(5)

Sometimes on these fine, warm, late summer days, I decide to go out walking towards the country instead of going over to the cemetery.  Since I live right at the edge of town, the country's not far away.  It doesn't take long before the houses begin to space out, yards turning into open fields and eventually, if I go far enough, into acres of corn, for that's what the farmers around here mostly plant.  Sometimes when I go out walking along these country roads I take a plastic bag with me, just as I do when I go into the woods over by the cemetery, and pick up some of the trash I find by the roadside.  I must admit that I rather like thinking of the spectacle I present to passing motorists; they probably imagine me to be some sort of scavenger, looking for treasure amongst other people's garbage.  And I figure, what's wrong with that?  Other times I find that I'm a little embarrassed to think this, and I want to yell out at them, "Stop trashing up the world!  It's your garbage I'm picking up!"  But of course to do that really would embarrass me even more.  And so I'm taught something about humility through the process; also I'm taught something about pride.

Sometimes the objects I find seem to me very curious.  Once I found a perfectly good child's toy, a small plastic dinosaur, half-buried in the mud.  This seemed to me very suggestive in a symbolic manner, and I was reminded of a comedian who'd once joked that for all we know, nature's whole intention in producing the human race was to bring about the creation of plastic.  And it's true, really:  we don't any of us know why the things that happen in the world happen as they do; we only pretend to.  Certainly there exists a feeling these days that all the changes we have wrought upon this earth are carrying us forward like some giant tidal wave we cannot control, and whether it destroys us or delivers us safely to some farther shore we will not know until it happens.  But each day when I walk, I find that I grow more and more curious about these things.  Where are we going, I wonder?  Where am I going – and what will I find when I, finally, get there?

Well, today I found a fresh and almost full pack of cigarettes.  Somebody must have tossed them from their car as they were driving by.  I know this trick, having tried it myself:  someone who's trying to give up the tobacco habit gave in and bought a pack, smoked one or two cigarettes out of it and then, angry at having given in yet again to such an unhealthy addiction, threw the rest of the pack out the car window.  But today I felt a scavenger's sense of good fortune and put the cigarettes in my shirt pocket to save for later.  Farther still along the road I found a single playing card – the king of hearts.  This too I picked up and stuck into my pocket.  Perhaps it would prove a lucky omen for me.  Perhaps it foretold of a new love in my future!

Sometimes too when I'm out walking like this I am reminded of my boyhood dream of becoming a tramp.  A child's ambition, perhaps – and yet I've read the work of poets and of other writers too who made long journeys across their countries and wrote about what they experienced along the way.  Also I've heard stories of average men and women, displaced from society by circumstance or by choice, who set out to destinations unknown, traveling with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and whatever they could carry with them.  Consumed by wanderlust, or forced by the sense that their lives were restricted to an intolerable degree by circumstances over which they had no control, they simply picked up and left.  This sounds both liberating and romantic; but it must be, I imagine, a very difficult thing to accomplish in fact – not only physically but psychologically and emotionally as well.  For myself, it's not anything of a material nature which prevents me from undertaking such a venture; neither are my familial ties so tenuous that they would not survive my traveling to other areas of the country.  Rather, it's the practical considerations that overwhelm me.  How do these people eat, I wonder?  Where do they get such money as they need?  How do they wash their clothes, or themselves – or do they just not bother?  How do they avoid falling prey to someone else's more malicious intentions?  I simply do not know.  What's required to make a success of this, as well as virtually any other purposefully chosen style of life, is some capacity for self-reliance, some degree of inner fortitude, that I have never seemed to possess.  By which I mean that while I am capable, eager, and even dogmatical in my insistence upon intellectual independence, I have found that this independence comes with a rather nasty sting in its tail:  it makes me aware of just how futile the concept of freedom really is.  I suppose that what I speak of is the realization that it's impossible, no matter how far you travel, to ever escape yourself.  This self, qualified as it is by the burdens of past memories and of future expectations, by the tetherings of guilt and the straining after pleasure, by the ongoing battle between fatuous desire and genuine need, is something whose care requires so much attention that I cannot seem to find the necessary resources within me to simply lay it aside, no matter what the enticements offered by my wanderlust.  This self is, after all, the only thing of value I really possess.  In a sense it is my jailer but, as such, I must assume that it also holds the key that will eventually set me free.  If I have any goal in life, the pursuit of this key is the only one which appears to suit me.

And so, despite my sense of restlessness, I find that I am slowly approaching middle-age without ever having spent any real length of time away from this one small town.  My restlessness remains bottled up inside me, and I have no recourse but to explore whatever territory I may discover within the boundaries of my own heart and mind.  I find myself with no other choice, really, but to explore that territory which is known, for lack of a better phrase, as the realm of the imagination – of the spirit.  And, given that I have no other choice, I find that I must simply trust that this is how it was always meant to be.

WALKING NO PLACE SPECIAL