I ran a quick calculation and I've spent 13 solid years sleeping in a hotel room (or tent, vehicle or the back of a transport plane). The last few years, I've been home a lot more, as I do less field work and more "manage the technology and people that do the field work". I'm to the point now, that as much as intellectually I miss full time field work, I'd rather sleep in my own bed at night, even if I still have two, in completely different time zones.
Then, there was the time I locked myself out of my room in my underwear grabbing the newspaper I had no phone. I stole a towel off an abandoned housekeeping cart, draped it over my head (they can stare at my butt all day long, but no one will recognize me) and sauntered down to the front desk "extra key for Dr. ____ please" The clerk is still probably traumatized.
There is night after night of sameness. The bed looks like any bed in any hotel. Dinner is Ramen Noodles cooked in the coffee pot, not because there is no room service or restaurant but because you've had all the interaction with the world you can stand for the day, and you just want something hot to eat all alone. The mini bar beckons, but you don't go there either, not for the tiny little mortgage you pay with each clink of the little bottle that will only briefly relax your sapless limbs. The room is quiet, but in your head are the words of hundreds that can not be stilled, the voices that called you here, to this city, this week, where what little sleep you get will only be when the sodden match that is your brain, has nothing left with which it can spark.
There are the mornings you wake, not knowing what time it is, or what country you are in, and for a moment you pause in your hotel room, breathing heavy with fear as you orient yourself to your surroundings. You look outside, not really knowing what you will see, having arrived in total darkness. A lovely village full of sight and sound, and cobbled steps, or the war ravaged industrial town, a visage of smoke and ash, gaunt staring rubble rising out from sand, dirt and weed with an air of profound desolation that needs no further words.
It's a life of constant motion and travel, phone calls and emails home or abroad from loved ones living the same kind of life, including one in which you are told "I can't do this any more", as you sit helpless and shaking 2000 miles away. You don't argue, your only response as the proverbial dial tone growls in your ear is the flinging of a shoe that strikes the wall with a single, shattering blow. The remaining nights you simply sit, as if listening to something very far away or so close as to be contained within you. The phone lays silent, but you do not. You call someone you trust, who also lives on the road, to let it out, and then go on living. Certain types of lives demand sacrifices, but you can no more change that, than you can change what is essential to you. You continue with your duty, for it, and order, is the only constant that you know. It's simply part of who we are, traveling where our skills are needed, not because your friends and family mean any less, but because responsibility carries with it its own honor. It's a life of many hotels, and meals probably best eaten in low light. It's memories, transparent and weightless, that scatter around you like leaves, blown without destination by winds that forever change.
There is comfort in those sounds. It's like listening to a monk chanting in a language which you do not need to even understand to know. So many sounds, the creaks, the murmurs, whispers of earth and sky and people, quiet tears in a hotel room, laughter and the clink of glasses, sounds evocative of life and death and struggle, things we've been aware of all our lives but never really understood until now. Sounds and words like faded letters on a road sign, not pointing us to where we need to be, but letting us know we were on the right path.
For no matter how dark things have been, there will always be that light that awaits you, biting into shadow. It is home, and there is nowhere I'd rather be.
