Mile: 0
I had a simultaneous need to be somewhere and nowhere. Eighteen-months a wanderer, with never the same bed from month to month. I am ready for work, rest, and routine. But I couldn't just wait around for those things to happen.
"A man who can't get things to go right can at least go."
~ William Least Heat-Moon
~ William Least Heat-Moon
So, a new project came to mind. While I would fill out job applications and send resumes throughout the country, I would be a tumbleweed again. Though this time, of a goal undefined.
Craigslist offered an option. A new journey with new rules. Under the community forum, I would read the rideshare offers. Starting from Boston, I would go wherever people were willing to take me. East was as good as West, North as South. I had nowhere to be that I could just be now, here. A dandelion seed going wherever the wind will blow it.
But what would be the end? Would there be one? After a year and a half of wandering I've been looking forward to a domestic life. Sheets, showers, toasters, and tea in porcelaine cups. But this, this postponement, this non-goaled journey. Why?
Because I'd rather be wandering roads, and new ones each day, than grow familiar with unemployment and indolence. The depression of another refused application is easier to deal with when the road flows beneath me.
This is, perhaps, the most true odyssey I've ever begun, knowing neither where it would take me, or even what I was looking for. If it were the classic American roadtrip, it would have a clear end - California, Florida, Alaska - and expectations of adventure and intrigue. In prior trips I had known the character of the adventure and eagerly anticipated the unexpected. Now I knew them all, their general pattern, and looked forward to their end, which would come when I either found work, or exhausted the last of my funds. Whichever comes first.
So, a travel sketch, and not a project. I guess that shows some optimism that the wandering will be short. Or rather, that I will ramble as long as necessary, and no longer.
