One year ago, in mid-June 2021, I boarded my first plane in 20 months. Since then, I’ve been on eight more round-trip flights – easily the most air travel I’ve done in a span of 12 months. All this motion is a new rhythm in my work life, unprecedented in the scope of my career up to this point, and it’s one I’ll continue for several years to come. I don’t say that to boast; while I’m enjoying this new routine, especially my time in Boise in between flights, there’s nothing sexy about flying anymore (if there ever was) and little romance involved with traveling for work. If you haven’t flown in a while, for any reason, you’re not missing much. Delays are inevitable, cancelations commonplace, and good luck getting through to customer service with airlines that, like many companies in the wake of COVID, are struggling to serve their customers – it took Delta three months to respond to my refund request following a 38-hour debacle getting back to Cleveland in April, and in lieu of a refund they resolved to give me a $150 gift card. Then the passengers. If you think post-COVID humanity is twitchy enough on social media, being trapped with your species in a flying tube for several hours isn’t much better: petulant adults in Crocs and pajama pants, travelers with too many carry-on items and not enough spatial awareness, pushy people who won’t wait their turn to get off the plane. The world outside our suburban spaceship feels less tolerant and less tolerable than it was a year ago, and I’m keenly aware of this temperament shift within myself as well. At my worst, I’m as much a part of the problem as the next person in line waiting impatiently for an overpriced airport bagel at an understaffed counter.

The romance may have faded, but I still marvel at flight. The transporting of people to and from, especially in the air across massive countries and colossal oceans, is utterly fascinating. Even when everything goes as planned, it’s amazing that it even works at all, starting with hundreds of tons of metal, plastic and human flesh lifting off the ground like nothing. When it all unravels, as it did in April when it took four flights in four time zones to get me home two days late, it’s a mighty test of patience and resolve. But every trip is not built the same, and just as I was bracing myself for a June repeat of my 38-hour fever dream, I was seated on-time in a row by myself for another long flight to Boise, relieved to be leaning my head against molded plastic and watching the world outside pass by as twilight turned to dusk. The window seat at night is a simple pleasure of plane travel. I’ve always preferred the world after dark, and for contrasting reasons: the rush and thrill of music and bright lights and the possibilities of the night, and on the flip side, the quiet and calm of my corner of the world once it turns away from the sun. I long ago realized I am lunar-powered, and my mind is at its best, at its most ease, once the hot noise of humanity in motion has been tempered and cooled by the night. It’s a cosmic downshift I welcome every day, and flying over the slumbering country, seeing the miniature street lamps and flickering dots of orange campfire glow, I lose myself to a silent, detached peace that often eludes me on the ground below.

These hectic 12 months have felt, at various points, like 12 days or 12 years. There is good and bad baked into that statement, but mostly good. The big secret with that head-spinning return to Boise one year ago was that I was there to dig in with our business partners and begin the real work of purchasing The Record Exchange, my employer since 2009. A few people knew about it, a few others had figured it out for themselves, but at that point, it mostly remained a secret, and we aimed to keep it that way lest we jinxed ourselves before the deal was done. Regardless of the covert circumstances, settling into that trip – having been stationary for so long in our new home in Ohio, and having lived in Boise for nearly 15 years prior to that – took some time, and I never quite got there before it was time to go back to Hudson. But over time, this perpetual reacquainting process has gotten easier, the settling in quicker with each successive trip, and I have my feet to thank in part for that. When I’m back in Boise, I walk. A lot. This is by choice. There are cars I can rent and bikes I can borrow, and though driving and riding are much faster, you can’t take it all in like you can on a walk, and I discovered early on that I preferred the measured pace of a daily roundtrip stroll to The Record Exchange, and these meditative walks have carried me serenely through the dewy dawn and the arid high-desert dark. Regardless, my brother and others ask repeatedly: Are you sure you don’t want a ride? Most of the time I politely decline, though this last trip, when I awoke the first morning to a rare Boise downpour and realized I neglected to pack a rain jacket, I gratefully accepted. But that was a situational exception. Some people claim you won’t feel right after touching down in a different environment until you’ve eaten the food, but for me the grounding nourishment is the walk, and starting with that initial trip back, it’s been the best way for me to find my footing after a long day of travel. 

Returning last summer for the first time since moving away in 2020 was particularly disorienting – seeing a place I once called home through the odd-fitting lens of a quasi-visitor – but a year into this, with my feet as my primary form of transportation, I’ve established new routines in Boise a mere five miles from our old house and our old pathways: new grocery stores, new running routes, new pit stops for beer and/or bad late-night decisions. As I’ve mostly traveled alone, I’ve developed new social patterns, too. Most of the settings and most of the people remain the same – several relationships, ironically, have been strengthened by the distance between us – but certain friendships have fizzled, or perhaps, been put on pause. Some of that is a matter of circumstance, but mostly it’s a matter of time, and precious little of it. First and foremost, I’m there to work, and 10- to 12-hour days have been standard by choice. Yet, I still make concentrated efforts to connect in meaningful ways while I’m in Boise. Meanwhile, back in Hudson, I go months without seeing friends who live less than 10 minutes away. I’m still sorting it out, but nearly two years removed from the big move, I see myself consciously splitting my personality, letting the introvert relish the relative solitude of suburbia at home while the extrovert runs free in the city 2,000 miles away. Wherever I am, I’m still fundamentally me, and I’ll always be me regardless of coordinates, but right now the Hudson me and the Boise me feel like different people, and I haven’t figured out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe I just don’t have the balance right. Thinking about it late one evening near the end of this last trip, lost in my headphones and the shadows on the sidewalk as I walked back to my temporary abode, I suddenly felt out of tune – with being there, living here, all of it. Back in Ohio a week later, on the calf-burning concrete climb up Stow Road during a scorching afternoon run, the cool morning jog in the Boise foothills six days prior a fading memory, I wondered: Was I even there? Am I even here? Am I anywhere – or is this all just a fever dream?

On the back end of a trip, when I’m back home, I do the same thing I do on the front: I walk. It’s one-and-a-half miles around our block, and as a welcome back, this walk is right up there with the warm embrace of my family. On the evening before the first day of summer, I took the walk alone and savored the greenery around me, the humidity against my skin, the relative quiet compared to Downtown Boise, broken only by the sweetness of birdsong and the distant purr of wheels on asphalt wafting into the neighborhood from Interstate 480. (I grew up a mile from state Route 8, and highway noise is as comforting to me as the soft hum of nothingness deep inside a forest.) The frogs are back, the fireflies are back, the crickets are soon to follow. Boise sunsets are tough to beat, and some days I miss the mountains and the sharp scent of sagebrush along my path, but these are the tradeoffs, and right now, sitting here on the good side of summer in Northeast Ohio, I wouldn’t trade them for anything. 

We finally had our first backyard fire of the year on July 2, and it felt so good we had two more over the next two nights. I had been trying to get there – 40 feet into the yard from our back door – since last fall. Strange days have found us. The world is changing, work is changing, people are changing. Nothing seems real anymore, and maybe it never will again. Boise and Hudson still feel like parallel universes, and perhaps the split-personality sensation will never go away. But staring into the fire over three successive summer nights, losing myself in the flames as we listened to a family playlist we assembled on the fly for the occasion, for the first time in months I finally felt there, right there, no longer floating in the clouds, firmly on the ground below my motionless feet.

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