Wanderlust—Again

One of the many advantages of being single and a wanderer is that you can be up and gone without much preparation. There are no schedules to coordinate, no dogs to feed, no permissions to obtain. Already this year I have been to Boston, New Mexico and Arizona, Guatemala, and just this week another road trip to northern California. You might think that so much traveling in the first four months of the year would slake my thirst for the road. Just the opposite has happened, in fact. I want to travel more. And I will. I hope to return to Joshua Tree for a backpacking trip with students next weekend, and then I have a trip to Europe with St. Judy of Ohio, her daughter, and granddaughter.

During one of our many conversations last year, I asked Judy why she did not travel more. She is retired, interested in the world, and has the means to travel. When she told me that she had always wanted to go to England, I asked her why she hadn’t. She said that she didn’t feel comfortable getting around in another country. I said, “Hell, I’ve been there many times and driven all around the UK. I’ll go with you and drive if you like.” And it was done. Her daughter and granddaughter are anglophiles and especially love the nineteenth-century worlds created by the Brontës and Jane Austen. That’s actually my least-favorite literature (though Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is pretty good), but I am happy to facilitate my family’s foray into British culture. (For what it’s worth, I like the bookends to those Victorian writers: the Romantics before them and the Modernists after them.) So I will leave a day early this June so that I can meet them at Heathrow, then we will spend the next two weeks in London, the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, and the East, with a side trip to Paris through the Chunnel on the Eurostar. They will return to the states, but I will stay and return to the continent where I will bum around Europe. I’ve always wanted to see Greece and Italy, and I wouldn’t mind visiting Prague, Copenhagen, and Oslo. Who knows where I will end up? Maybe Istanbul or St. Petersburg.

Will this be enough travel for me? Likely not. For me, travel breeds more wanderlust. This week I drove up California 395 toward Tahoe, one of the great drives in America. Then I came down through the San Joaquin Valley, cutting over into Yosemite, King’s Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. It was one of the great weeks and drives of many in my life, and I feel refreshed and invigorated–and ready to leave again. I dread the prospect of going back to the office for our four-week May Term. Students and the university are great, but I am dealing with some problems, and I would rather not. But I would be feeling the wanderlust regardless. Whitman: “I am restless and make others so.” Maybe St. Mary of New York was right: the road is my home.

The irony is that I am in an ideal situation in so many ways. I have a great job, financial stability, and a nice place to live. Moreover, I am five or six years away from being set for life: I would have tenure, a full professorship, and a year-long sabbatical during which I can travel and write. But that is precisely what worries me: I would be settled and would find it harder than ever to leave. My pattern seems to be that I reach for something wonderful (Prestigious University or Cool University), have the good fortune to grasp it, then move on. It’s almost as if reaching a geographical or spiritual place is enough, then I am ready to reach again. Academe is the least conducive realm to this type of thinking, and I’ve already changed jobs more than any other professor I know, and everything rational tells me to do my five years and settle in. I would resign as director of the Buffalo Center and simply teach my five classes a year, including travel classes. I would be set and could save some money toward retirement.

But there’s that voice:

You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you;
What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

I want to keep moving, and more than missing a chance to be “set” or to “settle,” I want not to miss the chance to be moving “forever alive, forever forward.” A psychologist might tell me I am running from something, and she might be right. I would be running from being or even feeling locked in. But I also like to think I am running to something: to freedom, to self-determination, to life.

These are random and idle thoughts on a warm Saturday afternoon in SoCal, after a week-long journey full of goodness and light. I’ll probably go to work on Monday, but if I don’t, look for me on the road, where I may just find a town and work in it until I am ready to move on. Or maybe I won’t come back from Europe and will find myself, like Odysseus, looking for home along the Mediterranean. Everything is possible. There are no endings or beginnings, only the road.

Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys;
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you—however long, but it stretches and waits for you;
To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither,
To see no possession but you may possess it—enjoying all without labor or purchase—abstracting the feast, yet not abstracting one particle of it;
To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go,
To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them—to gather the love out of their hearts,
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road—as many roads—as roads for traveling souls.