Haunting the Customs Line

"Ow, Mom, that hurts!" Noah says to me, after his first swipe with third-world toilet paper.

We're on our first international family vacation. Isla Mujeres, Mexico. He's five years old. Okay, we'd all been out of the country before that but sorry, Canada, you don't count.

My first steps off the airplane, into the tube walkway, and then Wham! It smells of my childhood. It smells like home. That wet musty air hiding underneath the scent of machine-cooled air. An overworked A/C system. Leaky windows. Who knows what it is. I had to spend a minute sniffing it to figure it out. The smell of humidity. The smell of imperfection. The smell of a third-world HVAC system.

American air conditioning smells, well, perfect seems like an odd way to describe it. Clinically clean is more like it. You can't smell wetness, age, and a certain thickness. American HVAC air has no personality, no oomph. Here I was, sniffing stinky canned air and feeling quite happy about it. It meant I was overseas again.

The last time I was overseas in 2005 -- five months in India with my husband -- feels like -- decades ago, xx,xxx leagues under the sea away from who I am now. I am a mama. I now exist in an entirely new dimension, one that I never even knew existed. And I am now traveling overseas for the first time as a mother. Two kids in tow.

I stand in line, holding four dark blue passports now. Not my usual, solitary, One. The customs line winds around the poles. Katherine thrashes at my feet and makes a break into the crowd, too many hours on a plane for a one year old. Noah wants to be held, tired, heavy for a five year old. The whining, begging, chasing, thrashing sets in.

I am desperate for calm. To be left alone, really. I dig out the kingsize Blow Pop from my purse, it's been in emergency stash for a few months now. Sticky pink saliva immediately stains the front of Katherine's shirt. And she refuses to remove the sugarbomb from her mouth now that she's had a taste. She shrieks when I try to pull it away. Okay, I'm only slightly mortified. Because it works.

The sticky Blow Pop affords a few minutes of calm in the line (once I stop trying to rip it from Sticky      Paws' hands). I look around. I find myself looking into faces, wondering. I am looking for myself. that girl I knew. The one who stood in customs lines at the foot of her mommy and daddy, two, three, four times a year. That girl who never thought twice about standing in customs lines. It's just the way it was -- to get home, to leave home, to go most anywhere.

I want to find her in someone else's face. I want to recognize myself. Remember myself. This girl feels far far away from me. I want to find her, so that I can be sure she actually was a part of me. Is a part of me. More and more, I hardly believe I was her.

We're next. Hand over the four passports. It's my name on the customs form as Head of Family now. Hola. Small smile, make eye contact. Small nod. These are the people giving me passage to another country. They are the final gateway and I always take this moment seriously, and with a slight smile.

Passports flip open to the picture. A glance up from photo to actual face. Check. Boom! Stamp, stamp. The mechanical bang of stamps echoes down the line of customs desks, those square hard boxes each with filled with boxed unsmiling men. Travellers flow in one by one. Leaving home. Coming home.

I look at my Mexico entrance stamp, first one in my new passport. I've had a passport since I was six days old. And I wonder -- when will I come home? After forty years, here I am, still looking for myself in a customs line.

My Old Friend, U.S. Highway 2

You know those rare moments when you realize what a good friend you've had standing quietly beside you through the years? Today, I drove a two-lane highway for the umpth time -- through the corridor of trees, alongside the emerald Skykomish River, next to metal train cars chugging alongside, up up up to Stevens Pass. And I realized: Highway 2 and I have a long sweet history.

Today, a clear winter road took us up to Stevens Pass for Noah's Sunday ski lesson. A rare treat to spend two hours in the car, just my little buddy and me. Sure, he was tired. Sure, I was tired. 6:30 am, an early morning up and out of the house. A long drive ahead. I ignore an impulse to offer him an iPhone or Leapster game. I drive in the quiet and occasionally adjust my rear view mirror to study his face. Much of the ride, his eyes are relaxed -- lids heavy but open, his relaxed face turned to the window.

How many times have I whizzed along this road, watched the same scenery he was taking in? Today, we pass by gray-brown trees, haloed by the gray-white light of midwinter, covered in a thick moss like fur. Limbs stretch across the road like arms in slow motion. Together, my son and I fly through this tunnel of time.

Highway 2 was a frequent road to adventures in my early twenties. My then-boyfriend Brad and I would pack up for the day, sometimes without a plan, for a hike or to explore a town or to picnic or all the above. Sultan. Startup. Skykomish. Goldbar. I loved the sounds of these towns, the way you could still feel their roots out of nothingness, settlements borne out of some bold people making their way through these mountains as miners or loggers or prospectors.

The great Northwest lay at my feet, too. Both Brad and I were new to the area and hungry for its thick trees, its rivers, its mountains. That we could pass a car loaded with skis, then a car strapped down with a kayak, and another topped by a mountain bike, and us with our leather hiking boots itching for a trail... it felt exhilarating as hell to live here. It felt new and limitless.

It wasn't just a new city for me, or a new state. Living in this corner of the U.S. - it was an entirely new country for me. And man alive was it amazing. To be on my own, at the start of my adult life, discovering the beauty of great outdoors. Discovering who I was, in the context of America. Sure, I'd visited the Northwest - but under the wings of my parents, always as a child. Now I was in charge of the discoveries, and it was exhilarating. Highway 2. Curves of road lined with soft bristle of evergreen tree - and then around one corner, POW! A fist of snow-covered granite, Mount Index, hits you in the face.

Twenty years later, Highway 2 is an old friend, one that I'm still hanging out with, still new having adventures. Today, I'm with my six-year-old son. And every time I round that curve, the one that flings your car by that stretch of river that sits still and deep turquoise, your car so close you can almost imagine you are a bird swooping over the smooth boulders holding the pool wide, so close you have to inhale sharply every time, smile softly as you turn your head out the window to take in as much of the turquoise as you can, and you have to say to whoever is in the car with you this time, "Look at that! Oh man, is that beautiful. Look at that color." Every time. To my then-boyfriend or my husband or my good friend or my son or my mother -- whoever is on the adventure today. And if I'm by myself, just me and the road, you can bet I think the exact same thought.

Here's to old friends, you and me, Highway 2.