What to Do for Feet That Have Traversed At Least 1,202 Miles
By Cyan James
April 15, 2024
April 15, 2024
It stretches your mind out like saltwater taffy. That anyone, much less thousands of people, spent the hot, hot summer of 2023 walking two or twenty miles at a time from Kabul to Belgrade in knock-off black Nike or Adidas sneakers. It boggled my brain. That is what they told me though, the men in their twenties who handed me their balled-up, dirt-spattered jeans and joggers so I could load the clothes into a bank of washing machines stacked in a walk-in laundry and shower center in Serbia’s capitol. They had come so far.
I nodded, wrote on masking tape in red Sharpie whatever names the men chose to give me, then stuck the tape to the laundry hampers that held their dirty clothes. The other volunteers and I were busy that summer, like greeters at an odd and heart-rending ultramarathon, registering arrivals, taking laundry, and distributing boxers or pairs of thin socks.
“Shower?” we asked. “Douche? Hammam?” We tried to guess what language each one spoke. “Dari? Pashto? Arabic?” We did not speak those languages, but sometimes we stumbled into mutual French or German. We gestured toward the bowl that held spotty apples or hard plums; we indicated the water cooler and the spare outlets where phones could charge. We waved for the next man in line to go upstairs when the shower attendant yelled down that there was a free stall.
If approached by a stranger in a little public park in a strange city and offered a free shower, would you accept? What an odd and awkward offer, and it felt odd and awkward, too, pinpointing the young men by their black clothes and backpacks, then exhibiting laminated sheets of paper at that explained in multiple languages what the WASH Center was and what it offered.
Yet many of the men we approached nodded, exchanged questioning glances, then followed us up the cobblestoned hill of Kamenicka street, past the foraging street cats, the patent leather shoes spread for sale, and the shops that sold gardening supplies, including the rubber gloves we bought for handling dirty clothes.
The men packed into the Center shoulder to shoulder, tapping on burner phones, scratching toes protruding from separating shoes, flinging smiles at us in flashes. Did we know how to find an affordable barber? Was playing music allowed? Once in a while a man would pull up his shirt— “Look!” The pink runnel of scar tissue left from a Taliban bullet.
It smelled in the WASH Center of mint tea and damp skin. The fans broke regularly, almost as often as the temperature climbed over 90 degrees. But the men endured because it is important to be clean or because there was nowhere else to be right then or because their friends and fellow people on the move (POM, we called them) were also there, or perhaps because their feet hurt so very badly.
As the creaking summer sweated onward, the groups of young men swelled in size. We started completing more than 100 showers in seven hours. The line went out the door—no wonder passing Serbians stared at the sight: weary men with tidy hair trying to joke with tattooed, pierced volunteers who were wearing thrift-store clothes. Volunteers and POM both wore a lot of black because even though black clothing attracts heat it can also hide dirt. Many of the volunteers came from places the POM were trying to reach: Berlin, London, anywhere in the EU, really. But those places are miles from Belgrade, that White City where Ottoman-era fountains still run after 500 years and scores of cultures still bump and mingle in an atmosphere of wood smoke and butter.
By the time they reached us, the POM had likely spooned up goulash in Turkey or chickpea stew in Greece, had drunk swallow after swallow of tepid water from plastic bottles, had worn life vests stuffed with bubble wrap, had been burned by boat fuel mixed with seawater, and may have been sent back, sometimes multiple times, to the nearest border. Still they surged toward the chance to man kebab grills in Frankfurt or change spark plugs in Warsaw. They wanted work, wanted to learn English, wanted to bring the rest of their family somewhere safe.
They wanted to laugh, and so they did. They joked about the boxers and the pop music we played; they giggled as they tried to teach us different words for ‘apple’ or ‘thank you.’ Most shifts, in fact, passed as one long and often amusing pantomime. The WASH Center itself was also funny in a heart-cracking way: hand-drawn signs, things held together with duct tape and clothes pins, the fans, when they were functioning, spinning so fast the poster about scabies rattled against the one about how to report border violence.
Of course it was also not funny at all. Picture one of the men who has walked the farthest descending the stairs after his shower. He keeps one hand on the wall, the other on the railing, and he shuffles like a clean 80-year-old. Gleaming comb lines in his hair, shining teeth in his smile as he tries to reassure his friends. He is fine. Really, fine. He will be fine.
Ah, but those feet. If you are a hiker, you know the effects of boot friction over distance: the puffy blisters, the raw, slick spots, the black toenails. Imagine what knock-off shoes do to feet over the span of a continent. The bottom layer of the foot begins to detach. After a shower it is pale and soggy, threatening to peel back. There are also calluses, cracked scabs, serum oozing from damaged skin. There is sloughing, bruised shins, ankles stippled with poppy-red hot spots and calves peppered with the small, dark flecks of scabies. Do we have antiseptic spray? Bandages?
They left with their right hands clasped over their hearts in thanks. They often left hobbling, using each other as crutches, wearing their shoes half-on like slippers. They went out into the dry, wavering air as we stayed behind, listening to hot water gurgling in pipes and swooshing over and over in the washing machines.
Water matters in Belgrade, the place where the Sava and Danube rivers meet. There are the fountains left by the Turks as well as the remains of Roman baths. To the east lie the Austro-Hungarian lands of hot springs, to the south, the hammams of Turkey. Serbia is bracketed by these countries of communal cleanness, where a soak is meant to last hours and is much more social than the splashing, five-minute flurry typically conducted solo in the coffin-like dimensions of a Western shower stall. Immerse yourself in bath culture and you may start to find a shower rushed and utilitarian, more about preparing for productivity than savoring being in one’s skin. In Belgrade we wished we could offer the POM the most luxurious spa imaginable.
A simple shower, however, is not nothing.
That’s because it can be very dangerous to appear dirty. People with showers and tubs tend to mistrust those who do not seem clean. Evident dust and mud might mean sickness or carelessness; they might indicate who is in trouble and may subsequently cause even more trouble. Brains, even ones in skulls that were recently lathered, do not always behave rationally, and can cede territory to the gut. Biases against people who appear dirty set in as early as age five, researchers report. In Auschwitz, Primo Levi urged fellow prisoners to take pains to remain as clean as possible, lest guards single them out for lethal showers.
When you are on the move, you cannot afford to inspire disgust. Cleanliness is like oil: it lets potentially disapproving gazes slide right off you. Cleanliness does not guarantee safety, but it cloaks one in acceptability and makes is more likely you will be allowed to slip through fences and train stations and city centers. Cleanliness is short hand: you still care about your life. You still have hot water.
That summer I also visited my parents in southern Washington state. My mother and I visited the Pearl District in Portland to walk beside the Willamette, window-shop, and maybe visit Powell’s Books. We had done all this a dozen times before, but this time many cafes and shops were closed. REI was moving out and more people without homes were trickling in. We did not walk in the little parks. When a shirtless man with dirt-streaked ribs approached, I dove between him and my mother, because he was cursing and jerking his arms and did not seem to see us. I tried to angle my body so my mother would not notice the human shit wiped on several store windows, though she could probably smell it. I know she saw the woman in grimy clothes smoking something off a square of foil.
There is an ugliness to feeling your muscles tighten, your eyes dart away, and your lips clamp in disgust. I felt my own sense of judgment bubble up. Did these people need showers too? Of course, and yet I did not want to volunteer at a WASH Center in my own city. Despite hours of public health classes, despite knowing, at least roughly, why and how zoning laws, unemployment, rising costs, addiction, and insufficient support are consigning so many of my fellow citizens to places where they get dirty and continue to struggle, I wanted to walk away.
Hard. To witness heroin and fentanyl from places like Afghanistan and Mexico traveling into the bodies of people in Oregon with no place to go. Products grown to buy guns and establish control or to eke out survival bought by people trying to smother the raw emotions of not having a place to live. So many Afghans who wanted to reach the US, so many Americans who don’t know where to go, so many kaleidoscope echoes of conflict and retaliation and various acts of turning away. Different dirt in different places, but connected.
Disgust happens for a reason, but not a nice one. Civilization before widespread running water, which was for centuries merely normal civilization, was a place where the smallest puncture in the hazmat-suit that was your skin could admit bacteria and microbes capable of killing you in hours. Today we take our tetanus shots tamely every ten years, but back then? Everyone knew someone who had died of sepsis, lockjaw, or necrosis.
A very deep part of your brain knows that if you want to survive, you stay clean and you keep your distance. To be compassionate or even curious is often to wrestle with the unconscious paranoia writhing in our guts, so we often try to stick only with the people we already know. That happens, of course, at a cost: the cost of failing to care for others, the cost of foregoing benefits others may bring, and the lived cost of remaining ignorant and uninvolved.
When the WASH center filled to capacity and more, twenty-four men bunched into a space built for no more than seven, I reminded myself of the other people these men represented. Not only their sisters and mothers and other family members, not only Marines and World Trade Center employees, but also the factory workers who had made the knock-off Adidas sneakers and Gucci shirts the men were wearing.
A huge percentage of these workers are young women laboring in places like the industrial city of Dongguan, China. They, too, are on the move, migrating seasonally from their villages, where they are considered more expendable than the young men who will inherit land, to huge urban dorms and factories, where they churn out high-end and knock-off goods alike, to be bought around the world.
Once in these cities, the young women ride buses and trains or walk, streaming between different factories in an unending jostle to find a better job. Like the POM, they buy disposable phones, lose each other’s numbers, and are not necessarily sure what is happening to friends and colleagues. In some ways they are very alone. While the POM want almost any job, the young women leap onward to whatever job offers a few more pennies per hour or a slightly greater chance of making supervisor. It is a hard life, and they cannot afford to stop or they will be lost.
In China it takes four hundred hands to produce an athletic shoe, To make a shoe requires at least 2, 257 gallons of water. It takes ninety pounds of pressure to force a shoe’s layers to adhere.
With each step, a 170-pound man puts 204 pounds of pressure on his foot. I don’t know if you can say that the 8,350,000 steps it takes to trudge the 4,175 miles between Kabul and Berlin puts 1,703.400.000 pounds of pressure on human flesh, but there is definitely pressure. If a POM does reach Germany, he will likely enter a shadow economy of fast-food grills, factories or fields where pay shuttles beneath the table. Like the girls who made his shoes, he will likely send money home. He will work, probably relentlessly and perhaps while shouldering doubt. Is it worth it? Is all the effort and danger and uncertainty worth the dead-endness of it all?
I have worked at a factory for only a month. It was a poultry processing plant where I stuck stickers to skinned chicken breasts, piled handfuls of thimble-sized chicken hearts onto yellow Styrofoam trays, and filled bags with drumsticks. No post-shift shower managed to fully wash away the smell of bleach and chicken fat.
To my right on the conveyor belt line worked an older Vietnamese man who was saving up to send his son to medical school. To my right was a man from Nigeria who headed to night school after his shifts. There are so many people who force their personal dreams into the shapes and rhythms of machinery so their children can one day hold jobs that require less desperate showering.
Outside the WASH in late July, Serbian police rounded dozens of POM onto buses. First the police offered kebabs, gesturing broadly as though describing a rainbow. Then they gave orders. When one young man dashed away from a circle of police, they caught him and smacked him with nightsticks. We did not know where the police would take the POM, though in a few weeks they might be back.
Countries take showers, too, in the form of policies and regulations meant to manage who can enter and who must be scrubbed off the land. These showers imply walls, razor wires, separation, water deprivation, and the cultivation of a clinging fear and uncertainty.
Do you remember, during the pandemic, if you took more showers than usual? A few people did buckle down into longer and more frequent cleansing, but overall, people in the US took 17% fewer showers. Safe behind our own doors and spared from having to keep up appearances, we loosened hygiene standards a little.
It is not necessarily bad to shower less when you do not have to go anywhere. Hot water can dry skin out, increasing the odds of infection. As many of us also discovered, however, going without exposure to others leads to different, more existential infections like anxiety, loneliness, and depression. And foregoing exposure to others’ microbiomes causes your own to languish over time, leading to more monocultural gut bacteria, sleeplessness, exhaustion, bad digestion, and sour moods. Without regular stimulation, the immune system shuts down. The odds of becoming mentally and physically ill rise.
For better or worse, we meet each other in the water and in the air. Even when we are still, our cells travel. Do not forget to be grateful for this cellular marketplace of exchange, where we strengthen one another’s immune systems and keep each other healthy. Not all of us, I know. But most. Herd immunity requires the herd, steady contact, and the chance to share space with strangers. For the good of everyone, a measure of dirt and germs is necessary.
It may not be strictly accurate to draw a parallel between accepting the increased diversity refugees can bring to a country and accepting the need to expose ourselves to strangers’ bacteria for our own health. It would be insultingly reductive to portray POM as cells conveying cultural information that strengthen societies elsewhere, just as it is insulting to reduce them to threats or to units of labor or to knock-off shoes walking, walking, walking.
But. I suppose I’m trying to say POM and strangers in general bring connection, and that while you cannot always be sure of what will come from a non-commercial interaction, you can be certain that to resign yourself to solitary confinement leads more quickly to breakdowns. In exchange for illusory skin safety, the solitary earn troubled minds turning round and round in their tight skull cages.
While washing clothes that summer, I thought of refugees and water shortages, climate change and pandemics, labor practices and loneliness and the fear of contamination and of having to change and, most of all, the fear of not being safe. Whatever we do and whoever we are, however, we are not completely safe. Perhaps safety should not even be our highest aspiration.
When, I wonder, was the last time you drank from the same bottle as another human? When was the last time you washed another person’s feet? Or skipped a shower to meet up with friends? Or protested unjust, overprotective laws or policies that waste our water? And when was it when you last contemplated how we, in the end, will ourselves become literal dirt, in all the contamination and growth that implies?
I nodded, wrote on masking tape in red Sharpie whatever names the men chose to give me, then stuck the tape to the laundry hampers that held their dirty clothes. The other volunteers and I were busy that summer, like greeters at an odd and heart-rending ultramarathon, registering arrivals, taking laundry, and distributing boxers or pairs of thin socks.
“Shower?” we asked. “Douche? Hammam?” We tried to guess what language each one spoke. “Dari? Pashto? Arabic?” We did not speak those languages, but sometimes we stumbled into mutual French or German. We gestured toward the bowl that held spotty apples or hard plums; we indicated the water cooler and the spare outlets where phones could charge. We waved for the next man in line to go upstairs when the shower attendant yelled down that there was a free stall.
If approached by a stranger in a little public park in a strange city and offered a free shower, would you accept? What an odd and awkward offer, and it felt odd and awkward, too, pinpointing the young men by their black clothes and backpacks, then exhibiting laminated sheets of paper at that explained in multiple languages what the WASH Center was and what it offered.
Yet many of the men we approached nodded, exchanged questioning glances, then followed us up the cobblestoned hill of Kamenicka street, past the foraging street cats, the patent leather shoes spread for sale, and the shops that sold gardening supplies, including the rubber gloves we bought for handling dirty clothes.
The men packed into the Center shoulder to shoulder, tapping on burner phones, scratching toes protruding from separating shoes, flinging smiles at us in flashes. Did we know how to find an affordable barber? Was playing music allowed? Once in a while a man would pull up his shirt— “Look!” The pink runnel of scar tissue left from a Taliban bullet.
It smelled in the WASH Center of mint tea and damp skin. The fans broke regularly, almost as often as the temperature climbed over 90 degrees. But the men endured because it is important to be clean or because there was nowhere else to be right then or because their friends and fellow people on the move (POM, we called them) were also there, or perhaps because their feet hurt so very badly.
As the creaking summer sweated onward, the groups of young men swelled in size. We started completing more than 100 showers in seven hours. The line went out the door—no wonder passing Serbians stared at the sight: weary men with tidy hair trying to joke with tattooed, pierced volunteers who were wearing thrift-store clothes. Volunteers and POM both wore a lot of black because even though black clothing attracts heat it can also hide dirt. Many of the volunteers came from places the POM were trying to reach: Berlin, London, anywhere in the EU, really. But those places are miles from Belgrade, that White City where Ottoman-era fountains still run after 500 years and scores of cultures still bump and mingle in an atmosphere of wood smoke and butter.
By the time they reached us, the POM had likely spooned up goulash in Turkey or chickpea stew in Greece, had drunk swallow after swallow of tepid water from plastic bottles, had worn life vests stuffed with bubble wrap, had been burned by boat fuel mixed with seawater, and may have been sent back, sometimes multiple times, to the nearest border. Still they surged toward the chance to man kebab grills in Frankfurt or change spark plugs in Warsaw. They wanted work, wanted to learn English, wanted to bring the rest of their family somewhere safe.
They wanted to laugh, and so they did. They joked about the boxers and the pop music we played; they giggled as they tried to teach us different words for ‘apple’ or ‘thank you.’ Most shifts, in fact, passed as one long and often amusing pantomime. The WASH Center itself was also funny in a heart-cracking way: hand-drawn signs, things held together with duct tape and clothes pins, the fans, when they were functioning, spinning so fast the poster about scabies rattled against the one about how to report border violence.
Of course it was also not funny at all. Picture one of the men who has walked the farthest descending the stairs after his shower. He keeps one hand on the wall, the other on the railing, and he shuffles like a clean 80-year-old. Gleaming comb lines in his hair, shining teeth in his smile as he tries to reassure his friends. He is fine. Really, fine. He will be fine.
Ah, but those feet. If you are a hiker, you know the effects of boot friction over distance: the puffy blisters, the raw, slick spots, the black toenails. Imagine what knock-off shoes do to feet over the span of a continent. The bottom layer of the foot begins to detach. After a shower it is pale and soggy, threatening to peel back. There are also calluses, cracked scabs, serum oozing from damaged skin. There is sloughing, bruised shins, ankles stippled with poppy-red hot spots and calves peppered with the small, dark flecks of scabies. Do we have antiseptic spray? Bandages?
They left with their right hands clasped over their hearts in thanks. They often left hobbling, using each other as crutches, wearing their shoes half-on like slippers. They went out into the dry, wavering air as we stayed behind, listening to hot water gurgling in pipes and swooshing over and over in the washing machines.
Water matters in Belgrade, the place where the Sava and Danube rivers meet. There are the fountains left by the Turks as well as the remains of Roman baths. To the east lie the Austro-Hungarian lands of hot springs, to the south, the hammams of Turkey. Serbia is bracketed by these countries of communal cleanness, where a soak is meant to last hours and is much more social than the splashing, five-minute flurry typically conducted solo in the coffin-like dimensions of a Western shower stall. Immerse yourself in bath culture and you may start to find a shower rushed and utilitarian, more about preparing for productivity than savoring being in one’s skin. In Belgrade we wished we could offer the POM the most luxurious spa imaginable.
A simple shower, however, is not nothing.
That’s because it can be very dangerous to appear dirty. People with showers and tubs tend to mistrust those who do not seem clean. Evident dust and mud might mean sickness or carelessness; they might indicate who is in trouble and may subsequently cause even more trouble. Brains, even ones in skulls that were recently lathered, do not always behave rationally, and can cede territory to the gut. Biases against people who appear dirty set in as early as age five, researchers report. In Auschwitz, Primo Levi urged fellow prisoners to take pains to remain as clean as possible, lest guards single them out for lethal showers.
When you are on the move, you cannot afford to inspire disgust. Cleanliness is like oil: it lets potentially disapproving gazes slide right off you. Cleanliness does not guarantee safety, but it cloaks one in acceptability and makes is more likely you will be allowed to slip through fences and train stations and city centers. Cleanliness is short hand: you still care about your life. You still have hot water.
That summer I also visited my parents in southern Washington state. My mother and I visited the Pearl District in Portland to walk beside the Willamette, window-shop, and maybe visit Powell’s Books. We had done all this a dozen times before, but this time many cafes and shops were closed. REI was moving out and more people without homes were trickling in. We did not walk in the little parks. When a shirtless man with dirt-streaked ribs approached, I dove between him and my mother, because he was cursing and jerking his arms and did not seem to see us. I tried to angle my body so my mother would not notice the human shit wiped on several store windows, though she could probably smell it. I know she saw the woman in grimy clothes smoking something off a square of foil.
There is an ugliness to feeling your muscles tighten, your eyes dart away, and your lips clamp in disgust. I felt my own sense of judgment bubble up. Did these people need showers too? Of course, and yet I did not want to volunteer at a WASH Center in my own city. Despite hours of public health classes, despite knowing, at least roughly, why and how zoning laws, unemployment, rising costs, addiction, and insufficient support are consigning so many of my fellow citizens to places where they get dirty and continue to struggle, I wanted to walk away.
Hard. To witness heroin and fentanyl from places like Afghanistan and Mexico traveling into the bodies of people in Oregon with no place to go. Products grown to buy guns and establish control or to eke out survival bought by people trying to smother the raw emotions of not having a place to live. So many Afghans who wanted to reach the US, so many Americans who don’t know where to go, so many kaleidoscope echoes of conflict and retaliation and various acts of turning away. Different dirt in different places, but connected.
Disgust happens for a reason, but not a nice one. Civilization before widespread running water, which was for centuries merely normal civilization, was a place where the smallest puncture in the hazmat-suit that was your skin could admit bacteria and microbes capable of killing you in hours. Today we take our tetanus shots tamely every ten years, but back then? Everyone knew someone who had died of sepsis, lockjaw, or necrosis.
A very deep part of your brain knows that if you want to survive, you stay clean and you keep your distance. To be compassionate or even curious is often to wrestle with the unconscious paranoia writhing in our guts, so we often try to stick only with the people we already know. That happens, of course, at a cost: the cost of failing to care for others, the cost of foregoing benefits others may bring, and the lived cost of remaining ignorant and uninvolved.
When the WASH center filled to capacity and more, twenty-four men bunched into a space built for no more than seven, I reminded myself of the other people these men represented. Not only their sisters and mothers and other family members, not only Marines and World Trade Center employees, but also the factory workers who had made the knock-off Adidas sneakers and Gucci shirts the men were wearing.
A huge percentage of these workers are young women laboring in places like the industrial city of Dongguan, China. They, too, are on the move, migrating seasonally from their villages, where they are considered more expendable than the young men who will inherit land, to huge urban dorms and factories, where they churn out high-end and knock-off goods alike, to be bought around the world.
Once in these cities, the young women ride buses and trains or walk, streaming between different factories in an unending jostle to find a better job. Like the POM, they buy disposable phones, lose each other’s numbers, and are not necessarily sure what is happening to friends and colleagues. In some ways they are very alone. While the POM want almost any job, the young women leap onward to whatever job offers a few more pennies per hour or a slightly greater chance of making supervisor. It is a hard life, and they cannot afford to stop or they will be lost.
In China it takes four hundred hands to produce an athletic shoe, To make a shoe requires at least 2, 257 gallons of water. It takes ninety pounds of pressure to force a shoe’s layers to adhere.
With each step, a 170-pound man puts 204 pounds of pressure on his foot. I don’t know if you can say that the 8,350,000 steps it takes to trudge the 4,175 miles between Kabul and Berlin puts 1,703.400.000 pounds of pressure on human flesh, but there is definitely pressure. If a POM does reach Germany, he will likely enter a shadow economy of fast-food grills, factories or fields where pay shuttles beneath the table. Like the girls who made his shoes, he will likely send money home. He will work, probably relentlessly and perhaps while shouldering doubt. Is it worth it? Is all the effort and danger and uncertainty worth the dead-endness of it all?
I have worked at a factory for only a month. It was a poultry processing plant where I stuck stickers to skinned chicken breasts, piled handfuls of thimble-sized chicken hearts onto yellow Styrofoam trays, and filled bags with drumsticks. No post-shift shower managed to fully wash away the smell of bleach and chicken fat.
To my right on the conveyor belt line worked an older Vietnamese man who was saving up to send his son to medical school. To my right was a man from Nigeria who headed to night school after his shifts. There are so many people who force their personal dreams into the shapes and rhythms of machinery so their children can one day hold jobs that require less desperate showering.
Outside the WASH in late July, Serbian police rounded dozens of POM onto buses. First the police offered kebabs, gesturing broadly as though describing a rainbow. Then they gave orders. When one young man dashed away from a circle of police, they caught him and smacked him with nightsticks. We did not know where the police would take the POM, though in a few weeks they might be back.
Countries take showers, too, in the form of policies and regulations meant to manage who can enter and who must be scrubbed off the land. These showers imply walls, razor wires, separation, water deprivation, and the cultivation of a clinging fear and uncertainty.
Do you remember, during the pandemic, if you took more showers than usual? A few people did buckle down into longer and more frequent cleansing, but overall, people in the US took 17% fewer showers. Safe behind our own doors and spared from having to keep up appearances, we loosened hygiene standards a little.
It is not necessarily bad to shower less when you do not have to go anywhere. Hot water can dry skin out, increasing the odds of infection. As many of us also discovered, however, going without exposure to others leads to different, more existential infections like anxiety, loneliness, and depression. And foregoing exposure to others’ microbiomes causes your own to languish over time, leading to more monocultural gut bacteria, sleeplessness, exhaustion, bad digestion, and sour moods. Without regular stimulation, the immune system shuts down. The odds of becoming mentally and physically ill rise.
For better or worse, we meet each other in the water and in the air. Even when we are still, our cells travel. Do not forget to be grateful for this cellular marketplace of exchange, where we strengthen one another’s immune systems and keep each other healthy. Not all of us, I know. But most. Herd immunity requires the herd, steady contact, and the chance to share space with strangers. For the good of everyone, a measure of dirt and germs is necessary.
It may not be strictly accurate to draw a parallel between accepting the increased diversity refugees can bring to a country and accepting the need to expose ourselves to strangers’ bacteria for our own health. It would be insultingly reductive to portray POM as cells conveying cultural information that strengthen societies elsewhere, just as it is insulting to reduce them to threats or to units of labor or to knock-off shoes walking, walking, walking.
But. I suppose I’m trying to say POM and strangers in general bring connection, and that while you cannot always be sure of what will come from a non-commercial interaction, you can be certain that to resign yourself to solitary confinement leads more quickly to breakdowns. In exchange for illusory skin safety, the solitary earn troubled minds turning round and round in their tight skull cages.
While washing clothes that summer, I thought of refugees and water shortages, climate change and pandemics, labor practices and loneliness and the fear of contamination and of having to change and, most of all, the fear of not being safe. Whatever we do and whoever we are, however, we are not completely safe. Perhaps safety should not even be our highest aspiration.
When, I wonder, was the last time you drank from the same bottle as another human? When was the last time you washed another person’s feet? Or skipped a shower to meet up with friends? Or protested unjust, overprotective laws or policies that waste our water? And when was it when you last contemplated how we, in the end, will ourselves become literal dirt, in all the contamination and growth that implies?
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Cyan James’s MFA is from the University of Michigan. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in Conjunctions, Image, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, The Account, and Salon, among others. Currently she is finishing an essay collection about the wounds we get when we’re young and revising a novel about the women who survived the Green River Killer. She loves fiddles, falconry, long road trips, old front porches, and Laphroig.
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Author's Note:
This piece stretched me a bit because I was trying to connect threads and themes from around the world to ones you might encounter in your own home. Meeting people on the move was an honor as well as a very visceral experience -- I gained a lot of perspective on the kinds of decisions you have to make when you don’t have many official channels open to you, yet need to build a life and support others. I was also struck when researching this piece how connections can be so intimate and yet so “under the radar” (as with the young women working in factories to create the clothing you’re probably wearing right this minute). Writing this, I was thinking a lot about how politics and policies can be very visible and public while all along, out of sight and too often out of mind, churns the very active level where people accommodate, skirt, or try to manage these policies with their bodies and very lives.