Moonset, Moonrise. Lost in America

I have just performed the ritual all-nighter that I pull almost every single time I move. This time I am moving back up to Madison, capital of Wisconsin state, in America’s northern mid-west, home of my university. I’ll be teaching for a semester while I finish writing my PhD dissertation. I am sad to be […]

I have just performed the ritual all-nighter that I pull almost every single time I move. This time I am moving back up to Madison, capital of Wisconsin state, in America’s northern mid-west, home of my university. I’ll be teaching for a semester while I finish writing my PhD dissertation.
I am sad to be leaving Atlanta. By now, the polar vortex has spun away from America’s south, and Atlanta’s gentle winter has returned with a rain that makes a swamp of my grandmother’s back yard and fills the creek that runs past her house with churning brown water that almost overflows its banks. The sun comes out once the weekend is past. Though last month we mourned the passing of my grandmother on my father’s side, this week we celebrate the 92nd birthday of my grandmother on my mother’s side. She is spry and sharp-memoried, granting me a two hour interview about her life before joining my parents and me for a walk in the woods behind her house.  She uses a cane to keep her balance in the marshy ground. Under her knitted cap, her cheeks flush in the crisp air, as we duck branches to examine trees where the deer have rubbed their antlers. The golden light of late day moves higher and higher until only the tops of the trees are illuminated, leaving the woods in shadow, the impossibly tall pine trees looming dark against the rosy sky.
I go back to my room to keep preparing for my trip. After a night of scanning heavy notebooks to save my weight allowance and packing winter clothes newly shrunk from the wash, I lie down at 5am, and fall into that wild desperate sleep that comes only when you know you have to get up soon. Thirty minutes later, my mother comes to wake me. Now, while my dad drives, I doze in and out. The morning moon sinks. I open my eyes and we are at the airport, pulling out my heavy bags in the grey dawn.
The Atlanta airport is busy even at 7am. As I wait for the flight to Madison, all I want to do is sleep, but I pull out my laptop to work on this column. Forcing fingers to keyboard, I see the young man across from me putting a sim card into his phone and then hear him speaking. When he finishes, I lean over and ask him where he is from. “Nigeria,” he says. “Ah,” I thought so,” I say. His name is Uzo, and he lives in Lagos. He has just flown in on the overnight Delta flight I took a month ago and is in transit to Madison where he will start his masters. This is his first time in the U.S. He has been to London, but he has never experienced a winter before. In the covered bridge to the plane, he asks me “Is this air conditioning or natural cold.” “Natural cold,” I say.
After an hour and a half of flight, we emerge out of the clouds over Madison. The city’s Victorian houses spread out beneath us, grey and white with snow, picturesque as a miniature village in a snow globe. After collecting our luggage, I wait outside with Uzo for a shared taxi. He says he has never been so cold in his life. It is a biting cold that creeps under your gloves and burns your fingers till they go numb.
***
My friend, whom I have not see in about five years, comes out of her house to hug me and help me carry my 350 pound bags up three flights of stairs to her flat. Proclaiming my thin fall coat unsuitable, she gives me one of her old coats filled with feather down. The coat saves my life. I walk for about 30 minutes across town to the flat I have found on the sharing website Craigslist. The young woman, a graduate student at the university, is moving out, and I will take over her lease. It is tiny but sweet, a small room with wooden floors and a separate kitchen and bathroom and balcony. Since she is in the middle of moving across town, I offer to take the paperwork to the landlord, who, I think, is an easy bus ride and a short walk away.
I have never been good at directions. I get off the bus and head in the direction I believe to be southeast. We have left behind the university with its pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and have entered the America of highways, where most everyone has cars. I cross one highway and walk alongside another one. The snow is piled high on the sides of the road and I leave deep tracks sinking past my ankle with each step. It is hard to explain the consistency of snow to someone who has not experienced it. When it first falls it can be soft and downy, with a dry crunch or a soggy splash, depending on what kind of snow it is. But once it has sat for a while, it grows a hard crust, so hard that you can sometimes walk a few steps hardly leaving a track before falling through the surface, past the ankle, sometimes even to the knee. This is how I struggle down the highway, where obviously no one has walked since the last snow. My jeans crust over and I am thankful for the snow boots I changed into before I left my friend’s house. I lumber on and on, yet I see no sign of the road I was supposed to turn onto. I pass under a highway bridge, where the snow has iced into a slippery hill. Should I fall down, I would slide directly into the path of oncoming traffic.
“I could die here,” I think for the first time, gingerly bracing my hand against the cement wall and eyeing the cars speeding past me. About a hundred meters past the bridge, I stop. “Perhaps I should call the landlord,” I think. I sprint across the highway again where it forks and step over a low fence. The snow-edged highway stretches out with no sign of the road I am looking for. “I could die here,” I think again. This time I imagine freezing to death.
The landlord tells me I have walked in the wrong direction. In fact, I took the bus too far. I am over a mile from where I am supposed to be. I trudge back, stepping in my own tracks. I am cold and increasingly hungry. I have not eaten since the oatmeal I gulped down at 5:45am.Back at the intersection where I first crossed the high way is a fast food joint, Burger King. I have never been so happy to enter a fast food restaurant in my life. I buy a sandwich for a dollar (about N160) and let the warmth work its way back into my fingers and my toes before venturing outside again, this time in the opposite direction.
An hour and a half later, I am yet to find the rental office. Walking through the deep snow on the highway in the sun, I had cheerfully snapped photos of my tracks and my shadow sprawling across snow banks. But as the sun falls and the temperatures drop, it is no longer fun. I have been walking for almost three hours. I can hardly feel my nose. I wonder if my face is frostbitten. I hail a bus, but the bus driver does not know the street I am looking for. I go into a petrol station, but they do not know either. 
As the darkness grows thicker, I call the woman I am subleasing from. She sends her boyfriend to come pick me up in his car. The office is only a block past where I had stopped a second time and turned around. It is now past 5pm. The rental agent has already gone home, so I drop the paperwork in his mailbox. The woman’s boyfriend offers to drop me at my friend’s house. We drive along one of Madison’s many lakes. The city lights mirror in the icy water, the dome of the capital building tall and bright against the night sky. Over it all, the great round moon rises, a pale reflection of the earth. It is two hundred thousand miles away, but in the frosty air, it glows so bright and big it seems a place you could go, if you walked long enough.