territoriality: a discussion

It's high time I did some more sententious vaunting. This here's one of my rare opinion posts. Let's begin with a definition:

territoriality

ter·ri·to·ri·al·i·ty [ter-i-tawr-ee-al-i-tee, -tohr-]

noun

1. territorial quality, condition, or status.

2. the behavior of an animal in defining and defending its territory.

3. attachment to or protection of a territory or domain.

And let's follow that up with a basic truth: the concept of territoriality applies to human interaction as well. We build fences around our houses, put up NO TRESPASSING signs, and feel more at home in our native towns, counties, states, provinces, and (naturally) territories than anywhere else.

It's that specific aspect of territoriality I want to discuss, actually.

Traveling and living in foreign countries is a growing experience. It's a baptism by fire, a crash course in open-mindedness, cultural exposure, language barriers, communication disasters, culinary misadventures and homesickness. You feel it the moment you step off the plane. Everything's new, and it's scary. People are talking in tongues you can't understand. The signs are unreadable. Often the people themselves look completely alien to you, and it's a lead-pipe cinch that they'll think and act in different ways. This makes travelers apprehensive and twitchy and throws us all off our chumps. Eventually, with successive jaunts and expeditions, we get used to the otherness and can relax and enjoy our trips with relative ease.

But one fear never goes away.

In addition to the surface nervousness that traveling engenders within us, there is also something more primordial: a creeping, furtive sort of nervousness, an ever-present low-key fear. It's not just the unfamiliarity of our surroundings. It's the simple fact that we're off our home range. We're on someone else's turf, so to speak. We're in a foreign land, with different laws, mindsets, philosophies, mores, and etiquette. We're in someone else's backyard, and they know it like the back of their hand, and we don't. We, the interlopers, won't be torn limb from limb if discovered by the natives, as happens to wild animals who stray too far from their territory. But the inchoate threat of such still lingers in the reptilian parts of the human brain, and we feel that fear whenever a foreign shore heaves into sight on the  distant horizon.

Even after living in South Korea for something like three nonconsecutive years, I still get the willies on occasion. If I could speak the language better, I wouldn't have 'em so often. But even if I was a whiz at Hangul, that primordial fear would still be there. I'm in Asia, where the rules of the game are elementally different from what I know. The sun still rises and sets, and the tides go in and out, but those are the only similarities. The Koreans have their own ideas about commerce, social relations, gratitude, etiquette, politeness, interpersonal nuance, humor, entertainment, morality, fine dining, hard work and whatnot. Furthermore, the Korean civilization is thousands of years old, far outstripping my own country's paltry history. The enormity of those ages weighs upon my shoulders like a millstone at times.

I feel the opposite effect whenever I return home to the States. I exhale literally and metaphorically. Everything makes sense again, imperfect as it may be. The signs are legible. People's slang terms are comforting. That sense of oneness with my surroundings comes flooding back to me. I feel ready to turn and do battle with whatever extraterritorial threats hounded me home. Your turn, you bastards. You're on my block now.

And you know what? I think that's a good thing.

Culture shock, homesickness, and otherness are shoots which spring from the same seed: territoriality. The feelings of attachment or protectiveness we harbor for the land of our birth. It exerts a powerful, formative influence upon us, and rightly so. The stark reality of it is impossible to deny, deeply biological as it is. Americans have their territory, Koreans have theirs. I'm intruding, plain and simple. Never mind that the immigration office stamps my passport and lets me live and work here for a year at a time. I'm an alien freak. I have the children's stares to prove it.

Of course, there are other, darker shoots of that same territorial seed. Things like bigotry, prejudice, and racism are also tendrils of territoriality. But there are positive effects as well: patriotism and nationalism, for example.

Many will disagree with me on this. Some of you may be shaking your heads right now. In your minds, the argument is coalescing: "Some of the most horrendous atrocities have been committed in the names of patriotism and nationalism!"

They have, no doubt. But I still say that devotion to, fondness for and belief in one's country and culture are healthy things for an upstanding, free-minded individual to have. I think that notion of otherness isn't a stumbling block, but rather a step stool. It's a platform with a telescope, a hill to climb, steep and rocky perhaps but a great place to pause and peruse the sunlit uplands beyond.

I believe (especially as an American) that we're sort of shamed into forsaking our nationalities when we're out on the road. We're encouraged to forget who we are and where we came from, and be totally open-minded as we view other countries, cultures and customs. Viewing anything through the lens of the culture we were born into is frowned upon. Bigotry, it's called. Prejudice. Willful ignorance.

I disagree.

I think you have to judge the entire world from the perspective of your own tiny slice of it, because you'd have to be a robot to do otherwise. Only a mindless automaton is capable of ignoring its own heritage and upbringing and judge something with perfect objectivity. As G.K. Chesterton warned, "Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out." Stay judgmental. Be biased. Cultivate prejudice. You need a basis, a foundation upon which to judge what you see, and your background is well-suited to it. As long as you're a righteous human being (and I already know that you are), then you won't fall into the bottomless pits of prejudice or racism or ethnocentrism. You'll be fine. Rock on. You need that cultural context of yours to form sound opinions of what you see and hear abroad.

D'you see what I'm saying, here?

I'm starting to think I'm the last person on the planet who feels that way. The paradigm is shifting. The world shrinks, technology advances, airplanes and boats and cars and trains move faster and with less energy, and the information superhighway reaches ever deeper into our lives. As the lines between cultures and continents begin to blur, the zeitgeist has changed. In talks with many of my more liberal friends, they have expressed nothing but disdain for the concepts of patriotism and nationalism. They shake their heads and say things like, "Murrica! F*** yeah!" in satirical tones. Some of the more extreme among them have expressed outright approval for a sort of "world culture," in which national boundaries are swept aside, the myriad cultures of the globes are integrated and amalgamated, and a sort of homogeneous global culture ensues, freeing humanity forever from the damnable vices of bigotry and racism.

Phooey to that, I say.

I don't know about you, but the whole notion of a "world culture," gives me the heebie-jeebies. You should take pride in your homeland. You should have some prejudice in its favor. You should be leery of the way other people do things. You should believe your country's the best in the world simply because you were born in it, as George Bernard Shaw once so scathingly wrote.

"Why?" I hear you ask. "Aren't you being an arrogant, ethnocentric pig? Won't people hate you for thinking that way? Aren't you being close-minded? Shouldn't you travel with an open mind?"

To which my answers are: No, yes, no, and yes.

Being territorial—feeling uncomfortable in another country and safe and secure in your own, cleaving to an intrinsic, instinctive, subconscious kind of nationalism—isn't arrogance. It's only natural to believe that your country's the best. You did grow up in it, after all. But it's not just natural—it's evolutionary. This is your territory. It's your home, and it's a part of you, from the tip of your hairs to the marrow of your bones. You were fed on it, suckled by it,  knocked about by it in your youth. You've breathed it, swam in it, tasted it and slept in it your whole life. It knows you and you know it, and you have each other's backs. You should love it to death. Stepping out of your territory is frightening, strange and potentially life-threatening. That makes the challenge—and rewards—all the greater.

People will hate you for feeling that way. They'll call you a racist pig, a jingoistic idiot, an ignorant, short-sighted, narrow-minded fool. Don't listen to 'em. You know in your heart that you're not a racist. You know people are people, no matter where they're from. You know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and you don't attribute either of those things to a human individual just 'cause they're from a particular place. And as long as you know it, no one can touch you or make you feel like you're a bad person.

You're not being close-minded. You're open to new experiences. In fact, that is the whole point of traveling: to get out of your comfort zone. To leave your territory, those familiar shores and welcoming skyline, and venture into the unknown. There's the rub. Be territorial. Love your homeland, be wary or even leery of other people's, but don't let that stop you from going. Go there and find out how it really is. Then you can decide whether or not your preconceptions were accurate. What you're doing, if you're doing it right, is giving other people's cultures and societies the respect they deserve without fawning over them, worshiping them, or paying them lip service for political correctness's sake. By the Great Green Arkleseizure, folks, you're allowed to have an opinion. Just make sure it's founded on your own experience and a thorough knowledge of circumstance, not sweeping generalizations or assumptions. Just look at Paul Theroux. That's precisely how he writes his travel books. He's judgmental as hell. He'll lampoon anybody, be they an individual or a government, foreign or American. The point is to go and see, and then judge harshly...based on what you know is right.

That, my dears, is how you travel with an open mind. You have a context to work with: your culture. Hold that culture close to yourself, cherish it, be proud of it, but keep your heart and mind open. Let the ambient weirdness trickle in. You'll learn some startling things. Some of them will be as stupid or wrong or yucky as you always suspected. Many of them, however, won't be as bad as you thought—and more than a few will be the exact opposite. You'll see sights you never dreamed existed, taste the milk of human kindness, add more capital to the bank of experience than you ever thought possible. But don't forget where you started. Don't lord it over anybody, don't put anyone else down, but for Pete's sake, don't be afraid to flaunt it. You are who you are. Be proud. Don't skulk about. Tell people. Everyone's just as curious about you as you are about them, or ought to be. They're all nationalists at heart, too. They may dislike you just because of the color of your passport. But you can forgive them for that, 'cause deep down you're judging the hell out of their clothes, their dirty fingernails and their country's cockeyed ways, and you can laugh inside at the crazy two-way nature of the universe. 

But how would this priceless sensation, this ability to learn about others, to understand how things are done on the far side of the world, down in the dust or up in the snow, on top of the mountains and in the deepest valleys and over the silvery lakes—how would it be possible if we had one world culture? Where would your identity come from? What would you take pride in? How would you build that base, that context, from which to travel and peer into other people's lives? How could you judge their shortcomings—and their wonders? What use would travel be if everyone else thought and slept and breathed and loved the same way that you do? 

It wouldn't, and that's the truth. It wouldn't be any use at all.  

I don't want a world that's all the same. I don't want a world where I never feel ill at ease or out of place. I want a world full of mystery and weirdness and otherness to explore. And I want a patch of dirt that I can come back to and feel at home in, unconditionally—but with a host of foreign friends and experiences rattling around in my head, heart and soul. I think it's grand that we're all different from each other, and that we have a little fear and perhaps aversion to one another (and our respective nations). Just because we travel and learn about the world doesn't mean we should lose faith in who we are and where we came from, or our belief in our own greatness. I think that sort of national pride fosters healthy competition, self-confidence, cultural self-esteem, and most importantly, our curiosity about each other. It makes the sun brighter, the water clearer, the air fresher and our friendships warmer. 

But maybe that's just me.

Patriotic enough for ya?

adjusting for refraction, part II

This is what I'd secretly hoped would happen all along, you know?

I'd be flying out of a quiet, run-down, pleasant sort of backwater airport filled with interesting people: savants, a few young guns like myself, wise old sages, colorful internationals, jokesters, ace pilots, acrobats, war veterans, lots of beat-up airplanes, and maybe a lethargic dog or cat.

And that's exactly what I'm doing.

Let me tell you a bit about M_____ Aviation, where my bosses rent their spare Mooney (known as 95W, or Nine-Five Whiskey). The building is a hangar, to which a couple of carpeted, fluorescently-lit rooms have been tacked on. It's just west of 18, right on the taxiway, and in the exact center of the runway; what's known as "midfield" in aviation lingo. There are about thirty or so airplanes of every description parked nearby, tied down against the omnipresent desert breeze.

Inside the hangar, three small aircraft sit in various states of dissection. The radio is always on, and the booming voices of talk show hosts carom off the metal walls and rebound through the empty space. Workbenches, carts, trolleys, and shelves, all packed with oilcans and all kinds of tools, are scattered throughout. The extra rooms comprise the office, bathrooms, and classroom of M_____ Aviation. The classroom is about the size of a dining room, and has a couple of long tables and a mismatched selection of rickety chairs. There's a whiteboard, which almost always has some basic principle of aviation demonstrated upon it in fading marker: the different kinds of airspace, accepted methods for stall recovery. The walls of the classroom are plastered with old white T-shirts and assorted bits of cloth; upon these, also in marker, have been scrawled the names of students, the dates of their first solo flights, and some encouraging remarks like "It was a piece of cake!" or "Three Perfect Landings!" Some artistic souls have also drawn pictures of their airplane coming in on Runway 18.

Light shines feebly in through the opaque glass of the windows. There's a microwave in one corner of the classroom, with an ancient Cup o' Noodles sitting on it. The tables are covered with piles of aviation magazines, textbooks, and instructional pamphlets. The computer in the opposite corner sits and whirs idly.

The main office is a long room, about thirty feet. It smells heavily of secondhand smoke. The southernmost end has a couple of soft, sagging couches, more aviation magazines, toys, mugs, headsets, and all manner of bumper stickers and license plate holders, all for sale. Aviation comics from the 1930s and photographs of F-86s and B-25s are tacked up on the stained, yellowing walls. The coffee machine next to the bathroom door is well-supplied with creamer, sugar, and Styrofoam cups—even little brown straws. On the north side of the room, toward the classroom, is the reception desk. It is impossible to discern what kind of wood it's made of, or even if it's made of wood at all. There is such an amazing pile of textbooks, documents, newspapers, paperweights, cigarette lighters and coffee cups on it that its surface is utterly obscured. The desk faces the two big glass doors and the two floor-length plate-glass windows on either side of them; but for the eucalyptus tree out in front of the office, there'd be a rather good view of Runway 18. (There are also some shrubs and a metal barbecue, filled with cigarette butts, outside.)

Just inside the glass door is another sagging couch...absurdly comfortable, conforming immediately to one's backside. To the right of the desk, as you walk in, is the classroom; to the left, there's a long, low glass counter, filled with textbooks and merchandise (and further down, bumper stickers). Payments are transacted here. Up against the east wall, where the doors are, there's a sort of shelving unit which separates the north and south sides of the room. On this shelf are tiny flight jackets (for those toddlers aspiring to be aviators) and other aviation apparel. There is also a large, smooth, two-bladed wooden propeller leaning up against this shelf, all of a piece. Pete says the propeller was carved out of a single block of wood by a local woman with a chainsaw. I don't know if that's true, but Pete has no cause to lie about it.

Ah-ha!

Now that I've finished populating this flight school with inanimate objects, I must relate to you something of its organic denizens. Enter Anna, the Dutch matron who runs the place, and Pete, the soft-spoken genius mechanic. Anna is short, thickset, and brown-haired, with twinkling brown eyes that shine out of a weather-beaten face. She smokes unashamedly and plays solitaire on the computer at light-speed. I took a liking to her almost immediately. She always has some incisive observation to make, and she knows aviation through and through. I'll bet she's forgotten more about flying than I'll ever learn.

Anna has aviation in her blood. She learned to fly in her native Holland, oh-so-many years ago, as she says. She flew in Holland, in Belgium, in Germany, and then finally came over here and started up this flight school in 1978. She's a fun person, always giving you a big hello. She pronounces her R's like W's, and her Th's like D's, but dat's all wight with me. Anna always arrives first, about ten minutes before seven, unlocking and opening the gate and starting the coffee. She makes good coffee. That's quite something, coming from me. I don't even like coffee. But hers is quite palatable.
"In Holland," she told me when I complimented her, "dey make it twice as stwong."
Oh goodie. Now I have another entry for my already monumental list of places to visit and things to do.

And then there's Pete. Pete rolls up about five minutes after Anna, in a gray Toyota stained black with tar. It looks as though a tarry monster slimed and oozed its way out of his truck bed, down the side panel and onto the ground. Anna told us it was from the work they'd done earlier re-tarring the ramp area. They'd done it themselves. It's not surprising. Pete is handy guy. He's the resident aviation mechanic, and rather proficient by all appearances.

What appearances, you ask? Well, I'll tell you.

Maybe I'm a sentimentalist, or set too much store by appearances. But regardless, there are certain visual criteria I use to determine if somebody is a quote-unquote "good" mechanic. The first thing I really noticed about Pete was his hands. For a man as short and skinny as he is, his hands are disproportionate. The fingers are large, thick, and stubby, covered with nicks and coated with the grayish vestiges of yesterday's engine oil. It's under his nails, down his cuticles, embedded in the creases of his knuckles. That spells "good mechanic" to me. I figure his fingers didn't start out thick and stubby like that. They got that way from years of poking around inside aircraft engines, nicking them on sharp metal corners, scraping them on unforgiving cylinder heads and cowlings, fumbling with nuts and rivets, tweaking, tuning and tinkering, often in freezing temperatures or other harsh conditions. The oil tells me he's not afraid to get his hands dirty, nor leave them that way for a while. Pete's all fix and no fuss, in other words. I admire men like that. I don't mind getting coated with engine oil or working on anything mechanical, but I have a set of beater clothes for that. Pete just dives right in.

The rest of him bears out that impression. The only part of Pete that ever changes is the color of his button-down shirt. The rest of him stays the same. Bespectacled, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and sideburns, flyaway brown hair poking out from beneath his cap, Pete just looks like a stereotypical aviation mechanic. He smokes as much as Anna, if not more. He's soft-spoken, and quietly whistles his consonants. He never opens his mouth wide when he's talking; and his mustache acts like a shield for his teeth and gums. But eventually I was able to determine that Pete is missing one of his front teeth. Whenever he's investigating an engine, peering under the cowling with a flashlight in his hand, Pete whistles breezily through this gap in his dentition. The knees of his jeans are eternally oil-stained. His feet fit snugly into comfortably beaten tennis shoes. He wears a plain black jacket with a pocket on the sleeve, and reaches unhesitatingly into whatever aperture or opening on an engine he can find.

That's his first and most trusted diagnostic: reach in and feel around for the trouble. As we attempted to remedy the inoperative governor yesterday, I saw Pete employ this method to great effect. He reached in and fumbled around a while, whistling airily, his arm embedded in the engine up to the shoulder. Then he pulled his hand back out. An incriminating drop of oil slid down his index finger like blood. Pete's got some funny stories to tell, too. And it's a delight to hear somebody tell him their mechanical problems. You can just see the wheels turning in Pete's head. He'll muse for a bit, and then ask a few salient questions: "What was the oil pressure doing?" or "Was it sustained at 2200 RPM?" Then he'll grab his screwdriver and head out to the hangar to do battle with the Gods of Disrepair.

Like I said, he seems to be a good mechanic.

Pete doesn't commute to the airport alone. He carpools. Zeke always comes with him. Zeke has four legs, a wet snout, amber eyes, and fur as soft and abundant as a chinchilla. He's a German shepherd cross, and Pete's constant companion. After relieving himself outside on the taxiway somewhere, Zeke comes inside and lays down in the middle of the floor, right in front of the reception desk. He barked at Mr. Mooney and me a few times, but got used to us eventually. Indeed, once he figured out I was good for free pets, I became his new best friend. Airplanes don't faze him; firing engines don't bother him in the slightest. He's a shockproof, biscuit-mad, pet-crazy old airport dog, that's all.

Scan is the name I give to M_____ Aviation's last noteworthy resident. Mr. Mooney and I were rolling 95 Whiskey back into place when I spotted a cat sitting on the asphalt just ten feet away. He was dark gray, with a black back and stripes. Pete noticed my surprise.

"Want a Cat Scan?" he asked.

"I'm sorry?" I answered shakily, not sure I'd heard him right.

"He gives Cat Scans," Pete answered, nodding at the cat, an undercut smile on his face. "He'll climb inside your engine and tell you what's wrong with it."

I, in my usual blockhead mode, still didn't understand.

"He charges 75 bucks, though," Pete went on, still smiling. "And he doesn't diagnose much apart from mice."

Finally, I caught on.

"Yeah," I grinned back. " 'Everything's good in there, man, but you've got some birds in the air intakes!' "

Both of us chuckled.

Scan doesn't really have a name so far as I'm aware. If he does, I've never heard anyone call him by it. Scan seems to suit perfectly well.

And now, before I let you go, I will tell you about refraction. As we discussed yesterday, refraction is chiefly the change in direction of a ray of light, sound, or heat, in passing obliquely from one medium to another.

I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a ray of light, but I have passed obliquely from one medium to another: unemployment to employment, stagnation to participation, earth to air. And I think I feel a change in the wind. This new job is not the paltry part-time noncommittal thing I imagined it would be. It's the real deal. There's some potential for advancement within this company. They're expanding, growing, pushing out, taking on new contracts. I'm getting some flight time in the right seat and also furthering my writing career in my off-hours. The pay is good, and there's the possibility that it may increase.

But more importantly, I'm enjoying the work. I stand to both (a) save up a lot of money, and (b) "grow as an aviator," as Mr. Mooney put it. Long story short...this might turn out to be a lengthier gig than I imagined. I think I might stick around for a year or three and see how things turn out. Who knows what'll happen? I might make great strides in obtaining my commercial pilot's license, at the very least. At most...well, I'm not given to wild speculation.

Tentatively, it's safe to say that I have been refracted. My direction has changed. I have passed from one medium to another, and ricocheted off in a new and exciting direction. I'm content to settle in for a spell and see where it takes me. If I don't to Australia or Japan this year or the next...so be it. They're not going anywhere.

But I am.