Just a few weeks earlier, Hurricane Dorian had slammed into our home in the Bahamas, a country I'd lived in my entire life. My family had spent 24 hours trapped in our attic, praying the roof would hold before evacuating to nearby Florida. Once we arrived, we found ourselves stuck in immigration limbo. For as long as possible, we tried to remain in Florida, close to home.
During the pandemic, I was freelancing at the time, and I was writing an article about "worldschooling." I had never heard of it, and I started interviewing these people around the world, and these are families who were just traveling the world with their kids. My wife and I had both lived abroad, and we loved the idea, and we said if we ever make it out of the pandemic, we want to do something like this with our kids.
Land is one of those things that can disappear even as you see it. It falls away beneath you, becoming merely the ground under your feet, because you're thinking about where you're going, or a place slowly blurring out of focus from the airplane window. Land is a primal word, primordial even, like lava. And it is a loaded word if, say, you're Indigenous or descend from a people whose land was taken from them.
In the summer of 1989, Karen Palmer bought a used car for cash, filled it with belongings some clothes, toys, one pot, one pan and a shoebox of photos and disappeared with her new husband and two young daughters. She didn't tell her mother, her friends or her neighbours where she was going. She gave no notice to her employers and landlord, leaving items out on her apartment balcony as a sign she still lived there.