I heard rolling thunder for the first time today--the kind that sounds like someone is pushing a huge, empty garbage bin down the road. It just goes on and on. Completely different from the sharp claps I'm used to.
I can hardly describe how much it pleases me when I experience firsthand a natural phenomenon completely new to me. And I love that restless fascination that seems to come hand-in-hand with storms. Even if you're scared, you're still (hopefully figuratively) electrified. Even more so if there's something new and different about it, and so long as you're not in any appreciable danger for it.
"Is that really even thunder?" I wondered aloud to my Southern mate. Having lived through hurricanes, he laughed. We live directly under a bad weather alternate flight path, so sometimes we'll hear planes over the house that sound for all the world like they're going to crash. This thunder was so strange to me, at first I thought it must be a struggling plane. But it wasn't.
---
In the Other Country I saw my first monsoon rainfall. I remember exactly where I was: with friends in--of all places!--an American-themed hot dog shop. Halfway through our shriveled, mayonnaise-slathered early dinners (which tasted fricking amazing after working with our bodies all day and then walking the three kilometers to town), the rain began to pour.
Within minutes the shop was crowded with shrieking high school students in soaked uniforms, the girls folding their arms across their chests because their blouses were white. Women walking home from market pulled out umbrellas and tsked at the students for not being better prepared for what they all should have known was coming because, after all, it came this time every year. We watched a bus float past the shop in half a foot of standing water, which impressed no one but me. Half an hour passed and nothing changed for the drier.
We could have waited under cover all afternoon until the downpour stopped, but we didn't. I think my friends could tell I wanted to be out in it, so we headed for home. And I--having no knowledge yet of the terrible things that get washed away by the monsoon rains--hiked up my pants and trudged straight into the water. It was delightful! Even though I spent half of the next afternoon trying to wash the stench of rot and sewage from my sneakers, I felt it was 100% worth it to have run through flooded alleyways sopping wet in a real monsoon.
Once we were in the outskirts of town, the muddy flooded earth was so slick that when we walked uphill we were forced to cling to whatever we could in order not to fall. Branches, boulders, the front walls of houses, the graveyard fence.
---
A few weeks after I'd arrived, a young man around my age demanded my shoes as we crouched together playing cards in front of the house his dead parents had lived in. "Those are nice," he said, poking at the material over my toes. Tan corduroy. "How about you give them to me?"
I demurred, explaining that they were my only sneakers. He offered a trade, but his own sneakers were heavy and black, clearly meant for a man. Mine were unisex. I didn't want a trade. And, truthfully, I was offended. Supposedly we were friends, but he was in the habit of saying lots of brash, intrusive things and this was the worst yet. Taking my shoes? Some friend!
He shrugged. "Let me know if you change your mind."
Much later he explained to me, smirking, that he'd found out at a young age that he could simply demand things of American foreigners. Whether by straight-up pity or some more complicated sense of hegemonic guilt, more often than not they felt compelled to comply. He showed me his collection, an expansive wardrobe of baseball caps, jackets, ties, silky polyester clubbing shirts, stopwatches, crisp designer jeans.
It took months before he really grasped that I didn't have secret barrels of money stashed away like seemingly everyone else from my country, that I wasn't lying about the circumstances under which I'd come there. And when he did understand, he started to introduce me to his other friends as "This is ______, my American friend. She is not rich." It was said in a strange tone, half boasting, half protective. I felt like a black swan or Zuckerman's famous pig--somewhat embarrassed to have been examined so closely and found to be unusual, yet fairly confident this at least meant I wasn't to be treated like a regular pig. She is not rich. That one sentence opened many hearts and doors to me that had previously been barred.
---
I was ashamed of what I was learning about my country, though I didn't know the half of it yet. Not a quarter. Not a tenth.
I'd never been proud to be an American, but only because the idea of being proud of the uncontrollable location of one's own birth seemed ludicrous to me. But these people were telling me, indirectly, that there was another reason I should not be proud. They wouldn't say it outright, but I could feel it skulking around the edges of every interaction.
I wanted them to be wrong. I kept hoping to run into another American like me, one who didn't fit their unjust stereotypes.
In retrospect, the American stereotypes were not so unjust. In retrospect, I actually fit more of them than I thought I did. But when you listen good and keep your mouth shut about most things, people fill in the blanks... and when you set them off kilter with a few of your more flattering oddities, sometimes they fill in the remaining blanks with nicer stuff than you really deserve.
Once I hung back on a bus ride far past my stop, squirming apologetically past all the SRO passengers to reach a pair of white faces in the back row. A young man and an older man. "What are you doing here?" I asked the Americans, breathless and smiling, in the local language.
They shook their heads, laughing. "English, please!"
"What are you doing in _____." I repeated.
"Volunteering!"
"He's volunteering. I'm visiting," said the older one. The younger man's father.
I was pleased. "Me, too! I'm volunteering with ______."
"Yeah? I 'm with the ______." The younger one grinned. "Can't wait to get out of this dirty hellhole!"
---
The day after the first monsoon rains, my friend watched me scrubbing at my flimsy shoes. I've never seen such a rueful smile before or since.
"Now look what you've done. Those pretty shoes are ruined. You should have given them to me when you had the chance."
"Want to make a bet? They're coming clean. See?"
They were improving considerably. I'd been filling a bucket of water, scrubbing the shoes with a brush in the bucket, then emptying out the dark water and filling the bucket again. You couldn't always do such a thing. At certain points in the year, the creeks and the taps both run dry. But for now there was plenty of clear water. You could bathe and wash as much as you pleased.
"So the mud scrubs off. You'll never get the smell out."
He was right. They were fine dry, but every time they got damp, they smelled like a polluted creek. I wore them 'til the rubber soles broke through. Four years.
---
Local Natives - Wide Eyes
