Landing In The Direct Opposite

Pilot and author Mark Vanhoenacker talks about “place lag,” that dazed feeling of leaving a place  in the morning – its season, its architecture, its people, and touching down halfway around the world in the evening in a new place with different light, smells, language, perhaps even a different alphabet. Place lag seems a good way to describe the way our brains and senses trot along, trying to catch up with the technology that can transport us into an other culture within hours -- the time it used to take us to travel to another town a state or two away.

I felt that place lag when I pushed the trolley stacked with my suitcases out of  the Auckland airport terminal almost a month ago, walking straight into a New Zealand summer morning still dressed in my Portland winter clothes. It was an effort to remember to head to the left side of my friend’s car to strap myself  into the dislocated passenger side.  Later, after a long day of talking and catching up, I realized that itself was another difference: a long day. I’d flown out of the cave of long winter nights and landed in the expanse of early sunrise and late sunsets.

So yes, some mild place lag. Not much jet lag, since there is only a 3 hour difference in the time of day between here and Portland. I refuse to think about that matter of having lost New Year’s Day somewhere over the Pacific because of the International Date Line, since I choose to believe I’ll make up for what must be a bookkeeping error  when I return in February. After all, my ticket insists, somewhat improbably, that I will arrive in the US before I leave NZ.

But what I found when I landed in Tasmania a few weeks ago was not place lag or jet lag, but a delicious sort of  time lag. I landed in Hobart and quickly discovered why Chris, the wonderful class organizer who arranged my workshop, told me there would be no trouble finding each other when I disembarked:  the entire airport is smaller than PDX’s central merchant area, and still allows friends and family to accompany you to your gate to hug you good-bye.

The softer side of modern airports

We drove into a city where building cranes were stacking up new high rises behind rows of convict-built buildings from the 1800’s and back to a pace of life I had found in New Zealand a quarter century ago. Merchants assured me the amount of money I had in my hand was “close enough” even though it was 20 or 50 cents short (honestly, I’m not that bad at math --I’m just a slow learner when it comes to figuring out currency in a new place). And maybe it was because Tasmania was still celebrating school holidays, but I never encountered a rush hour in Hobart. Traffic was equally thin elsewhere – as Bill and I drove around the state I think we saw more dead wallabies and opossums along the road than we did cars.

Bill pacing off Nine Mile Beach

We decided to take it slowly, so we only saw a small sliver of Tasmania, and some of the landscape we saw was brown from drought or smoky from lightning-strike fires. But some of what we saw was magical: empty white sand beaches and rock formations eons in the making, granite and sandstone and iron-flecked pillars that looked like sculptural installations. 

Natural formation/art installation

We drove through towns and visited a few museums which illuminated a culture built by its colonial hegemony, convict history, isolation, and other-ness. Every small town we stopped at still had bridges or city halls built by convict labor, a fact that used to make Tasmanians cringe but has now become a point of pride. There is MONA, a private art museum started by a man who made his money out of a mastery of probability (aka a gambler) and decided to build a museum of “old and new art” tunneled into the earth of his middle class suburb and filled with art work reflecting his twin obsessions of sex and death. A relatively new gallery in the publicly-owned Tasmanian Museum provides a small place for aborigines to present their side of colonial occupation in their own unequivocal words, calling it an “invasion…an attempted genocide.”

The funhouse-mirrored entrance to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)

In another gallery in the Tasmanian Museum I read this placard explaining what the convicts who arrived in Tasmania found when they arrived 200 years ago: “The swans were black, not white. The trees shed their bark but kept their leaves. The seasons were reversed. European settlers in Van Dieman’s land viewed the new world they encountered with amazement and wonder. They called it ‘The Antipodes’ – the name means ‘direct opposite.” I imagined the bedraggled transports tripping off their ships after the harrowing forced voyage from Great Britain, shielding their eyes from the insistent sun, blinking at these strange animals that hop and carry their babies in a pouch, trying to take in this world they couldn’t have imagined and had never asked to see. Maybe, I thought when I read this,  place lag isn’t such a new phenomenon.

Convict-built buildings on a Hobart wharf