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Outside Magazine January 2004

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The Hard Way
Leap Year (cont.)

In April, Sue and I flew over on a reconnaissance mission, rented a car, and found Salobreña on the first day. A town of 10,500 inhabitants, it could be traversed on foot in eight minutes. The beach was a five-minute walk away; 800-foot limestone climbing crags a ten-minute drive; the Sierra Nevada, Spain's highest mountain range, only an hour north. Before we left, we signed a lease on a furnished house, paid our first month's rent, and spoke with the principal of an elementary school for the girls.

In early August, after renting out our house in Laramie (fully furnished, plates to electronics), rearranging our banking to live off ATM cards, and loaning our two cars to kin, we pulled up stakes and fired ourselves, as if out of a cannon, over the big pond. In less than 24 hours, we had traded the dry, landlocked spread of Wyoming—where there are more deer and antelope than people, and nine months of winter—for the sticky, flesh-covered Costa Tropical, where some form of summer reigns year-round.

By day two, the bikes were reassembled and Addi and Teal were out exploring. In one week, we had obtained a certificado de empadronamiento, our census certificate. In two weeks, we had willingly converted from expensive microbrews to cheap micro-riojas. In three weeks we had purchased a used VW Golf, the standard Euro family car, with 130,000 kilometers on the odometer. After a month, we had a high-speed Internet connection, supplementing our addiction to the BBC.

A little patience, bastante dinero, a lot of running around, and before I could properly pronounce destornillador (screwdriver), we were rookie members of the European community.

LIVING ABROAD, like isolationism and xenophobia, is a venerable American tradition. Benjamin Franklin lived in England for almost 18 years and in Paris for more than seven. Mark Twain settled in Europe for a decade. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Matthiessen and Plimpton, and many other Yanks temporarily sank peacetime roots into foreign soil.

According to a 1999 U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs report, there are almost four million American civilians living abroad. A thousand in Tanzania; 38,000 in Taiwan; 450 in Mongolia; a hundred or so in Turkmenistan; about 95,000 in Spain. Among the millions are diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, nurses, exchange students, and multinational corporate employees. All have chosen to forsake close friends and relatives, familiar neighborhoods and routines, to live overseas for a time.

Many go for the same reasons we travel: to experience the unfamiliar. To eat goat cheese from the green cave of Magaha, queso de cabra that is so acridly tart it makes your mouth water. To follow doglegging lanes in a mountain village until you're convinced you're lost, only to suddenly realize that you're right back where you started (the recursive metaphor of travel, again). To witness customs that we could hardly imagine: two oxen, say, garlanded with delicate violet blossoms, pulling a cart carrying a small statue of Santa Maria del Rosario, the patron saint of Salobreña.

Moving abroad is more profound than traveling. It goes beyond curiosity to commitment. It is full immersion in a strange country.

Yet moving abroad is more profound than traveling. It goes beyond curiosity to commitment. If to travel is to be a stone skipping lightly over the water, to move abroad is to stop and allow yourself to sink into an alien world, gulping to breathe a different language. Moving abroad is full immersion in a strange country, being forced to make a new life there, using little more than whatever wit, wisdom, openheartedness, and evenhandedness you carry inside you.

Perhaps the principal difference is this: To travel is to expect much of the places you visit; to move to one of these places is to expect much of yourself. No longer just passing through, you must figure out how things actually work in your adopted nation.

Some of this is banal. When is garbage collected? (Midnight.) Where is the wine- bottle-recycling container? (By the bus stop.) What is the word for the female end of a telephone jack? (I still have no idea.) Which ferretería(hardware store) has clavos pequeños (little nails)?

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