I’m Brian.  I’m an American, but don’t hold that against me.  Before I walked 2,200 miles to get here to Maine, I lived in Perth, Australia for a year.  In December 2006, this really happened:

Let’s back up.  In the March 2009 issue I told you about my return to Perth.  This is how I arrived.

Scott is a friend of mine from college in Upstate New York.  His fate brought him to Perth to marry Clare, where he worked as the sous chef at a beachfront café called Tonic.  At the time I was living in an apartment with no air-conditioning a mere 7 degrees north of the equator in Thailand.  Behind my corner apartment was a dirt lot on the shores of a large lagoon.  The lagoon featured a multitude of fish farms, while the dirt lot was home to some soi (street) dogs and a few fishermen’s shanties.  Next door to my apartment building was a fish processing plant.  The worst part about living next to that fish plant was not the noise of a hundred workers changing shifts at 6am, nor was it the smell of fish that was so pervasive throughout the neighborhood. No, the fish plant was an especially awful neighbor because the exhaust vents would constantly blow a very fine dust of fish scales through my open windows.  I constantly swept and brushed those tiny glitters off my bed, desk, suitcase, and floor.  Lucky for me I didn’t own furniture. 

Needless to say, the opportunity to escape for a couple weeks to the oft dreamed of land Down Under was exciting.  So, I RSVP’d for Scott and Claire’s wedding, spent a month’s pay on a ticket, got the mandatory chest x-ray to prove I wouldn’t bring tuberculosis from Thailand to Oz, and made arrangements to work a few shifts in Scott’s restaurant while I was out there so as to earn some spending cash.  

Ah, the commercial kitchen.  It’s a bubbling fumarole of stress.  A complicated pipeline of energy that can be as dazzling as it is dangerous.  Staffed by various drunks, rebels, professional travelers, and busted, cutthroat beasts of burden who will gladly risk their finger tips for a job that doesn’t make you pee in a cup. Commanded by savants of umami who must master both the fine details of presentation and their unruly mob of employees who constantly search for a weakness in the pipeline so they can bust through it. 

I got respect in that kitchen thanks to a tour as dishwasher at a research station in Antarctica, and because I could lend both credence and clarity to Scott’s stories of excess and debauchery from the unparalleled life of an American college student.  College was like a spiritual retreat compared to that blur of a fortnight in Perth.  There was a full lineup of festivities from holiday parties to wedding celebrations, and all the while I would stumble into Tonic inexcusably late and imprudently inebriated, bullshit my way through a shift, nap on the beach across the street, and then do it all over again, all the while keeping an eye open for the passport I’d lost immediately upon arrival.  At the peak of this rock n’ roll vacation, just as I happened to be shoulder-deep in a sink of dirty dishes I heard one of the privileged, beach babe waitresses refer to me as “dirty and deranged.”  I liked it.

It reinvigorated my love of travel.  I reconnected with my old friend, and we each marched to the beat of our old drum for the first time since we left the States.  I rediscovered the joys of speaking my native tongue, with that screwy Aussie slant, and enjoyed a sense of belonging and camaraderie I simply didn’t have in Thailand. 

It culminated at Scott and Clare’s wedding reception.  On a well-manicured lawn in King’s Park, atop a hill overlooking the Swan River and the bright oasis of Perth, I stood in front of a crowd of well wishers to give my speech.  In that singular moment before I opened my mouth, I thought back to the time I arrived at my English school in Thailand to find my British boss arguing with our Thai secretary. It seemed the secretary had just witnessed a gunfight across the street on the beach, but she wouldn’t call the police because she “didn’t know what to tell them.”  Puzzling? Baffling?  Flabbergasting?  Nay, that was par for the course.  In the Land of Smiles I was an irreconcilable stranger in a strange land.  Much better to be dirty and deranged Down Under. And that, as far as my lifestyle was concerned, was that. 

Now if I could just find that passport…

Brian Spigel is a reformed world traveler based in Portland, Maine, USA. After stints in various American national parks, Antarctica, Thailand, Australia, and the Appalachian Trail, he is currently attempting to live a so-called normal life in Portland.