Crossing the River (3 page)

Over my twenty years as a dance professor, I've been granted a couple of sabbaticals and have had an understanding dean who was willing to give me additional leaves of absence. And Peter, of course, is a freelance writer. As a result, our lives are more flexible than many. Whenever we've come into any extra money, such as when a family member has died, the money has gone to travel.

I applied for my first sabbatical when our second child, Skyler, was due to be born. We left for southern Spain when he was just five weeks old. Start 'em young. Get 'em hooked. That had been my parents' theory. We chose a place that was not too expensive and had no major diseases.

Those five months in Andalusia, in the ancient Phoenician walled
town of Cadiz, went by in a sleep-deprived blur. But it was worth it. While Peter picked up three-year-old Molly and took her to the bar across the street from her preschool to share a bowl of stewed snails, I carted tiny Skyler to the community center, where I'd rented a second-floor studio to choreograph. On the way, I'd stop at the flower market. Inevitably, stern old women would tell me my baby was going to have a deformed back if I kept carrying him around in that hammock-sling thing and would instruct me to take my germ-infested pinky finger out of his mouth.

“Use a pacifier if he cries,” they'd say in Spanish I barely understood, but their disapproval was unmistakable.

I like languages, and I'm pretty good at them. So I'd thought that with a little tutoring in Spanish to prepare before we left home, I'd pick it up in no time when immersed. Who was I kidding? With a three-year-old and a newborn, it wasn't like I had time to memorize verbs. And the situation was more desperate than I'd anticipated. It's one thing to figure out how to order at a restaurant and another to try to communicate with your child's teacher when your daughter's having trouble making friends at school or with the doctor when your baby's developing a mysterious rash.

The solo I ended up choreographing was called “First Position.” There are five positions for the feet in ballet, and in those days, I felt as if I couldn't even make it to first. In the mornings, in our rooftop apartment, I struggled to persuade Molly to get dressed. The twos had been fine, but the threes, the terrible threes. Are they usually that bad? Or was it worse because of the advent of a baby brother, or because of living abroad? I finally gave up and let her choose her own clothes, clashing reds and purples, let her do her own hair. Who said there was anything wrong with five sprouting pigtails? The Spanish, that's who. The perfectly coiffed children with their perfectly coiffed mothers—in their neat but somehow so sexy business suits, with their matching mother-daughter tucked ponytails clipped with starched bows—looked at us appraisingly, or so I imagined, as I raced up to the school door each morning, dragging my crazily pigtailed child and carrying my about-to-be-deformed baby. Here we are, the Americans, a disheveled heap.

But in the end, Molly zoomed past us in Spanish, spitting out perfect Andalusian
th
's and ordering lollipops at the ubiquitous candy shops using mysterious local slang. In that astonishing way that kids can subconsciously absorb and sort out language, Molly had found the key and unlocked the door just by osmosis, slipping in and bypassing all those torturous years of masculine/feminine nouns, single and plural agreements, past participles, conditionals, pluperfects and subjunctives.

Skyler became a great travel baby, happily carted onto buses to visit picturesque hill towns, onto boats to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, into oven-hot cars to trek into the dunes of the Sahara, and onto the string of planes to return home five months later.

I returned to my job, heading the dance program at the university, and Peter continued writing. I had happily moved from New York City to Missoula—which turned out to be a vibrant, outdoorsy college town in the mountains—on the understanding that it would be fine as long as, periodically, we could leave.

Looking for a way to keep our family (and myself) traveling and for my dance students to experience a culture that truly integrated the arts into everyone's lives, I developed a three-week winter-session course to take students to Bali in Indonesia. It was in Bali that Skyler learned to walk. The Balinese have a strong sense of spatial hierarchy, which they apply to architecture, geographic location, and even one's own body, meaning you don't ever want your head below your feet—so no handstands, no cartwheels, no falling down for toddlers like Skyler, newly investigating their watery ten-month-old legs. Babysitters snatched him up as soon as his pudgy knees began to buckle.

At four and a half, Molly learned to flick her eyes and angled elbows side to side to the metallic ripple of gamelan music like a Balinese dancer, while I shepherded my mildly culture-shocked American students around town. Three years in a row we arrived, with a new batch of students, in the artsy town of Ubud, always on my birthday. I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate the passing of another year. Then came 9/11 and the terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002, and the program got shot out of the water.

Peter and I began to plot our next adventure. By the time Molly was
seven, we'd managed to go to Indonesia four times and live in Spain, but the trips had been short, three weeks to five months. It was time for something bigger. When I had the opportunity to apply for a second sabbatical, we decided to look for a place that met our criteria for raising globally comfortable, globally tolerant kids. This would be the real beginning of our traveling-family experiment.

The criteria were:

          
   
a place where English was not the primary language

          
   
a place where white was not the primary race

          
   
a place where people were less affluent

Well, that left most of the world.

Our theory was that if our kids were to feel at home in that world, they would need to understand that people do not speak English everywhere, but that one can still communicate. They would need to feel comfortable being in the minority, in part so they could understand what that feels like and empathize with those in the minority at home. And it would be good for them to see how much less, materially, most people in the world have.

Molly was at the incipient mall-rat stage. “I need to have . . .” was becoming her standard opening salvo. Every time I heard that opening line, I remembered the ingenuity of the Tibetan nomads in Qinghai, China. They seemed able to glean everything they needed from a yak: wool for tents, dung for fires, milk for yogurt, meat for their bellies. But their needs weren't great. How much do we really “need”?

Looking for a place for our next adventure, Peter and I took the
Times Atlas
and headed for our favorite Missoula oyster bar. We slid onto stools at the counter. Flipping through the atlas, we rapidly ruled out Asia, the continent we'd visited most. We wanted to try something new. Then we practically threw the dice.

“What about Mozambique?” Peter had just been to Mozambique for an
Outside
magazine assignment. “There's a crashing third-world economy, just what we need.” He smiled.

Peter and I are well aware of the privileged lives we lead as people able to pick up and move to another country just for the adventure of it, but we can't actually just go anywhere; the reality is that to stay
within our budget, we have to find somewhere substantially less expensive than home.

“We could probably afford it then, but wasn't there just a civil war?” I asked with some trepidation.

“Yeah, but it's been over for a few years,” he said cheerily. “Things are looking up.”

We'd loved our time in West Africa on an earlier trip, before kids; we'd loved the way the vendors in Ghana beat rhythms on their coolers to announce their presence, the way strangers would call out to us, “Hey, Mr. White!” But we'd never been, as a family, farther south.

We finally settled on Mozambique, but reluctantly. As a former colony of Portugal, the country's official language is Portuguese. Between us we spoke Spanish and French, but Portuguese? After six or seven months of finding our minds continually returning to Mozambique, we said, “Okay, Portuguese.”