It’s not until you arrive at home and pick up your comfortable rhythms that you clearly feel the feeling of being elsewhere.

In the last six weeks, I have visited:

• Seattle, WA
• Olympia, WA
• San Diego, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Taipei, Taiwan
• Chia-Yi, Taiwan

In each of these places, planes of existence, there exists an particular song of life.  Each has its own melodies, and people shuffle, walk, dance, and sing differently.

When I arrived at my comfortable one-bedroom apartment at home in DC, smelling the musty air and feeling the dust, I felt the ineffable feeling of missing travel, missing being on the road and elsewhere.

In particular, the Taiwanese song was unmistakably Asian, a rich squalid contradiction of street and hotel room, skyscraper and slum.  Each meal struck a note, be it an frogs’ egg drink or the spicy chicken meal at McDonalds (which helpfully delivered to our hotel).  Each week in Taiwan had its own sonata, it’s own sequence of events and impact on the putative listener.

Like a seductive bolero, Taiwan danced with me, danced until the wee hours of the morning.  Its charms were on display, from Deaflympic to brothel—courteously, slowly, with a bow, the country opened its door and allowed us in for a space, perhaps until the end of the song or the next.

Musical metaphors may fall on deaf ears, but there is much to be said for the pounding of one against another—be it on a drum or during sex.  For everything has its rhythm and cannot be ignored, and rewards those who listen with their heart.

Like a monster from childhood, he snuck up on us.  There was no time to react, no time to contemplate myths and legends.

Click.  Sometimes a moment in life crystallizes in a gravid moment.  Where the hidden force lines of fate align, where human prediction becomes accurate and real.  You just know that shit is going to happen. It was unavoidable.  Like gravity and taxes.

He, on the scooter was coming towards us.  We, in the taxi, were talking of Michaelangelo.

Click. The twain did meet, head-on, a juicy T-bone in the middle of an intersection, in the middle of Taipei, in the Middle Country.

He hit us, dead-on, still alive, whisper-quiet, the jolt that passed through the taxi tame in comparison to the shock of seeing a prophecy come true.  Of seeing physics proven, F=ma, Newton smiling benevolently over us.  The brain making calculations; if the scooter keeps going and the taxi is here and then the scooter and the taxi will be in the same place, there.

The inevitable, as it is wont to do, happened.

Sluggishly the Taxi Driver (reduced to his pure Platonian form, for his wits had momentarily departed him) sat still for a heartbeat then logically backed up the taxi a foot or two, naturally pinning the scooter and its rider under the car.  The Taxi Driver had become a caricature of himself, wrapped in an egg roll of strangeness.  He seemed to recede in himself, a lost piece of meat in a boiling bowl of soup.

After the crash, as the strands of physics and fate loosened, the chaos of possibility, that comfortable dark uncertain future, became ascendant again.  No longer had we the certainty of an accident.  More mundane forces reasserted themselves, like cowardice.  Clicking away, I snapped photos while thinking:

Should I help move him, but I’m deaf and can’t communicate with the people helping him so I’d probably just cause more damage for all I know I would move him and his head would fall off because I didn’t help support his neck like I was told to in perfect Mandarin Chinese but I don’t know Mandarin and can’t hear besides but of course they know that because I’m white and white right now means white and deaf and besides I’m fulfilling the photojournalistic duty of someone with a Big Camera so I am taking pictures of this tragic event so that pictures exist he is moving now and seems to be alright but look at his scooter he is lucky to be alive wow those cars are passing by us pretty fast we’d better get out of the street before someone hits us too last thing we need is Two Deaflympians Killed in Car Accident headlines

Pinned under the taxi, the rider (click) was frozen in a rictus of twisted pain, left arm held tight by the tire, legs under the scooter, body heaving from shock.  Volunteers moved the scooter, while the rider struggled up, and walked away.  Force, mass, and acceleration do not care if you live or die—only that you obey its laws.

And obey we did in that timeless space, in that instant of collision where our masses and our bodies all occupied the same space, potential energy to the kinetic.  We all walked away from that changed—some bloodier, some bloodless.

To ride in a Taiwanese taxi is to ride an unruly horse—occasionally placid, often roiled with manic, quick energy.  Traffic flows and darts around, organized and respectful chaos.  Cabs to the left, cabs to the right, scooters to the rear, scooters to the front, fear painted white like the surgical masks covering peoples’ faces.

Scooters, mopeds, motorcycles, taxis, cars, trucks, jalopys, food carts, and pedestrians all dance in a cacophonous concert that demands your attention else you’ll miss the truck that has a stack of pigs legs flopping as it hits ditches and potholes.  Or the jalopy bedecked with various geegaws and aerodynamic fins.  Maybe even the rickety food cart, slopping with used liquid and faded signs for chicken garlic rice or frog’s egg drinks.

Buses are covered with various advertisements, most predominantly the Deaflympics.  Between the buses hover all the mopeds that you have ever seen, and ever will see—a deep chiaroscuro in that twilight between buildings, between buses, both looming large when compared with the two-wheeled toys that dare cross their paths.

But the scooters and mopeds zoom from light to light, corner to corner, braving the wild streets, their only concession are masks that cover the mouth and nose—for what fun is riding the streets if you are coughing from the ever-present fumes.  Fumes that bedevil each doorway, each breath of the Taipei air, an odd miasma that permeates each taste and breath until you have become one with it.

It is with this breath, or maybe even this bated breath (for as you get used to the smell you begin to hate it), that you plunge forth again in the day, or night, as you go about your adventures; be it to the arena to watch a game of basketball, or an excursion to the Shilin night market.  And the smell travels with you happily, looking over your shoulder, as you go about your business.

You may get a brief respite as you descend into the subway, metro system, of slick greased fast trains carry you around Taipei and environs, fast, fast, smooth as you please.  Air conditioning embraces you while the smell dissipates, advertisements (both print and video) remind you of the future while the past is outside, waiting, with a knowing smile because you are doomed to repeat it, to return to it.

To smell Taiwan is to smell dinosaurs and spice.  Petroleum and food, exhaust and soy.  Like the pickled and soy-ified eggs you see simmering in a cauldron in a Taiwanese 7-11, one’s nose swims in the sweltering air.

Walking down the street is an detective story, with many suspects and no evident murder weapon—or victim.  The story is simple, the beginning being the smell and the end being the smell.  The middle is the finding.

Smelling smoke may lead you to a brazier (where fake paper money is placed to pray) or a food vendor.  Smelling food may or may not lead to the item itself; more often than not it dances away from you, laughing, daring you to find it—knowing that there is more just around the corner.

Fried tentacles vie with hungry dogs for my tourist eyes, and the aroma of moped competes with the fetid stink of an dank alleyway for the attention of my tourist nose.  To smell is to be there, and nothing accentuates this point more than walking through the perfume-laced department store attached to our hotel.

And just like the street, just under the surface of that L’Oreal and Estee Lauder—literally, the floor below—dried fish and durians can be had for a song, and if you were to feast on the two you would be returned to the streets again and the assault on the nose would begin anew.