Old With Wandering

The overwhelming urge – having posted up in Massachusetts this past summer – was to gas up a cosmic weed whacker and clear out the choking tangle of green. I couldn’t see anything. The wall of trees and vines hid the sky from me. Weather snuck up on me and disappeared just as fast. I’ve grown accustomed to long range views, watching multiple weather systems unfold at once. In New England, I wanted to cut it all down, escape the green body bag.

Holly and I have switched our game. We have a new rig and a new plan, a new method. We still will wander and seek, but slower and with longer pauses. The Nowhere Van is gone, off to Tennessee with Greg, who will head to Alaska and elsewhere before he undertakes even further adventure, boating the Great Loop. I remind myself of why we started this, why we’re here now, and why we’ll continue. Our new name – Old With Wandering – is from The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

W.B. Yeats

So we have changed to a truck and trailer for our travels. This makes sense for slowing down and spending longer in one place. The place for us last summer was a US Army Corps of Engineers site in Massachusetts. In exchange for work at a recreation site, we got a lovely RV site overlooking a dam. We live in a trailer – we have a bathroom! – and drive around in a truck. Our reason for travel – I went out to the hazel wood / Because a fire was in my head – remains. We have a burning to see the land and meet its inhabitants. For now that means we meet the same inhabitants over and over, like the old days in one place.

[Imagine a pause of a few months. That just happened.]

We made it through the summer in Massachusetts, happy to have made interesting new friends, and pleased with the slower pace of our days – learning from having a daily routine other than firing up the van and leaving. We became friends with Brian, a fellow volunteer and intrepid soul. He had a wealth of adventure to regale us with – and to fill two books! We hope to see Brian again. He will be heading west this winter. We think about Brian a lot. Another friend was mine alone; Holly never met him. Kyle is ultra-MAGA – truck flag, vulgar hat, the whole deal – and yet we clicked. We first talked about litter, dogs, birds, but we didn’t avoid politics. We each saw the humanity in the other and ended up liking one another. Go figure.

Choosing Massachusetts as our first volunteer locale was to be near local friends and family. It was lovely to be able to see folks nearby. We added on two weeks in Connecticut near Holly’s mom, Carole, who helped us create our first quilt collage triptych.

Our second volunteer gig was in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, working for the US Forest Service in the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. We arrived in the midst of a deluge. It was like living a sluice with no escape from rushing water. Low pressure had stalled a big bag of rain over the mountains for a week, and everything was soggy through and through. Then the hurricane came. Helene was – and remains – a brutal attack on the unwitting mountains. We were north of the worst of it, but we had to evacuate our little campground, leaving our rig in the screaming wind and rain. We were lucky to get a hotel room with electricity for a few days, waiting for the OK fetch our trailer out of the forest.

We tried to be helpful in those few days, showing up at emergency shelters to lend a hand. We learned a bit about the resolve of mountain folks. They weren’t flocking to get aid. They were holding fast in their homes keeping an eye on the rising waters and looking out for neighbors. We spent an afternoon at the Sugar Grove (VA) Volunteer Fire Department, where folks were cooking food to hand out, and keeping supplies ready. No one came in to get help, so we offered to deliver goods, but it seemed everybody was already cared for. We chatted with an unlikely fellow named William – a self-described pagan in a sea of Baptists. The fact of us talking to William was all that everyone else needed to know about us. In our chat, I opined that a little mountain town with not much economic activity would benefit from universal health care and Pre-K. He said they don’t want it – that they’d rather make do on their own. My preconceptions continue to fall like first-wave infantry.

We actually sort of had a Plan B. We had turned down a position near the Outer Banks in favor of the mountains. Thankfully the spot was still open, so we made our way to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. We have 160,000 acres to ourselves – at night at least – and I can see far. That helps my brain and breathing. Holly and I work at a beautiful visitor center, walk on the beach, drive on gravel roads looking for critters and just get by. It’s a lovely spot for three months. Nothing earth-shaking is happening here, which is fine.

I think often about the men I call friends, and hope I don’t forsake them. I think a lot about Bob, who has moved to a steep (very!) mountainside in the Philippines with his wife Mylen, a Filipina. He is doing astonishingly hard things to make a new life. That in itself is a good life, and I have many men in my life who do astonishingly hard things and are good men and good role models for me.

And to our new handle – Old With Wandering – we also think about getting old(er), and what to do when we choose, or are forced, to stop wandering. It could be 10 or 15 years hence, or next week. However that goes, it will certainly be something we’d have never dreamed of even a couple of years ago. The first couple we ever met who were full time travelers had been at it 20 years from age 55 to 75! Their names were Jim and Pat, and we ran across them at Bridal Veils Falls in Stowe, VT. That was a long time ago. They were truly inspirational – though I bet they’d cringe at that characterization – and got us thinking. And here we are, Old With Wandering.