I DON’T TRAVEL very well these days. I get called out all the time to speak at conferences, run workshops, do readings or lecture at universities. Most of these trips are only a few days long but, I can never wait to get home. I feel troubled by not being able to see the lake, get out on the land or feel the quiet all around me. Even when I’m ensconced in a nice hotel with all the amenities, I still long for our woodstove and plank floors. I guess I’ve become a homebody.
It wasn’t that long ago that my life was like a sappy country song. I was always on the road again, looking at the world through a windshield, as that old truckdriving song goes. White-line fever raged in me, and home was always just over the horizon. Life was about moving on.
I did a lot of hitchhiking during my late teens. There was a gypsy feel to being young and free on the side of a road with just a backpack and a sleeping bag. I felt like a hobo king, a Kerouac, the kind of ramblin’ boy Tom Paxton sang about. It always seemed to be summer. I could hit the road at the drop of a hat, and I often did. I ate at creaky truck stops and small clapboard diners along the highway. I’d meet other kings of the road at the hostels where I stayed; we’d share drinks and stories and a few guitar songs around a fire. Family was a never-changing set of faces.
I was a railroad gang labourer for a while. I picked pine cones, planted trees, stoked wheat, cleaned floors, washed dishes, shovelled feed, cleaned fish and lugged construction materials in every part of Canada except the Maritimes. Every job put just enough money in my pocket for me to hit the road again.
Later, I hit the road a lot as a reporter and a documentary producer. It was the late 1980s by then. There were always issues and questions and ideas I wanted to investigate, and being on the road made that possible. The road was my university, and I majored in people. I met miners, engineers, firefighters, nurses, teachers and scientists. I sat with them in grand old homes on cultured estates and dark shacks on remote reserves. Whatever the state of their homes, most of the people I met had settled in somewhere, and I started to crave that myself.
When Debra and I first moved in together, we lived in a condo on a busy street in Burnaby. Part of me still wrestled with slippery feet. Part of me still believed there was promise just over the rise ahead. But Deb was patient and gentle, and I gradually felt more comfortable walking in through a door than out. When we moved here to the mountains, that feeling grew stronger.
I’m fifty-three now, and these old bones have grown more attached to languishing in front of the fire than to racking up the miles. I don’t enjoy food much when I travel, and I can’t relax enough to read. I get ornery in airports, grumbling a lot and putting on the impassive Indian face that makes Deb laugh. Only when I’m home do I feel content.
The years sneak up on you, and you’re different suddenly. You realize there’s no more time to be wasted. You’re a hunter-gatherer, for Pete’s sake, I tell myself. You’re supposed to be out loose upon the land. You’re supposed to roam, sharing stories with others around a crackling fire. But the home fires are the only ones I care for any more. Call me an old coot, but I’ve never found a five-star joint that feels as good as home.