The Need

They don’t care where I have been. They want to know where I am going. –I didn’t realize how true this was until I wrote it. And then it pissed me off. All the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met and the stories I have get lost and forgotten because they don’t care.

“Wow!” They say, when I tell them how long I’ve been traveling. “You must have some great stories! Heh heh. So where you off to next?”

Idiots. This entire country is full of them. Ok, an honorable mention to a few but boy are they far and few between. I used to think of Finn as a pretentious snob for having these very same thoughts. Eventually I thought he was rubbing off on me. Now I just think he’s right. The only difference between us is that I include myself as one of those idiots.

A free country of idiots is what I have got to freely roam. Right? WRONG! It has never been free. It has always been a measured freedom – certain inalienable rights. It’s been mostly free for white men since the beginning. For women and African and Asian Americans it became mostly free yesterday. Then there was prohibition, now there are smoking bans and we might as well believe that all of our phones are tapped. This is a subject I could write a book on and probably should. But for now I’ll leave it at that.

I am tired of it here. Here where it seems no one learns from the past. Historical events beyond 3 or 4 years ago seem to get swept into books and political rhetoric more than they become meaningful lessons in our daily lives. I don’t mean to say that my exploits are anything comparable to 9/11 or devastating hurricanes and tsunamis but don’t they say God is in the details? It is the little stories of strangers saving strangers or loved ones coming together after days or weeks fearing the worst and sometimes the worst has happened. The people who go through these traumatic times will always remember but what about the rest of us? Are we not privy to our own slice of the life-changing pie? Isn’t the point of these stories to learn from them so we might be better prepared should the same happen to us?

And then there are the stories of people like me, people who travel and have seen so many things, met so many different and wonderfully interesting and boring people. I believe these stories can tell us much about our own country. In some ways all Americans are the same and in other ways they are drastically different from region to region and of course from individual to individual. This does not interest many people. It might be said that we are a society ignorant of itself with a scarce impulse to understand who and what we are.

It angers and embarrasses me that this is my species. In a less-than-sober episode last night I began formulating a plan to get out of here. I want to go to Ethiopia, the origin of the Homo sapiens. I thought I would trace back the path of my ancestors. As far as I know most of my blood came from France so I thought I could start there and travel my trailer around the Mediterranean, through the Fertile Crescent, and down to southern Ethiopia.

There’s a boat leaving from New Orleans to Nantes, FR in two weeks. All I need to do is make the drive from Albuquerque in time to store my truck and trailer on the ship. Then it’s a 38-day sail to Antes. For the first time in years I feel a sense of real freedom. Perhaps this trip is naive but today I could not care less, I feel the need.

They don’t care where I have been, only where I am going. So I am going to where we all have been.