Intro

Ships in harbor are safe, but that’s not what ships are for…

It took three full days to travel from Austin to Balhaf, Yemen. I flew out of Austin Bergstrom International Airport on Thursday, October 11 - under a new moon, appropriately – and laidover in Chicago, Frankfurt, Riyadh, and Sana’a, before finally arriving by propeller plane at the project site on Saturday afternoon.

My departure was characteristically unorganized, maybe even more than normal for me, and I left a good bit of important administranea partially or completely incomplete. Although I had been pushing for this ex-pat opportunity for two months, the mobilization date had remained elusive, and only came into sharp focus in the last week before I left. My normally chaotic Austin life had been exceptionally frenetic in the weeks leading up to departure, due to a hurricane of personal, professional and civic preoccupations competing for my time. So I didn’t pay much attention to the million details attendant to relocation to a new job in a foreign country until way late. Suffice it that my last few days in Austin were pretty scattered. I’m sure it will be some time before I realize all the repercussions of things left undone.

Friends and acquaintances’ opinions were split on my decision to take the job. A fair number - most, probably - wondered why I would consider leaving a comfortable life, great job, new house, great friends, a 30-year love affair with Austin, to move to a very remote industrial gulag in a part of the world that made no secret of its disdain for Americans. A smaller number were excited about my traveling to exotic lands, with the promise of adventure, new sights, new sounds.

But it wasn’t the allure of adventure in exotic lands that drove my decision; mostly it was an intangible, but palpable need for a change. In spite of the Edenish life I enjoyed in Austin, centering on fun things - friends, fine dining, the music scene, yacht club, a new house located a short walk from Barton Springs, the lake and downtown Austin - I sensed something missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly. In fact, for some time I had done my best to block it out with sensual distractions and intellectual amusements. But increasingly, these diversions only served to conjure a recurring sense that I was not being creative with my time and that comfy, familiar Austin was a distraction that stood in the way of something, not sure what.

Some people are motivated by ingrained sense of grandeur, which compels them to do creative things with their lives. They are guided by the stars as they meaningfully fulfill their role in a magnificent celestial plan. Not me. Although I value creativity as a personal goal, I typically avoid it except when there is nothing else fun to do. It is only when I have exhausted all avenues of procrastination, when there is no side door to slip through, that I am forced to act upon my innate creative impulses. The opportunity to work for KBR in Yemen provided that for me. No side doors. The timing was right, and I grew to realize that that an irreversible commitment for a year or so as an ex-pat in a remote, extremely unfamiliar and probably uncomfortable corner of the world would force me to recalibrate my life. And in doing so, I would also be able to satisfy a travel bug, maybe shake some bad habits and act on a number of New Year’s resolutions that I had been putting off.