It's a State of Mind

I have been pondering how nomadic travel has changed over the decades since I first hit the road.

“The world is changing,” says Galadriel at the beginning of Peter Jackson’s trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. “I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” In the books, though, it is Treebeard who utters this iconic statement as the quest is ending and the hobbits are on their way home. Either way, the emphasis is on profound transformation of the way things have been into something new and different.

I stepped forth onto the open road in the early 1970s. At that time, hitchhiking was common practice amidst budget travelers. Not only in the States, but also in Europe it was common on major roads and highways to see people, especially young people, with their backpacks or duffle bags at their sides and their thumbs out expectantly. At the entrances to some popular European highways, hitchhikers were lined up, individually or in groups of two or three, for a hundred meters or so down the road, and though many drivers stopped to assist, there were always more folks waiting for lifts. One crossroads I recall, on the Peloponnese Peninsula in southern Greece, was a mob scene. When I climbed out of the vehicle I’d been traveling in, I was surrounded by forty or fifty travelers, all looking to hitchhike to Olympia, the site of the ancient games. The only people getting rides in that location, where the drivers were overwhelmingly Greek males, were teamed up with young women. I managed to attach myself to a small group composed of two men and a German woman and thus moved on, but it wasn’t easy. Usually, however, in that era, rides came easy - so much so that on one trip I hitchhiked clear across the Middle East and all the way to Goa on the west coast of India.

Alas, those days are long gone. You never see hitchhikers on the road these days. It isn’t safe. Drivers are more suspicious. As quoted above: the world has changed.

It also used to be common for people to take long road trips in their cars or camper vans. I used to love to drive Interstate 5 from Seattle to California and back. Later, when I was living in Europe in the eighties and nineties, I used to love to take trips in borrowed campers - until with a well-timed inheritance my young family and I managed to buy our own. In Italy and Greece it was easy to find a place to stop for the night. There were regular campgrounds, of course, which we could pay for if we happened to have the money, but it was also possible to pull over almost anywhere and bed down for the night: at rest areas, parking lots at parks and beaches, and even the parking lots of shops and restaurants, provided we requested permission first. As long as we asked first, we could stop almost anywhere.

More recently in the States, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder highlighted the trend of retired couples and individuals, instead of enduring the expense and inconvenience of traditional homes, hitting the road fulltime in RVs. The book told of where these people would stay, the temp jobs they would take, and the road culture that arose as the travelers met and mingled. This still goes on, I’m sure, but I am concerned for the safety and security of these committed nomads as the federal government and more and more state governments treat homeless, or rather houseless, people as criminal indigents.

Times change. Situations evolve. And not everyone has the physical stamina or finances to remain on the road permanently in their vehicles. That’s why I emphasize that being a perennial nomad is a state of mind. It is the awareness that regardless of our specific locations, we are all hurtling through space in a gargantuan RV called the planet Earth. None of us can claim permanency anywhere, because in the time it takes me to write this sentence, we have moved from one point in the universe to another with no possibility of ever returning to where we were. That’s why I encourage everyone, regardless of your circumstances, to think like a nomad. If you can’t travel far from your homeland, expand your horizons by reading books and explore your environs by visiting museums and other nearby treasure-hoards of learning. If you can physically travel, on foot or by car or bus or train or plane or ship, great! If you can’t - then feed your head. In an article a few years back in The Guardian, singer/songwriter Grace Slick clarifies what she meant by the phrase “feed your head” in the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit.” She says, “The line in the song ‘feed your head’ is about both reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.” The song was a big hit in the sixties with its powerful references to Alice in Wonderland and its allusions to psychedelics, but the point I want to make here has nothing to do with drugs; it concerns feeding your nomadic mind and heart with experiences such as traveling, exploring the locale in which you find yourself, and delving into the endless multiverse of literature. Stay curious. Stay attentive. Stay receptive. And stay on the move.