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Where’s the house, really?
By Janet Manley
After months of lockdown, we sense a little better what it can be like to live on the moon. We masked ourselves to venture through the front door, floating in giant arches around masked neighbors, while those who cannot leave their homes watched. Through the window in a global orbit. During an era of the coronavirus pandemic, everyone on Earth experienced the distance ends regularly reserved for those in the death zone or in space. In our rooms, in addition to, we feel the preference for the put we can not go.
“Is space the position where we were born, where, as they say in Haiti, our umbilical cords are buried?Or is it the space where we die, where we are buried? Edwidge Danticat wrote in a prologue to “The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. “Each culture has a different word for nostalgia (the Polish ‘tsknota’ captures a wonderful desire or a form of nostalgia; in Welsh, ‘hiraeth’ means ‘aspiration to a space in which you cannot go back, it no longer exists, or once existed’), however, it is a condition that is rarely addressed in a practical sense, and the moment of provision has expanded the joy of those who are alienated from homes.
Conrad Anker, a mountaineer who has spent part of his life climbing the Himalayas and Antarctica, takes refuge in his Montana home, but said he longed for the home of his training years outside Yosemite, where his brother and sister still live. years of expeditions, comprises the strength of the house.
For many adventurers, “when they’re on an expedition, they just think about being home,” he said, “and as soon as they’re home, their preference for settling down and they need to be there in excess. lugares. de again. “
As the borders closed and expats rushed to be repatriated this year, I participated in the vast game of musical chairs, flying with my husband and children to the australian house. There, we spent two weeks quarantined in a government-ordered hotel. about my local country on the 31st floor. ” Let’s go to Australia!”my 5-year-old once told his parents about FaceTime, and I had to point out the Sydney Bay Bridge from the balcony and we were already there. Shortly after we left at 40, the Queensland border closed, blocking my sister in some other state. The metacondition of social estating has been that of obvious exile, and for 13% of American adults born in some other country, it is pronounced.
Anker appeared in the documentary “Meru”, which followed him and fellow mountaineering jimmys Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk as they climbed the path of the shark fin in the look of the Himalayan summit, an expedition hijacked through an ice typhoon that forced for days The pleasure of climbers is unsettlingly similar to that of many other people taking refuge in the place due to the pandemic : staying at home, or near home, is a matter of public safety. “If you make a mistake, ” said Mr. Anker, “it has consequences. “So, you want to find a way to feel comfortable where you are.
In a tent, he says, you can tell yourself, “Okay, I’m the inside of this nylon cocoon. The world there, even if the wind hits everything, I’m fine. I have my sleeping bag, my stove works, I have water, I’m going to eat something. And then I’m going to wake up and I’m going to do the same. “
“In a way, right now we’re in our own little tents,” he added, “but it’s on a society-wide scale. “Achieving the broadest purpose – reaching the top, being seeing your circle of relatives – requires patience and short-term sacrifices.
Sue Bell, a 70-year-old retired deputy director, has a 102-year-old mother who has hearing problems and lives in a partially contained housing center in Sydney. the library with masks. Physical touch is not allowed. Masks make communication difficult, so Ms. Bell brings a notebook and paper.
“When she knows why all this is happening, I just say, ‘It’s the virus and we’re protecting you,'” Bell said.
G. Vasquez, who asked to be known for his first initial because he is an undocumented immigrant, left Guatemala at age 29, traveling by land for a month to succeed in the United States, an adventure that would take only five hours. planes for someone who can freely cross foreign borders. Today, he lives with his wife and children in western New York, on a dairy farm. He said New York at home, although he did not feel “perfectly prepared” for life in the United States and very absent from his parents and extended family. Until immigration law changes, you can’t stop at them or let your children see their grandparents in person.
“He is dissatisfied and I am satisfied at the same time,” he said through an interpreter. “They grow up here, and at home, they wouldn’t have the opportunities that they have here, so thank God I’m going to see them capture this. Opportunity. “
Vasquez insists on reaching a compromise by letting his circle of relatives live and paint in a position where he can earn and save money. Life is more difficult in Guatemala, he said, and here many of his country colleagues sing and whistle for long days: through profitless paintings. “Never complain, ” he said.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch said her first area mission, from March 2019 to February 2020, lasted while living on the International Space Station, setting the record for the longest flight time for a woman, with 328 days. to avoid home damage when he is on Earth, he said, in component through the reformulation of his sense of desire.
“You have to leave the space to perceive the space,” Ms. Koch said. Focusing on the advantages I would get from being away “helped me stick to the position I had to leave to go through and do those scouting missions. “
He also said that instead of focusing on what he lacked, he would locate “something he had at the time that he could never recover and would focus time and time again on what was in order. “It’s simple in space, he says, because hunting Earth, “you know everything’s still out there. He’s waiting for you too. Nothing’s going anywhere. “
People on long-term projects refer to the “third-quarter effect” as a drop in functionality and morale that occurs right after half the expedition. Koch experienced this during a project in Antarctica, which required an “wintering”: spending 8 months on a closed base, waiting next summer. “I don’t forget it after thinking about half the winter,” four months passed. I can’t, ” he said. And then he thought, “Wow 4 more months. “
Ms. Koch approached the “new world” caused by the pandemic as a new planet to explore.
“Our task is to understand, what do other people do to entertain themselves on this new planet?How do you keep your spirit engaged?How do they interact?” She.
No matter how much you confess, it’s vital that you worry about something.
Many of us might have made resettlement decisions lightly until very recently, however, fleets of floor planes and the imperative of others have replaced our belief in distance. Everything is harder to achieve; Still, we’re much more connected than in the past,” Anker said.
“Think of a hundred years ago, in 1911, when Amundsen” – Roald Amundsen, an explorer – “arrived at the South Pole. No one knew where they were,” he said. Today, “with satellite technology, there is no place on the planet that has not been mapped into images. You can search Google Earth anywhere and locate it, you can look at it, there’s an image. “
Anker said he would take with him a small photo album of a circle of relatives on expeditions before the world wrapped in cellular signals. Now he’s just taking out his phone.
Mr. Vasquez’s children meet his grandparents in Guatemala in video conversations, and for Ms. Koch, handwritten letters seem very special in the area. “The concept that I enjoyed holding this object, and then gave it to it on a rocket and flew into area and now I have the same, a way to feel connected,” he said.
This year was a delight of social isolation, however, all the interviewees for this article talked about how they regarded themselves as components of a larger collective.
For Anker, space may be the physical design of where he lives, but it’s also “the place where he raises his children and takes others to dinner. “Sunday dinners with friends.
Vasquez looked for other people to perceive where his food came from and perceive his hands in the paintings in the chain of origin at a time when farm staff are vulnerable to coronavirus. He said he was proud of the paintings he has made to provide food to others and spoke. warmly from the hard and essential paintings that the farm staff makes.
Ms. Koch participated in the first exclusively female spacewalk and discovered, like other astronauts before her, that she reaffirmed her confidence in humanity. In a space suit, hanging and hunting along the structure, “you can see your friend there, focused on his task or you,” he said. “You see them in the context of the Earth, the vast darkness of space, and you realize the magnitude of what you two are capable of doing together. “
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