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Occasionally on one of these fine, hot summer days I like to follow a road out towards the country instead of taking my usual walk over to the cemetery.  Since I live right at the edge of town, the countryside's not far away.  In just a few minutes 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, so that I might pick up some of the trash I find lying by the roadside.  I have to admit I rather enjoy thinking of the spectacle I must present at such moments to passing motorists; they probably imagine me to be some sort of scavenger, looking for treasure amongst other people's garbage.  Other times I find that I'm a little embarrassed to be seen doing this, and I want to yell out at the people I see driving by in their cars:  "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 struck me as being very suggestive in a symbolic sort of way, and I was reminded of the comedian I'd once seen who had 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 get there?

Well, today I found a fresh and almost full pack of cigarettes, tossed most likely from a passing car.  I know this trick, having tried it myself:  someone who was 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 window.  But today I felt a scavenger's sense of good fortune and picked the cigarettes up, tucking them into my shirt pocket to save for later.  A little farther along the road I found a single playing card – the king of hearts.  This too I picked up and stuck into my pocket, thinking that 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 I'm reminded of the childhood dream I'd once had of becoming a tramp.  This dream was inspired by the work I'd read of poets and other writers too who'd made long journeys across their countries and written about what they experienced along the way.  Also by stories of more average folk who, displaced from society through circumstance or by choice, set out to destinations unknown, traveling with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and whatever they could carry in their hands.  Consumed by wanderlust, forced by misfortune or driven by a sense that their lives had become 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.  As for me, it was always a matter of certain practical considerations that made the adventure seem too problematic to undertake.  How did such people eat, I wondered?  Where did they get the money they needed once that which they had brought with them was spent?  How did they wash their clothes, or themselves – or did they just not bother?  How did they avoid falling prey to someone else's covertly malicious intentions; what to do, where to go, if they got sick or were injured?  I simply did not know.

What's required to make a success of such a life is, I suppose, some capacity for self-reliance, some degree of inner fortitude, that I have never seemed to possess.  For although I am capable, eager, even dogmatical in my insistence upon intellectual independence, I have found such independence to come with a rather nasty sting in its tail:  it makes one 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 the fulfillment of my urge to wander may be.  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 also assume that it holds the key that will eventually set me free.  If I have any goal in life, the pursuit of that 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 seem to have no other 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 the way it was always meant to be.

WALKING NO PLACE SPECIAL