On the Essence of Maps and Red Bull Vodka

Posted On April 12, 2021

The smell of a Red Bull always takes me back to Dubai. It’s not a pleasant aroma in any way for me. It’s more like a warm and comforting lamp that lights up and gives definition to a darkened and hazy blur of memories from my youth. It conjures up flashes of burning hot nights on the Arabian Peninsula. It brings back thoughts of vodka and discos full of Russians and swimming pools and taxi rides speeding down Sheik Zayed Road back towards “the boat”. It takes me back to the sweltering dilapidated gold souks and frigid cold modern malls. Aircraft carriers and muezzin calls to prayer. See, Red Bull vodka was the drink of choice back then. My good friend, Mo from New Orleans, who passed away a few years ago in a single car accident, introduced me to the drink as a nineteen year old Engineman in the US Navy. And we spent many nights indulging in the unique flavor and delights of that drink, and sometimes camel cheese pizza.

I happened to arrive in the Persian Gulf just days after the initial invasion of Iraq. Which meant I spent the high summer and fall in the city. In Dubai, in the summer, you don’t step out into the heat, the heat steps into you. It seeps viscous like into the bones, lungs and muscles. It slows everything down; my movements, my thoughts, my breathing. It always took some time before I came to terms with the temperature and was able to think properly. And once accustomed it, I would try my best to stay out of the AC, so as not to endure another twenty minute episode of coming to terms with it again. I haven’t since drank so much vodka and or Red Bull since those times on the town in Dubai. It wasn’t every night that we drank that mix, beer was involved too. But the drink of choice in the sailors bars skewed towards the unhealthy Red Bull variety for whatever reason. The dangers of mixing an energy drink with a depressant like alcohol wasn’t talked about as much back then it seems. Even the British and French sailors indulged in the mixed drink with us.

So that’s the smell that stuck with me. Red Bull. Not really even the vodka part, which once masked by the energy drink is really undetected by smell and taste. There were plenty of fun filled nights where I’d wake up at four in the morning, wide awake, heart pounding, and unable to recall how I’d returned to the ship. Unable to go back to sleep. The smell of Red Bull leaking out of every pore. So I’d wander outside and watch the sunrise over the glass like waters of the gulf. Sweating out the toxic mix before the first beams of sunshine touched my skin and the call to prayer hauntingly crackled its first verse through the quiet city.

Why is it that a unique smell can sometimes transport us back to another time, another life, without a second thought or even a say? The nostalgic feeling so intense its like we are there again.

I’m sure there’s some scientific answer to that question. I’ll probably google it later. I’m also secretly hoping there’s some smell now that I don’t think twice about, that will someday transport me back from an old ailing man to a late thirties father with two wild kids, who moonlights as a blogger, and dreams to someday save up enough to quit work and retire early.

What smell will this current chapter of life be? Will it even have one? Or it will it be a timeless blur lost like so many other moments of my life that don’t have the luxury of scents to transport me back to?

I’d like to hope this scent for this chapter of my life will be the smell of bacon cooking. Hickory bacon. Or charcoal smoke. Or fresh ground coffee. Though with my luck it will be some off putting scent like the putrid urine that emanates from the debris strewn alleyway next to my office in the city; but if it draws me back to this point in my life, I’ll happily take it.

We have no say in the matter. No choice on what smell, sound, song, thing will trigger a burst of nostalgic memories. We don’t even choose what time period in our life we might involuntarily flashback to. But how I wish I could have a trigger for this time right now. It’s a good time, and worthy of a flashback scent. Maybe this blog will be a window into my life now. This post. If Happily Disengaged is still around in decades time, will these words be my ticket back?

blank spaces

Joseph Conrad said quite elegantly with his protagonist Marlow: “…I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the Earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say When I grow up I will go there. The North Pole was one of those places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and…well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet–the biggest, the most blank so to speak–that I had a hankering after.”

That paragraph has stuck with me over the years. I remember reading it, cramped and hunched over in my rack, the ship vibrating and rocking under me as it made its way across the South Pacific towards the Middle East and eventually Dubai. I remember reading that and thinking about my own situation: what have you gotten yourself into now? I asked myself with a smile on my face to cover the fear of the unknown. I imagined, pretended, it was the same anxious feeling that afflicts all sailors, no matter the year or century or body of water being traversed, and I was damned lucky to be privy to it and in turn slightly bonded to them and history. The same feeling that Conrad describes as fueling Marlow’s quest into the interior of Africa. Going into the unknown, for me, is the difference between living life or having life live you.

It’s probably because I had no idea where I was going or what I’d see and encounter, that Dubai has had such a profound memory encapsulated in the scent of Red Bull vodka for me.

Those are the best memories right? The ones where we encounter the unexpected. The ones where we’ve been thrust into situations out of our control. It’s that helpless feeling that turns these events of our life story into earmarked pages and underlined paragraphs. Well, for me that’s the case. If things become too monotonous, too complacent, too routine, don’t the days and weeks and months sort of blur together? The older we get the more we have to lose. Which means playing it safe. Less risk taking. Less giving up control to the moment. Playing it safe is secure. It’s predictable. It’s called being responsible. Rational even.

That summer of 2003 in the Middle East, I’d given myself up to the moment. I had no control or say over where I was going. Other than my choice to join the Navy, other worldly, geopolitical forces had taken control of my life by way of a trickle down effect to my ship’s orders. The Navy chose for me where I’d live, who I’d sleep next to, what I’d eat, how often I could communicate with my home country. With this lack of control over my life, I felt alive as ever. So much so, that I started to feel at home on the ship. It became a bustling town floating around the most desolate places on earth…the ocean expanses. And so I didn’t feel so far away from home while I was on the other side of the earth. My home was with me. It was what was outside the ship’s safe hatches that changed. That sort of situation can amplify the culture shock. You don’t get to ease into a place. The front door opens and you step into another country.

That Conrad quote does remind me of an old National Geographic map that I had on the wall of my childhood bedroom beside my bed. It was old enough to have the Soviet Union as being a country on the map. I too would spend, what felt like hours, searching over the map. Reading the funny sounding names of the places. Following the coastlines and the wondering what these places looked like. Looking back, this map had a helping hand in my decision to join the Navy over the Marines. I wanted a branch that would allow me to see the world. And after my service, this map played a role in my decision to backpack around for nearly two years in my late twenties.

I think to myself, how much of what Conrad describes still applies to my life, like I imagined nearly two decades ago? How many of us still have blank spots on our maps? And if we do, are we doing anything about going to those mysterious places? Or are we trying best as we can to avoid the darkness and stay with what we know? Like Marlow on his journey up the Congo in Heart of Darkness, sometimes it might serve us to not know what lays in those mysterious places calling out to us. Sometimes the responsible thing to do is to avoid those blank spots.

But is that truly living a life? Avoiding blank spots on the map and living in the predictable world we’ve made for ourselves? Like any good answer to a good question, it depends.

My oldest daughter has a map above her bed these days too. Her map is a little different from the one I used to have, hers is full of pins from all the places her mother and I have been to. There’s a red pin in Dubai, one that I can never keep from looking at when my eyes caress the map. Sometimes I watch her as she scans over the world on that map and I see myself at that age. I quiz her on the continents and oceans and cities, and she’s slowly starting to comprehend how big the world is. I tell her how I used to have a map over my bed when I was little boy, and that I told myself decades before I did it, that I would one day go to all those cities that have pins in them.

“So you’re done. You’ve been to all the places you wanted to go see when you were a little boy looking at your map, right?” Her eyes are shining and bright when she asks this question. I almost feel as though I’m looking back through time and speaking to myself.

“No, mija. Not even close.”

Are there any unique smells or sounds or food that transport you back to another time in your life? What about your blank spots in the world? Not just in the literal geographic sense. Are you happily avoiding any? Heading towards some? Are they all filled in?