This day is special to me for another reason, too: ten years ago today I arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico -- a place I'd never seen before but decided to leave the East Coast for anyway. I went there both to get away from wretched East Coast winters and to try something completely different. I had arranged to do fieldwork there for my PhD dissertation on cross-cultural medicine, but that was just part (and, it turned out, a small part) of the Master Plan. If I hated it, I reasoned, I could go back east in six months. If I liked it, I'd do my fieldwork and then go back east in a year -- two at most -- to write up the dissertation and get on with my life.
I landed in that hot, dry, but friendly city in a rented car with two friends, three cats (Mimi, Ginger, and Georgia), and some of my precious stuff. Agatha and Rosanne left a few days later, and suddenly I was alone (except for the kitties) in a strange place with no car, a map of the bus system, and a TV and a radio/CD player. Being so terribly East Coast and unfamiliar with the Western U.S. concept of "city" (not compact and navigable by public transit but sprawling and very pedestrian unfriendly), I bumbled my way around and wondered what the hell I was doing there. Being 5000 feet above sea level in 95-degree dry heat, I had trouble walking or biking anywhere at first, so I mostly stayed home, talked to friends and family on the phone, ran across the street to the supermarket for food and beer, and sat on my little patio to listen to the strange bugs and talk myself out of running back home.
In July 1993, I headed west, never to return. In July 2003, I look back and think of what other directions my life could have taken. I could have stayed back east, done fieldwork there, written that dissertation (it never materialized more than one-third of the way), gotten a PhD, married another PhD, and had a much more stable, conventional, bounded life than I've had in the ten years since. Or I could have tried to do all that and gone bonkers and taken off a few years later, headed west or elsewhere, and ended up pretty much where I am now, or somewhere else. In a decade, I've lived in New Mexico, California, Colorado, and New Mexico again; had two good jobs, gotten married (not to a PhD -- sorry, Mom and Dad), had a beautiful and amazing baby, bought and sold a house (for a nice profit, thank you), planted many gardens, and packed up and moved more times than I'd have liked to. And I'd do it again, starting with that road trip from Philadelphia to Albuquerque a decade ago -- even if I had to live in southern California again. Because I know (even if others don't) that I'm where I'm supposed to be, geographically and otherwise, and the journey was all good because it got me here.
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