On Bumdom

We've got some weather in these parts this weekend, so that makes for a nice excuse to hang out all day at the library.  Sometimes I like to wander around with no purpose, and just pick up and read books that I otherwise might not ever notice. 

I picked this one up, and was so pumped about the first two pages, I thought I'd reproduce them in their entirety, with one minor humble edit:

When I was very young, and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.  When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.  In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.  Nothing has worked.  Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.  The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.  In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum.  I fear the disease is incurable.  I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.  This to the practical bum is not difficult.  He has a built in garden of reasons to choose from.  Next he must plan his trip in time and space, and choose a direction and a destination.  And last he must implement the journey.  How to go, what to take, how long to stay.  This process is invariable and immortal.  I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over.  A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys.  It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.  A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.  And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.  We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.  Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip.  Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it.  Only then do the frustrations fall away.  In this way, a journey is like a marriage. (or a lapacaca). The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.  I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it. 

That selection sent me meandering through various adventure books.  Walking from Tierra Del Fuego to the North Slope sounds fun, but a 7 year mission is a bit of a hefty time frame at the moment.  Riding the rails would be sweet, so I checked out Theroux's classic.  But most of those trains are no longer in service.  To follow his footsteps, we'd have to hop freight trains.  That'd be fun, but we'd need a pretty good sling to carry Revel safely.  Also inspiring wanderlust, Reader's Digest.  An unlikely source, but in 1980 they put out guide to the natural wonders of the world.  (Available through Amazon for a mere penny!  I can't afford NOT to buy it.  I think it will be the perfect anniversary present for Genevieve.)  Exotic geographic features in far-flung lands always get me fired up.  Especially when they consist of large snowy mountains that can be ridden.  Or glissaded. 

If the weather cooperates, I'll be on a mini-adventure tomorrow, 220 air miles upriver via an Alaska State Trooper Cessna 206 to the town of McGrath.