After I graduated high school I set off to hike the Appalachian Trail for the summer. I started out with a friend who accompanied me for a few weeks; when he had to leave the trail to head back home, I faced a hard bout of loneliness. One night in a lonely A-frame shelter, I was reading the Psalms in a bible that was left there and feeling especially homesick, quietly crying to myself. Another hiker showed up and I was embarrassed at what I felt was a weakness of character; I confessed to him that I felt like bagging the rest of the trip, and I'll never forget what he said to me, "You know kid, a lot of these guys on the trail are out here because they don't have a family to go home to. Sounds like you do."
One of my buddies from high school (not the same guy who accompanied me on my AT hike) and I grew up hiking and camping and roadtripping together out West, picking up hitchikers in Tucson, pitching a tent in White Sands, and sleeping in our borrowed Explorer in the Gila wilderness. Ivan's* (named changed for privacy) parents were divorced, and his mom was remarried to a guy he regarded as a kind of ogre whom he had no love or regard for. Ivan was a very good looking guy with rugged features, who had done some modeling. While he always seemed to be the kind of guy who would be featured in a Men's Health or GQ magazine, I always felt there was a deep insecurity about not knowing how or what it meant to be a man that lived beneath the surface. His father didn't really raise him, and his stepfather was a kind of stranger in his home.
As we went to college and even after college, we stayed in touch. I settled down in my late twenties and got married, but my buddy never did. He continued to live a nomadic life that I lived vicariously through. I would send him texts, "Where in the world is Ivan today?" and he would text me back from a sailboat in Iceland or some remote village in a far-off country. He was a talented photographer, who had gone to grad school to learn it. "Man, he is living the life," I thought.
At some point, he became a Mormon and did a two year mission in Russia. I believe the Mormon religion was attractive to him because it offered the prospect of the family he never had and always wanted. The community he joined seemed to take him in, though he found it difficult to meet a "nice girl" to settle down with given that he was now in his late thirties and never had a steady job or way to provide. He eventually left the Church of LDS; I assume he just became disillusioned, possibly with the theology, but also that perhaps he never ultimately found what he was looking for: a family and a home.
The last time I texted Ivan he had converted a van while crashing on a friend's couch in L.A. and was living on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land somewhere in California. He was the definition of an conquistador adventurer, but we were now in our forties and I got the sense in corresponding with my friend that all he really wanted was a family, and by this time it was too late. Whether he was suited for that, or was running from something that haunted him deep down I'll never know, as we fell out of touch.
Behind the perceived Instagram glory of adventure and the nomadic life, I tend to think a lot of people living "on the road" are not doing it for "kicks" as the Beats would say, but because many don't have a place to go home to or a family to open the door for them. Somewhere along the way the adventures of one's twenties becomes the loneliness of one's forties, running from something, the way a trilobite gets ensconced in amber.
I used to think I was "selling out" in leaving this fledgling life of a wanderer and settling down to get married and start a family in the suburbs. But now that I am in it, I realize it was where I was called to be. I'm grateful to have found my vocation and can devote myself to the business of living it out. I know many who want to, but haven't yet met the person to do it with. On days like today, it's a good opportunity to open your home to these friends and strangers if you are able. One of the gifts many of us have been blessed with that makes for the envy of many is, simply, a family and a home, something we can often take for granted.
Happy Thanksgiving, Christian pilgrims. May you always have a door to be opened to you when the road gets weary.
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