[Author’s note: This is the next in a series of writing challenges first proposed to me by Leslie Farnsworth. Leslie has organized and expanded the challenge to include a larger group of excellent blog writers. Once per month, one member of the group will propose a topic and we will all give our own unique take on the subject. This latest installment was proposed by Joan Johnson. You may want to look at the other bloggers listed below to see what they came up with:]
- Leslie Farnsworth: http://www.lesliefarnsworth.com/
- Joan Johnson: http://onefishtaco.blogspot.com/
- Rebecca Harvey: http://bayoucitypostcards.blogspot.com/
- James McPherson: http://jalmcpherson.com/
- Jenna Sauber: http://jennasauber.com/
- Jon Lundell: http://therealmil.blogspot.com/
The first trip that I can remember was the trip up from Colombia. I have moved around the Americas since I was born. First from Chile to Ecuador and then from Ecuador to Colombia. I remember nothing from those trips.
My father is a geologist and he was constantly being assigned new jobs in foreign places. My family followed from one project to another. Finally my dad was assigned to the States and we moved to the promised land of Houston and have lived there for the last 37 years and counting.
I arrived in the US on my feet. I was about 6 at the time and we we’re landing at Miami international on a 747 back in 1977. Back then stewardesses didn’t give a damn what you did so I unbuckled, stood up, braced myself between two seats in the isle and landed in the US along with the plane on my feet. It was the start of a new adventure and I didn’t want to waste a second of it.
To me the US was a magical land. The birthplace of my father, the country that sent astronauts to the moon, and where Mickey Mouse was from. I wanted to see and do it all. Of course there was one slight hold up. I didn’t speak the language .
That was my first substantive change. I had to retrain my mind in English. I was assigned to first grade but could barely speak a word. One day a lovely old lady, who was a teaching assistant, took me to the back of the classroom and using the flash cards meant for pre-K kids taught me the alphabet in English and how to pronounce the letters.
Now I can barely recall what it’s like to think in Spanish anymore. I can do it of course but it now takes a conscious effort.
Of course you can say that this doesn’t really qualify as “travel”. It’s not like a vacation. But to my seven-year old mind it was a vacation. It wasn’t till the first couple of years had passed that I accepted it as my new living condition.
If you want a real trip type of experience I would have to say a field trip just before my senior year in college would qualify as life changing. We were assigned to a small resort town in Colorado and did some field exercises in the rocky mountains. A very pleasant and bucolic trip with no real bad incidents. But what it did do for me is to give me a taste of the sorts of things that geographers did every day when they went about their research.
Before that geography was a dry scholarly pursuit. A very sterile and lifeless exercise. No reason to get your hands dirty but here we were getting to do research in the rawest and purest form. All that data we were used to getting in packets or looking up in books in the library had to come from someplace and here we learned how it went.
Geography to most people means drawing maps, or looking at globes or whatnot but really it branches out into so many fields like botany, biology, soil sciences, geology, anthropology, and sociology and of course how these interact and shape each other.
Learning how the land shapes the climate which shapes the plants and then the animals and finally man who of course goes back and shapes all these too. That’s geography.
I think that’s when I decided that this would be more than just a degree to get just any job. It was here that I found that not only did I have the capability of doing this type of work but that I could get passionate about. That is when I went from being just another undergrad looking for a piece of paper to get me a job after college to being someone who cared about the thing he was studying.
Recent Comments