West by Northwest

Noon above Washington state.

High over the coast between the Cascades and the Pacific, skimming above a thick cream of clouds, I'm traveling from the home of Microsoft, Starbucks and Puget Sound to the home of Silicon Valley, Peet's, and San Francisco Bay.

Up north they have a penchant for something called Fish Throwing, a truly bizarre tourist attraction. Down where I live we have Cable Cars, a way of getting around that has long passed its prime.

This trip was not simply a jaunt up the coast but a journey back in time -- 28 years to be precise. It was back to a different me, at a relatively tender age, still inexperienced in many ways.

It was not long after the beginning of an era when I circled the globe, year after year, visiting Malaysia (twice), Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan (twice), Australia, Tahiti, Mexico (several times), Costa Rica, Honduras, Bermuda, England (twice), France, The Netherlands (twice), Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, Canada (several times), Russia (newly accessible to Americans), and places I've forgotten.

Gradually, my orientation as an American was transformed more into that of a citizen of the world. This was not a sudden shift but a continuation of a process that began during my years a decade or more earlier in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, and environs (Pakistan, India, Iran, and Lebanon).

It simply became impossible to think exclusively as an American after getting to know so many others from different cultures with different traditions, ideas and orientations. The world was an exceedingly complex place, filled with nuances of culture and habit that would never be able to be translated into the arbitrary segments of partial reality captured from any one national or linguistic perspective.

Languages did not translate, not perfectly, much was lost in the process or never even mutually comprehended. I worked with translators all over the world, attended meetings and gave speeches and gathered information for articles and books. In the process, I impressed myself not with how much I was learning, but at how much I never would be able to learn.

The world was too vast for someone like me -- able to visit its far corners only on an occasional, temporary basis -- to ever hope to grasp anything more than its bare outlines.

Nevertheless, I tried to learn what I could, usually by reading the literature and history of places after I had visited them (seldom before), as I seemed to have to had to physically enter a place before my latent curiosity about it could be fully triggered.

Of all of these places, the ones that most captured my imagination were Japan, Afghanistan (of course -- the only foreign country I ever actually lived in), India, England, and the one giant country I've still never stepped foot in (unless you count Hong Kong) and that's China.

Of the literature and history of these particular places I simply never get enough, and it continues to be the case to this day.

All of this came to mind as through the magic of place, friendship and opportunism, I traveled back in time, back to 1983. Without going into details that are best left for another venue, probably a novel, I re-experienced some very important firsts. Yet it all felt as natural as sliding from day to day in my normal routine.

Nothing odd or awkward about having discovered time travel. Not at all. Time, in fact, had left much undisturbed, even as so much else has been transformed radically by the ravages of love, career and happenstance during all of those years in-between.

I suppose this is magic. I guess it is proof that magic exists. I often speculate about magic in my writing, about jinns, tiny creatures, spirits, but I less often experience it first-hand.

The soft rains that clothed Seattle last night gave way to a brilliant sunshine today. Every wave in the Sound outside the hotel window was sunlit as the enormous and lovely body of water danced around in its morning breeze.

Outside the mighty Cascade Mountains rose to the clouds, backlit from the morning sun. The driver of my cab had NPR on the radio. A guest explained how Canada views its role in hosting the Olympics just a year ago now. How the country and its people feel pretty good about it all, except for the colossal housing project disaster that characterizes the former Olympic Village in Vancouver.

The airport features free Wi-Fi. My flight left on time. I like Virgin, the soft purple light. My regular schedule looms; obligations remain, deadlines approach, the every day rhythms of life will resume. But for 24 hours, I went back in time, revisited an earlier me in a more innocent time, a more hopeful time, a time before all that has aged and depleted me had yet gathered as dark clouds on what was then my still-bright future.

All that I still must deal with; the challenges of today, tomorrow, next year and the years ahead bear down on me relentlessly. There is no time for relaxing; this is no country for an old man.

But now I know about time travel, maybe the way will be eased ever so slightly. Plus there's one other cliche that can be now put to rest -- you can never go back and relive the past.

Turns out that's simply not exactly true. The people who spout these platitudes may not want you to know this; indeed, they may not know it themselves, but you can go back.

That's what I learned, and I'm a better man for it.

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