Kira Rambles

My Dad loves spy movies. Maybe it’s his past life in army intelligence, but I grew up with boxed sets of James Bond and Jason Bourne movies in the basement. When we paused to make popcorn, he would take the wooden dowel we used to prop open the kitchen window and fight air enemies, and I could picture him as the stick and knife martial arts instructor my Mom met and married as a pre-med student. 

When I was twenty, I moved to Spain. I had never left the United States before, but I studied Spanish, and I knew I needed immersion to cement the language. I’m a heritage speaker on my Dad’s side; he spoke Spanish until he was three and his parents separated, and while he studied Korean at the Defense Language Institute, he always regretted not moving to a Spanish-speaking country to remember his first language. 

The Summer before I left for Spain, I worked as a backpacking guide in Durango, CO. Two weeks on. Two weeks off. I was eight hours from my parents’ house in Denver, and I said I was living in my pickup to explore the Southwest on my off shifts, but I always found my way back to the Front Range for a load of laundry and some spy movies before returning to the field. 

That Summer, I gravitated towards James Bond because of the Q Branch, the team who prepares him for every mission with high tech gadgets and always answers the phone when something goes wrong. My last offshift, in August, as I packed a behemoth backpack with the plain, dressy clothes I would augment with day-glo crop tops and baggy blazers in Bilbao, my Dad talked me through his tips for international travel. We laid out my euros and dollars and travel documents on our kitchen table, and he taught me how to distribute them between secure locations in my luggage and on my person. We made an emergency call list. I packed an old cracked phone T-mobile wouldn’t trade in, so I could buy a cheap SIM card and still call the embassy or home if something went wrong. 

In short, I met with my Q Branch. 

Last May, I participated in a fellowship through Western Colorado University that took a group of students to France, Germany, and the Czech Republic. At twenty three, I was among the older students, and I was one of the few who had previous experience abroad. One of my classmates said, crying on a park bench, that she was scared to navigate the city on public transportation alone because her parents told her she would be sex trafficked. She had never flown on a plane before the trip. 

That comment grounded me for a few minutes. I grieved for the constant fear that kept her from enjoying the fellowship, and I felt grateful to have a family that prepared me, not scared me, to explore. 

I’m sure I scared my Dad when I moved to Spain. I know I scared him when I took a gap year after and moved to Argentina; he tried to talk me out of it. When he couldn’t, though, we spread out my pesos and dollars and travel documents on the kitchen table. We made an emergency call list. He dropped me off at the airport. 

And today, when either of us travel, we still have the other on call as a Q Branch.