumental change. The elections on July 22 should make things clearer. Maybe.

We leave the protest, kicking through discarded water bottles.

I look back to see if the man on the broadcast tower is still there. Doesn’t he know he’s in danger? Doesn’t he know he could die? Is this what happens when you are so cut off from your self that you lose the mammalian ability to know that your body is in danger?

But he’s gone. Fervor or jumper, he’s gone.