To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret by Jedidiah Jenkins: Select Quotes

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don’t know what’s under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child—why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns the patterns of living. Every second has value. But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what’s next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand.

But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I’m in a new place, I don’t know what’s next, even if I’ve read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can’t know a smell until I’ve smelled it. I can’t know the feeling of a New York street until I’ve walked it. I can’t feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can’t understand the humility of walking beneath those giant buildings. I can’t smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

This kind of attention is natural to a child. To an adult, it must be chosen. The trick is: knowing when we are in fact adults, and when attention is asleep. (Kindle Locations 85, 97)

Riding a bicycle gives the land a realistic scale. You notice every seam and crease. The distances between towns and farms and the height of hills, and the way a road will follow a river or instead cut straight over a hill—you experience it all viscerally. You feel it all fitting together. (Kindle Location 563)

It hurts to write by hand if I do it for too long, which pushes me to keep my language tight and right. The permanence of pen on paper means something. You say it, and it’s there, and if you change your mind, the scribbled-out out words are still there—no pretending you’re perfect. (Kindle Location 925).

People love to blame a place for their own failures. Los Angeles is the king of this. So many people move here to chase a dream, or to escape the cold, or to escape their family. The city is supposed to be the answer to their discontent, to whatever it was that rejected them at home, and in their mind, simply having the bravery to get out west deserves fanfare. But once here, they find that no one cares about them as much as they do. If vanity drove them to this city, they discover that vanity doesn’t like peers. It likes followers. In a city that feeds off the bigfish-small-pond kids, they discover a big pond swarming with over-the-top talent and perfect bone structure. (Kindle Locations 973-974).

We’d become the type of comrades who can spend the day in silence, existing together, thinking independently, then spring into conversation out of seeming nowhere. (Kindle Location 1119).

As we walked home, he told us about his family. “My son Alejandro is very smart. He is the top at his school. He will work in the U.S. No question. He is studying English and, you saw, it’s pretty good. He will get better. I am proud of him. My daughter, Litian, she is smart, but I don’t know. She is light skinned, that is very good, not like her mother. Alejandro has the dark skin like his mother, but he is smart, so he will be okay. My wife, her skin is too dark. Here, it is a bad thing to be so dark skinned. People don’t like her in this town because of it. It is racist here. She has indigenous in her. She is a beautiful woman, but she is very dark. I’m glad Litian is light skinned. It will help her if she is not as smart as Alejandro.’ (Kindle Location 1248).

Miguel got me thinking about how strange it is to be born in a country whose influence has spread around the world like an infestation. The world’s hunger to speak English is emblematic of this. Some cultures welcome our films, television, and music, or feel drawn by the prospect of money and power. Others resist. Either way, my culture is the most dominant on the planet, and I benefit from that. Sitting there watching Alejandro studying my markup like it was holy scripture made me wonder, what moral weight does being the beneficiary of my dominant culture place on my shoulders? (Kindle Location 1268).

Morelia felt every bit as cosmopolitan and savvy as an artists’ town in Germany or Park City, Utah. We couldn’t believe the contrast here to the feeling of lawlessness on the coast. The streets of Morelia were stone, the buildings European. I stood, frozen in front of the two giant cathedral bell towers as the orchestra played. Women in big Victorian dresses, fully in costume, waltzed around in front of the violinists. Thousands of people milled about and were mostly quiet to respect the musicians. (Kindle Location 1879).

The great monarch butterfly migration was under way just as we approached the town of Zitácuaro. A local told us that we were near the forest where they arrive every fall, by the millions and millions. We ditched our bikes at a cheap motel and took a bus to the forest. The mountains here were covered in evergreen trees. The air was chilly and garnished in mist. We booked a horseback ride into the forest. Our guide took us over a ridge and down into a gully where we saw that the trees looked strange, as if they were dipped in chocolate and dripping.

“Can you tell us about why they’re here?” Weston asked. “Sure,” he said with a proud smile. I remember his English being excellent. He’d done this tour many times before. “Monarch butterflies born in the fall are different than all the other monarchs. They are a super generation. They can live up to eight months as they travel from Canada all the way down to our forest. Then, after waiting out winter here, they’ll head up to warmer places like Louisiana and breed. Their children will live for only six weeks. It can take five generations of their children, who live so much shorter lives, to get back to Canada. Then those born at the beginning of fall, they become the super ones again. Then those ones begin the great journey. They can fly from Michigan all the way here, to Zitácuaro.” (Kindle Locations 1897).

As he talked, I realized Diego was the type of person I would be friends with. (I was tempted to write “in real life” to finish that sentence, as if this moment weren’t real life.) Whenever I meet someone, even in the most passing way, my brain subconsciously analyzes their speech, their diction, their humor, their demeanor, looking for signals that fit into the preselected categories of “cool” and “like me.” For the most part, my brain automatically discards the vast majority of people as forgettable. But sometimes my recognition software triggers a message. “We found one!” The brain then shoots waves of endorphins and energy and words to nudge me toward investigation. This was one of those moments. (Kindle Location 2057).

I walked beside one old nun for a few blocks. She had dark skin and her face was almost entirely wrinkled, as if her eyes and button nose had been poked into the wrinkles like chocolate chips into dough. I thought of her life, how at some point she had decided to give up sex and romance for the Christian God. She didn’t show a trace of European blood. She looked older than conquest. If so, when the Spanish came, they had destroyed her own people’s gods and their myths, tore down their temples, and built cathedrals to a new god over them. And this woman, centuries later, serves that same destroyer god. She had bound herself to the church that “civilized the savages.” In that god’s name, she quietly serves the poor and prays for the lost.

Of course, I was only walking near her and imagining her story, her life. Still, her small frame, her determined walk and body language, and the commitment she made, inspired me.

Was I strong enough to commit to something the way she had? Believe so deeply? I wondered if she ever doubted, if she ever thought about walking away. (Kindle Locations 2877).

Several people had told us we had to stop in Salento, a coffee-growing village in the mountains famous for its attractive buildings and surroundings. We didn’t really have time to stop, but I got mad at having a schedule and racing to Quito, so we rerouted our course for Salento. After several days of biking, we arrived at the beautiful little town, loved it immediately, and ended up staying there for four days. Green mountains surrounded the town, and a picturesque river wound through the valley below. It is how I would imagine Switzerland if it had been near the equator. The high elevation and the weather—a mix of chilly and warm—made the region perfect for coffee. (Kindle Location 3056).

He recommended a hike in the Cocora Valley. “The scenery is stunning. Waterfalls and cliffs and a café at the end where you can get a beer.” The valley, part of Los Nevados National Natural Park, also features the national tree, the Quindío wax palm. She pointed one out down the road, and Weston and I recognized it. We’d seen a bunch of them on the roads. It looks like a typical palm tree, but taller, as if Dr. Seuss had given it a cartoonish stretch. (Kindle Location 3066).

Eventually, though, I got to the bottom of this bowler hat situation. When British companies were connecting South America through a vast railway system in the early twentieth century, the railmen wore them, and the Quechua-speaking people liked them, especially the women, so they adopted them. It was that simple. (Kindle Location 3225).

My mom appeared in the crowd at baggage claim glowing, seeing me from across the room, shooting her hands in the air with a little jig, and then struggling to get her rollie bag to go in a straight line. She was feeling international. Even as her bag was rebelling, she danced and wiggled her hips and made a duck face, all representative of how cool she was, flying to Ecuador. (Kindle Location 3241).

I later researched the pointed hats and robes and learned that criminals were forced to wear the cones in humiliation as they were marched through town and pummeled with rotten fruit and mud. The Spanish Catholics adopted the pointed hat and cloak as a sign of guilt and humility during Easter week and marched through the cities as penance for their sins. The Ku Klux Klan co-opted the hood, for reasons unclear. Maybe in reference to holiness. Maybe to look like scary ghosts to intimidate blacks. It’s fitting that those hoods were meant for dunces and sinners. (Kindle Location 3269).

I was comforted by her celebration of the Catholic Easter parade. She had definitely told me before that Catholics weren’t saved. She had spoken about them as pagans in the abstract. But here, on the streets of Quito, she was shaken by their devotion. Exposure to them seemed to expand what she found acceptable. It reaffirmed my belief that exposure creates empathy. (Kindle Location 3351).

I remembered the joke “love minus distance plus time equals hate.” I just needed a minute of distance, so I could appreciate Weston for who he was. (Kindle Location 3682).

“I’m confused about it all right now. Have you heard about Ferguson, and all the racial tension and stuff?”

“Oh, yes. That stuff doesn’t surprise me. America is good with race. Argentina used to have black people. Do you see any?”

“No, actually. I haven’t seen almost any. Did they all move to Brazil?”

“No. We killed them all. Black slaves made up almost half our country at one point. But then we only promised them freedom if they’d fight in war. And we sent all the men to the front lines of our war with Spain, and then our war with Paraguay. We killed them all. And then we only allowed Europeans to immigrate here. So, Argentina is worse with race. America will be fine.”

“Whoa. I didn’t know any of that. Do people talk about that?”

“People don’t know. They trust the newspapers, which are all lies. What do you think about Syria and the U.S.?” she said, leaning in like she was asking about secrets.

“What Assad is doing is terrible. It’s so terrible. I don’t know if the U.S. is going to intervene. It makes me really sad.”

“You believe that Assad is bad?”

“Yes, doesn’t everyone?”

“I don’t believe it. I believe it’s the U.S. coming in and lying, the newspapers are lying. The U.S. wants the oil in Syria, to control. I think Assad is maybe a good guy, and the rebels are U.S.-planted terrorists to disrupt. Like what the U.S. did in Nicaragua.”

Whoa. There are so many ways to see the world. I tried to counter. “I don’t know. I’ve got friends in journalism,” I said. “I’ve got friends who work at NPR and cover the Middle East. They’re there. They see what they see and report it. And our news media is pretty antagonistic with our government.”

“Well, that’s what they want you to think.” She leaned back and raised her eyebrows, looking down at her beer. Her body language pulled away as she realized I was another sheep in the system. I tried to bring her back. “What makes you think these things?” I asked.

“It’s just the truth. The U.S. runs the world through coercion, through fake news stories, through control. Everyone knows this that’s outside of the U.S. They keep Americans arguing over guns and black people so they won’t look outside the country and see that the U.S. is an empire.”

“Wow. That may be some level of true. Thank God I made it out, right?” I held my beer up, and she leaned back in to cheers me.

“I mean, I’ve always wanted to visit the U.S.,” she said, somewhat reassuringly. “I want to do a road trip across it. It’s so famous, to do the U.S. road trip. One day I will. I want to see the empire before it falls.”

“It is a beautiful empire,” I said. (Kindle Location 4520).

We arrived at the cottage my mom had rented just outside Puerto Natales by midafternoon. It was attached to a boutique hotel sitting on a broad grassy field that rolled down to the bay, which is connected by a series of channels to the Pacific. The distant mountains were white with snow, but in town, the grass was neon green and lush. Horses waded through it. Puerto Natales swarmed with serious hikers from all over—Europeans, Australians, Israelis, and Americans. They come here to do the circuit hikes around the peaks of Torres del Paine and Cuernos del Paine. The full circuit takes about a week. You camp along the way, stop at ranger cabins to replenish or have a beer, and meet hikers from all over the planet. For two days, we played tourists along with the crowds—shopping, horseback riding, and eating well. Then we drove the final two hours to the park itself. (Kindle Location 4842).

“Mom, that fruit is probably from a factory just like at home.”

“Well, I don’t know. It seems fresher. I have us big water bottles, metal ones, lightweight, so we don’t get that BPA poison in our systems. Oh, and here.” She handed me a crystal. “I got these at a gift shop, they are crystals from the top of the Andes and the lady said they are charged with good energy. I think we should have them in our pockets! For good luck.”

I laughed. “Mom, when I was a kid, you forbade me from having those little troll dolls with the poofy pink hair because you thought it was witchcraft and un-Christian. And here you are giving me a crystal?”

“God made crystals. The Chinese made those troll dolls. Trolls are demonic. Crystals are okay. And so are pennies. (Kindle Location 4871).