Swamp Lungs

How does your body know that it's home?

There are a few ways to get from California to Washington, DC. You could drive north through Utah and head east towards Denver, then Kansas City, then Louisville. You could drive the southernmost route through Tuscon, giving you the bulk of Texas to trudge across either via Dallas or Austin before redirecting back north through Atlanta and then Charlotte. Or, you can split the difference and take I-40 almost all 2,550 miles from Barstow to Nashville before breaking off to drive north up the western part of Virginia. The first option presented too many destinations that I hadn’t made it to yet and I knew I would be too tempted to stay, keeping me from my goal of hitting D.C. by next week. The second option would take me back to the East Coast the way I came, but would come with its own distractions in the form of a lost love along that route. This left the most direct, and miserable option: I-40, straight through New Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, the top of Texas, and Oklahoma.

Driving through the desert in the middle of summer is my worst-case scenario. I’d been avoiding sea-level activities in California since I left the coast, opting instead to cling to the High Sierras for as long as I could, making my way south through the cooler, more elevated interior of the state. I made it as far as Bakersfield before having to give up and accept my fate in the desert.

Driving, at least, is bearable when I have air conditioning blasting in the cab. The back of the van, where I sleep, does not have air conditioning, just a small fan I can use to blow already hot air back on me while I sleep.

On my first night in the desert this week, I sat up in bed to look at the thermometer in the van: 103 degrees at 10 pm.

Both because I was totally unable to do anything to alleviate my discomfort, and because I was just curious, I simply sat quietly in the dry heat. It was difficult to take a deep breath. It felt like like trying to suck the little bits of melted ice through a straw, checking again every few seconds in case more ice had melted. My skin and hair felt brittle and ashy. I chugged as much water as I possibly could but I could never seem to drink enough to fully hydrate. This would just have to be it for the night.

I woke up early from a hot, miserable night. It didn’t help that my free camping options were waning as the percentage of U.S. Forest Service land decreases as you travel eastward. This left me sleeping in unshaded parking lots that baked in the sun all day, ensuring that heat would encompass the van from every direction, including the floor.

I wondered what it was about being specifically too hot and too dry that made me feel so drained and irritated and unlike myself. I would choose to exist in almost any other (reasonable) climate than the desert heat. There’s a part of me that envies people who thrive in the desert, but I don’t know if it’s something you can ever acclimate to. Are we born with some genetically coded map to the environments that feel most like home? Or are we gravitating towards places that make us feel the most at ease?

Ayurvedics¹ would say it’s the former. Practitioners believe that we are born with a special biological coding that we can bring into balance through diet, movement, and lifestyle adaptations that bring us closer to living a healthy and stable life. To oversimplify this massively: Ayurveda teaches that our bodies have three types of energy associated with different parts of the body, different elements, and different mental states, with each of us having a dominant dosha.² You can eat and act in accordance with your own dosha to become more in balance or at ease, but you cannot change your genetic coding.

While Ayruveda doesn’t explain outright exactly where one should live, it does offer an elemental framework for understanding what qualities of an environment make us feel balanced and which make us feel squirrelly. Humans known as Vatas are characterized by the elements air and ether and associated with being dry and cold; Pittas are characterized by the elements fire and water and associated with being hot and wet; and Kaphas are characterized by the elements water and earth and associated with being hot and wet. Again, a wild oversimplification. But I like thinking about my body’s genetic predispositions without centering my weight or size, specifically. Does my body feel more hot or cold? More wet or dry? And do I feel naturally better in places that replicated my body’s design, or balanced it out?

Perhaps environments feel more at home simply because we are born or developed there. I was born and raised in North Carolina, spent most summers in and around New Orleans, and lived for a decade in The Swamp. By all environmental factors, I’ve always been a humidity girl through and through. I love when my hair gets big and curly from the moisture, or when I’m outside doing yoga in the park in the heat and I can feel my muscles relax and elongate. When I was a kid visiting the Grand Canyon with my parents, I remember them buying a humidifier for the hotel room because I couldn’t breathe. (Actually, I bought myself a humidifier for the van circa Sedona, Arizona to combat the same problem.)

You can’t spend your entire life in 80% > humidity without evolving a pair a gills, or at least a swampy set of lungs.

Humidity presents this perfect moment where your sweaty skin no longer feels independent from the wet air around you. You are fully engulfed in the moisture of your environment and have no choice but to surrender and become a cohesive unit with the space around you. When the air is wet, it forces you to recognize it not as nothingness we move through, but rather as an unimaginable mass of particles we ignorantly push out of the way.

By the time I hit Arkansas, I could feel the humidity returning, ready to welcome me back into its damp cocoon and away from the brittle air of the Southwest. I thought surely my body would happily greet this climate with deeper breaths, bouncier hair, and a looseness in my joints I had been craving since the Mojave.

Instead, I was slapped in the face with a wet paper towel and told to shape up or ship the fuck out. I was overwhelmed almost immediately by how much I was sweating, even compared to the tourists around me at Hot Springs National Park. When I lived in Thailand, my strategy would be to take short but cold showers throughout the day to both clean the sweat off my body and lower my temperature back to homeostasis. But without an easily accessible shower and hours of driving ahead of me, that tactic would not help this time. Had my body forgotten how to move through the humidity, or had my home climate forgotten me, treating me instead as an uninformed tourist ready for a rude awakening?

The humidity had once been such a comfort to me. My body had always felt at home in this hot, damp climate. But the closer I got to D.C., the more my body sent me signals of distress: I was more irritable, jittery, and unable to sleep deeply. I knew that moving in this direction did not feel like moving homeward.

Sometimes, we simply confuse the feeling of familiarity with the feeling of comfort.

There are a lot of ways to narrow down where you want to live. The most straightforward way includes making a checklist of Google-able facts like population size and density, housing prices, or the job market. A slightly more nuanced way could be to get a vibe of the different neighborhoods, nightlife, dating scene, and pace of a place — all things you can technically Google, but require some conscious self-reflection on how you interact with these different pieces of a puzzle.

And then there’s a third way: by noticing how your unconscious bodily sensations react to being in a new environment. How does my nervous system engage when I’m visiting a new city; am I on edge or invigorated? How does my respiratory system feel when I’m lucky enough to be in an area with clean air? How does my circulation change when I travel from one altitude to another?

These aren’t exactly easy to point to and have a pulse on what different sensations actually feel like. We’re not taught to observe these innate, subtle changes in our bodies; at least, not until something is wrong with one of these systems. It’s also hard to know how many of these bodily reactions are fixed biological predispositions that will live within us no matter what, and which of these reactions are subject to adaption given a little time.

I had taken the most straightforward way to drive back to D.C. and had not enjoyed the journey. I think I’m done relying on the straightforward, making checklists or objective pros and cons to help me choose major life decisions. From now on, I’m listening to my sweat.

1. https://www.ayurveda.com/ayurveda-a-brief-introduction-and-guide/

2. https://chopra.com/dosha-quiz