An Essay on Modern Nomadism
I’ve never had itchy feet, not in the sense of travel or wanderlust. Itchy feet, as far as my knowing, was always a dermatological issue, not a spiritual malady. But, something changed roughly this time last year, and I can feel it changing again.
June, 2023 — That was the month my wife and I decided it was time to up sticks and leave our long-time home in Alaska. We opted for Arizona, for a litany of reasons both familial and climatic. It was both the hardest, and easiest, choice we’d ever made together. It’s always surprised me that big decisions have the attribute of being a riddle; difficult to parse, but once solved the solution could never have been more obvious.
After explaining our decision to family, friends, and jobs — all featuring individuals whose reactions ran the gamut from supportive to surprised to almost insulted — the real work got started. The work of moving, of re-settling, is a physical ordeal as much as an emotional or spiritual one. What to keep? What to not keep? What can I schlep in a vehicle that’s only 15’ 9” from schnoz to boot; and, even better and more pertinent, what is valuable enough to carry all 3,700 miles?
These were the sorts of questions I agonized over. We had a full house to go through, as well as two separate storage units. The amount of stuff one person, let alone a married couple, can accumulate is almost an insult to our herdsman ancestors. Did you really need that all-wood Radio Flyer sled? What plans did you have for eight separate tires for two separate vehicles (neither of which you still own)? And your books, board games, and childhood trinkets! Did you value them so much that you kept them in box after box, in a shed that smelled like ancient particleboard and decades old dust? The answer to all of these was the same: I had plans, at the time, but now those plans have changed.
After a crash course in learning to let go, we had everything ready to go — life was adequately portioned, right-sized, crammed and stuffed, broken down, boxed up, and shipped out. We were ready to set sail.
Wagons, Ho! — This was a phrase from America’s past as much as my own. When my parents and I, all the way back in 1997, moved from Arizona to Alaska, this was a phrase we used every morning after piling into our Ford Ranger. Bags packed, seat belts buckled, engine running? Well then, wagons, ho! Dad encouraged us to say it every morning, and it was a refrain I used more than once in my head when, 26 years later, I was leaving The Last Frontier for The Grand Canyon State. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like time is a flat circle.
I won’t go into the three-week odyssey here, but know it was liberating in a way I never knew and could never expect. We rushed through Canada — something I regret doing now, and not just because multiple, and consecutive, ten-hour days were brutal on the back — and when we arrived in Montana it felt like coming home and journeying into a strange land. The first night in Montana, nestled in a campground on the Madison River and just below the headwaters of the Missouri River (yes, that Missouri River) I honest-to-god wept.
There was a poetry in feeling so moved in that exact spot. It was a symbolism that I must have been aware of at the time, on some level, even though it took me months to realize later. Being in that place, at the origin of Big Muddy, standing near where Lewis and Clark had stood, it felt like I was standing in a great, cosmic river — one where the past, present, and future were together. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel it. I was doing something many others before had done — left home and hearth behind to seek my fortune in the West. I saw myself in that moment as an adventurer, and one in a long-line stretching back to others who had done similar things, who had set out for similar reasons. I was no Lewis and Clark and no Sacagawea, no Louis Jolliet or Jacques Marquette (the first two Europeans to see the Missouri), but I was me and I was here. Those mighty few had seen this place with eyes like mine, and I wonder if they too were as moved as I had been. There, before them, was the future and a land of vast, unknown promises; behind them was the past, comfort and everything they already knew.
Dropping down into Montana, moving from the Canadian Rockies to the American Rockies, felt like crossing an invisible boundary, a threshold of newness. We had done it, we were doing it, and it was only in Montana that I realized we had really, truly done something that many think about, long for, but never even try — for one reason or another.
It didn’t hurt that we also wanted to. But this move was not about itchy feet, not really. We had a list of reasons ( being closer to aging parents, worsening allergy seasons, cost of living) that were all good and true — and people have pulled up stakes for less — but itchy feet was not one of them. On some level, too, we just needed a fresh start.
But reverting to a type of pastoralism, a weird and car-centric nomadry, revealed a certain freedom that does not exist for most people anymore — at least not in the United States. Maybe the rare train hopper or thru-hiker is witness to the revelation. The real eye-opener is that there is a freedom in being on the road and on the move, of boondocking, of meeting other friendly travelers at campsites, reading until it was literally too dark to do so, waking up outside (on a cold morning) with the right amount of blankets, and of drinking instant coffee by a dead campfire. You can go anywhere, be anyone, and own your time. There was something simple about it, something basic and prehistoric; as close as one can reasonably get with such modern amenities as instant coffee, sleeping pads, and a Subaru.
And now, ensconced in the borderlands south of Tucson in a comfortable townhouse, I feel the urge. Not to travel, for the sake of it, but to travel because I think I really need to. Since standing on the shores of the Madison River, I’ve felt different. I need less, want less, consume less. But, that less has given me more — more time to think, to see, and to understand what is possible. A lot is possible, as a matter of fact, with the right way of thinking and an equal amount of doing.
What prompted this musing on itchy feet was an ad and, because it’s 2024, it was not in a travel magazine or on the television, but on Instagram. While of course, I hear you cry, an ad on any social media site or application is designed to grab your attention, to whet your appetite, to get the juices for whatever they’re selling going. You’re right. However, what’s unusual about this ad, as I reckon it, is that it was for Iowa.
I have nothing against Iowa. In fact, I know nothing about Iowa save for the little I’ve heard from both my father and one of my closest friends who both went to university there — decades apart, at different schools, studying different things. Iowa, for most people, is a flyover state and home to corn and Caitlin Clark. And yet, it now has a certain allure — both for that it is and for what it represents.
Does this mean we’re planning to up sticks again and haul ourselves off to Iowa? No. Does it mean that, suddenly, a place I had heretofore paid little attention to (beyond the Iowa caucus) might suddenly be interesting, worth a gander, and maybe a nice, long road trip? Maybe. And I ask myself: what is Iowa like? Yes, I could take a tour via Google Street View or scroll through Instagram looking at curated images, but to make that the answer to the question is to miss the forest for the trees. And, to say that this is just about Iowa is to miss the corn for the husk.
Something is stirring in my heart, and I do not know where it will take me or us. My wife is no stranger to itchy feet, and, if this is some spiritual malady that can be contracted then odds are I got it from her. But, really, I think this urge has always been there — waiting quietly — latent like a sleeper agent awaiting its activation phrase. Perhaps the phrase was used, and lost, somewhere on the Madison River.
My wife and I have a short road trip planned for early September (family, baseball, wine, and camping in Colorado), and I hope that scratches the itch — pun intended. If not, well, Change of Address forms are easy to come by.
[This essay first appeared on Desert Dispatch on July 31, 2024.]
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