A Hopeful Wind

A hopeful wind blew into my house from Asia this week. It brought back my daughter, who had been traveling there since early last November. She started in Bangkok, then journeyed through Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and finally back to Thailand. Along the way she volunteered at an elephant sanctuary, supported families through homestays in villages, earned her scuba diving certification, climbed rocks, kayaked, and learned.

She told me that in Vietnam, they call the war the “American War.” She toured caves in Laos and Vietnam where citizens survived during the war years. She saw the Killing Fields in Cambodia, where thousands of people were brutally murdered. She went to a visitor center in Cambodia and met “hero rats,” animals that are still being trained today to help clear the country from unexploded landmines (and the rats are not harmed because they don’t weigh enough to trigger the bombs).

With a retired hero rat in Cambodia

She graduated from college in 2023 with a degree in environmental science and two minors—one in conservation biology and another in community engagement and social change. She did the things she thought she was supposed to do right after graduation: she went to Oregon and had a paid internship collecting and studying butterflies with Pacific University. After that, she landed a job working with sea turtles in Costa Rica. She was just about the only one on her research team who only had a bachelor’s degree. Everyone else was working for master’s degrees or already had one.

That was when she started to realize something. The Costa Rica job paid for her airline flights and also provided room and board. That was all, though. There wasn’t any salary associated with it—and it was hard work. Sea turtles lay their eggs at nighttime, so the job included monitoring long stretches of beach with a partner, often for hours at a time. Sleep was often difficult. I had a chance to visit her and her team, and I walked along with her one night for turtle patrol. It was exhausting.

It was good work, important work, but if most of her teammates held master’s degrees and were still basically only earning room and board, what did that say about her plan, her dream, of continuing her education at the master’s level?

When she got home from Costa Rica, she found a summer, in-between kind of job, working as a zip line operator at Heavenly Valley resort, up in Tahoe. That job included a discounted rate for shared employee housing. Whoever would have guessed that adding “zip line guide” to a resume would be helpful in finding future employment? It worked for her, since last summer she went to Catalina Island and was a zip line guide there.

During all of these jobs, she managed to save money. Employee housing meant having a roommate, a shared apartment space, and roommate annoyances, but it also meant that she could live frugally. She saved enough money to finance a trip—and she had a friend from her Costa Rica internship who lived in the UK and had traveled through Thailand. She decided that would be her starting place.

When I’ve told people about her adventures, without exception they wonder if she is traveling by herself. Yes, she is—sort of. But she has the internet on her cell phone and that is a gift that most folks reading this didn’t have back in the day. I was lucky enough to spend two months in Europe in 1989, traveling with friends. I had a book called “Let’s Go Europe” (my traveling Bible), which had addresses for hostels, maps, and information about buses and trains. I called my parents maybe twice during my time away.

My daughter, on the other hand, has WhatsApp and a SIM card for her phone, so she can text, call, and connect with people nearly every day. She is alone but not alone. She can check the internet to see if hostels in the city where she is heading are social and friendly with activities, or more tailored toward quiet time and rest. She can decide which she is in the mood for and change if she wants.

She’ll be home later this week, and I will hear more about her adventures. She will stay with me until month’s end, when she will then fly to Ketchikan, Alaska for her next job: working as a tour guide for a family owned company that runs a duck boat, a vessel that moves on both land and water. She’ll give tours to cruise ship passengers who arrive in Ketchikan for the day. This job also includes employee housing, and bonus: it’s free if she stays for the entire season, which runs through early September. After that? Unclear. She is floating the idea of applying for a youth work visa in either New Zealand or Australia.

I’m grateful that the jobs she’s found have brought her joy and have enriched her life. They’ve enriched mine, too. I’d love to figure out a way to see her in Alaska this summer. But more than that? I’m happy that she’s happy, forging a path that is not one that any of us would have expected.

You think that if you are a college graduate, especially one from UCLA, that the next steps might include grad school or a proper job with a proper salary from a proper governmental or environmental organization.

Maybe not.

Because there are many ways to save money. There are many ways to live.

My daughter reminds me that I also have choices in how I spend my days and order my life. I have good, steady work as a massage therapist, a little house, a garden (and a mortgage). There is something to be said for having a place to land—that’s important to me. But maybe I have dreams that I’ve let stagnate, dreams I’ve ignored or fallen asleep to. It makes me wonder. Maybe it’s not too late to do something totally different. Maybe it’s not too late at all.

I trust this hopeful wind keeps blowing for her, from Dutch Flat to Ketchikan to wherever she lands after that. I hope I can find a way to have it move me, too.

At an elephant sanctuary in Thailand