Following Nomads

“The issue, of course, is balance. A familiar problem in another costume: the desire to be solidified, in relation, bound to people and to things in time, here expressed in my house and its groaning upper regions, its poor old crowded brain stuffed with memory. I want to live with my lover and my animals in a house stratified with our collective histories.

And of course I carry, permanently, the contradictory desire - to be free, open to the winds, awash in light and air, unbordered,” (Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon).

Many of us have seen the millennials on YouTube and Instagram who get to travel the world for a living. We watch them and we feel inspired, hopeful, and bordered with a tinge of jealous discontent. My desire for far-off places and the freedom to move between these borders is a yearning I have carried with me for as long as I can remember. This aspiration seems to promise a whispered tale of dreamlike experience, personal growth, and adventure. For the time being, I anchor myself down to these things and places I have committed to, but it takes a good measure of responsibility to run off into the world. The fact that I have a tendency to not form connections with people makes me less inclined to stay, and I wish I could say the connection I share with my husband grounds me, but he is just as windblown as I. Perhaps the only thing holding us back remains in the fact that we’re not ready.

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When I was sixteen, I called myself a bohemian at heart, where in reality I was home schooled in the same hundred year-old house painted olive green surrounded by a towering red fence ever since I was four. I wore boot cutoff jeans that had to be held up with a belt along the hip because my mom made my sister and I buy pants two sizes too large so that the fabric would not hug our thighs. For a while I switched to bell-bottoms because they were in fashion and seemed to fit with my self-identified sense of bohemia, or freedom. However, the discomfort of fitting my body into jeans fashioned for someone much wider and taller than I was, and simultaneously striving to embody Bohemia, while also obeying the restrictions imposed on me — for a long time my edges were frayed at the seams.

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According to Wikipedia, “Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary or spiritual pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may or may not be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds.”

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Nomadic life can be traced much further in human history than settlers. To migrate from place to place almost didn't disappear until humans learned to domesticate plants and animals and the transition from hunter-gatherer to settlers emerged. There are a number of small pockets of people who still adhere to this lifestyle, tribes such as the Tuareg who inhabit the desert plains of the Sahara, who have been called the “blue people” because of their indigo-dye colored clothes, or the Bedouin tribes stretched out from the vast deserts of North Africa to the rugged sands of the Middle East. The term bedouin originates from the Arabic word badawī, which means "desert dweller." In Arabic the badawī were considered the antonym for the ḥāḍir, otherwise known as sedentary people.

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Aubrey and Christian Matney have spent the last year in a van. A van converted to have all the necessities of a tiny home with which they travel across North America, past Mexico and down into South America. The van’s interior has been stripped down, walls resealed with sandy oak planks, a full mattress laid down covering the hidden storage underneath. A small kitchen is nestled in the midsection of this vehicle to prepare their vegan meals.

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I remember as a kid riding in my dad’s green conversion van as we drove for three days across America’s frontier from Minnesota to visit my grandparents in Las Vegas. There seems something nostalgic about the American road trip, the long highways empty but for the occasional trucker or the other vacationing family who can afford the RV, the back roads through small towns that have little more than a gas station and mom ‘n pop cafe. Every summer in June we made the trip in time for my sister’s birthday, and I had always considered my grandparents’ house as a second home. When my sister was little she would color all over the walls of our own house, hoping that it would convince our parents that we should live with our grandparents. There are those who say home is where the heart is, but what if your heart is spread out across the world? There are days where I want to hop in a van like Aubrey and Christian, and just drive, often forgetting my tendency to become carsick in large vehicles.

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Kika and Dan live in a sailboat. “Uma” is 36 feet long and refurbished from being an old dingy vessel that was hardly seaworthy and tainted out of style with 70s vibes. The couple bought her online and sold everything they had to rebuild her body and begin their journey. A number of months departed before they set sail off the coast of Florida. Sitting alone in my old, shadow-lit basement level apartment on a beautiful summer day, I leafed through many of their videos, wondering if I could attempt something like that. Almost four years later, regardless of their hardships and unpredictable struggles, they seem happy. They seem free.

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I didn’t know I loved the sea. I was always fond of water, how this element trickles and courses through the earth’s crevices, washing away particles of the past. My sixth grade email password was swim4life and I convinced my parents to get me an aquatic tank so I could have a piece of tropical waters that I had never seen with my own eyes or touched with my own skin. The warm tank water and plastic coral reef felt like a comfort against the Minnesota winters and being separated from the freeing buoyancy with which water surrounds my body with. We let ourselves believe that water is like a purifier, a place of birth, or new beginnings. However, the water of the sea exists as an altogether different beast. Powerful and unforgiving. I didn’t know how much I wanted to be a part of this energy until I stepped outside the Midwest when I was nineteen. I was eating lunch at my old job’s cafeteria when a coworker asked what I was going to do with my vacation.

“I’m not sure,” I answered. Honestly I wasn’t planning to do anything with the nine days that I had received because I was going to be transferred to night shift.

“You could drive to Florida,” he said. “It’s really nice this time of year.” And just like that the seed had been planted in my brain. I had never traveled anywhere without my parents before, and the vacation started the next day. I called my boyfriend and asked if he wanted to go to Florida tomorrow. Two days later we were there and I saw the ocean for the first time. I felt the push of the waves against my body and even then I didn’t know. I didn’t know how I loved the ocean’s unpredictability until I grew tired of the timeless predictability that never ceased to end.  

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Humpback whales travel the furthest of any animal known to man. These nomadic creatures usually live alone or in small pods, they don’t bother surrounding themselves with an overcrowding community. Their circle is small. However, most of the animals that I come across that are nomadic would be migratory birds, who often fly together in enormous flocks. There is a safety in numbers; however, my dad once said when he sees a crowd of humans, he walks in the other direction. I think I have internalized that piece of wisdom to go much further than avoiding mobs circling street fights.

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My mom recently found an article archived by the Minnesota Historical Society about my great-great-grandfather, who told the interviewer that he had traveled by sea to “such ports as Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Madagascar, Africa, South America, the United States, the Suez Canal, Cape Horn, China, Japan, and dozens of out-of-the-way tropical places and Asiatic and European ports.” Joseph Jwanouskos was born near Moscow, in the Kovno Province of Russia in 1880 and took this world cruise for two-and-a-half years with his German pal because they “decided to see the world.” I tend to let myself believe in the mythic force of forefathers and foremothers, or at least the powerful nature of blood narratives.

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I read in a volume of human ecology that the mode of life such as the pastoral nomadism is disappearing. Pastoral nomads in the sense of herding sheep from one green pasture to another, which conflicts with the “true” nomads who follow irregular patterns of movement. I am not sure who gets to dictate who gets to be a “true” nomad but whenever someone asks me where I would like to travel, I always see a flash of a million pictures of the world from every corner, and I respond sheepishly, “I don’t know.”

I don’t want nomadism to be confused with travel, because they are not the same. They are entirely different, as one is a mode of life that rejects a home rooted in one place. For some it has been referred to as something along the lines of the privileged homeless, or a homelessness for rich people if they were not born into a traditional nomadic tribe. Of course not all modern nomads can be categorized as rich because many have taken considerable risks to attain this lifestyle. I think when people ask where I would like to travel, the question fills me with a sense of panic because to tour another country implies that you have to come back, and you might not get another chance to leave.

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I remember the first opportunity I had to leave the United States. I was an intern researching Palestinian fashion at the Minnesota Historical Society, and they were choosing a number of interns to travel to Israel. I was seventeen and hopeful, excited even, and knew I couldn’t afford a trip on my own for a long time. I had no particular reason to go to Israel over any other country, I just wanted to go somewhere. When I got the rejection letter I cried for many days, I’m not sure how many. I am twenty-three now and have only made it to Canada and the memory still upsets me.

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On a television news broadcast, there is a family living together on a sailboat. A father, a mother, and their three small children. The program shows the chaos of raising toddlers in the boat’s smallness of space, which staggers amidst the ocean’s impending danger while little girls protest life jackets and a baby is strapped to a highchair. Ominous music plays in the background while they debate this parenting couple’s life choices. The parents insist they are fine. They enjoy life not chained to the economic system and say they both have a history with sailing.

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Tourism carries with it the weight of something distasteful, likened to overcrowding and cheapened experiences whenever capitalism gets a hold of something once pure, or unruined by mass connotations. Perhaps these nomadic travelers are trying to avoid that stigma, to just live and experience a place without the rush of a return flight, to be in that space off-season when the real tourists go home and they are left alone with the locals. In that sense modern nomadism is better, but like anything good, when the masses of people try it out we get an influx of travelers ill-prepared like the white young people sitting on the sides of Thailand roads begging for money to fund their travel dreams. I imagine there are hungry children not too far away from where they beg, children who will never see the world outside their own country.

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It could be implied that I have romanticized a sort of homelessness, or a reckless irresponsibility. Dad often refers to American society as a zoo, and having grown up in the jungles of Cambodia, he is no zoo animal. But he stays anyway because he has an American wife and American children, and unlike him, we’re zoo animals.

People assume that modern nomads are avoiding responsibility and for a time perhaps I thought that as well, yet I find myself resistant to that categorization as something I strive to do. I have always considered myself a person who endures the rough road of responsibility, but perhaps I am resistant to being obligated to things I have not volunteered myself to. And yet I cannot deny it is my responsibility that has in part denied me to leave this place I have both chosen and not chosen, which in fact does make me feel entirely like an animal born in a zoo who watches videos of other animals wild and free and not knowing what to do about it.

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If I had never cocooned myself in this place, perhaps I would be somewhere faraway, traveling over rigid mountains and resting in villages that have existed for thousands of years, where they themselves have only survived so long because they never leave, whose roots are firmly planted within their collective histories. And I would envy their quaint life and their commitment to family and their contentment to carry on as their ancestors did, and then I would leave until I could go no further, until the road becomes too rigid or until I have found whatever I have been searching for all this time. Does the heart ever settle? This wanderlust, is something that both ignites a kind of spark within me and also something I have grown to disdain about myself. Because, like all lusts, it exists for which it lacks and renders those under the spell of longing as discontent and hungry children. But perhaps that is my own depressive nature talking, a manifestation of a constant need to shut myself in.

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As young seedlings, plants devote all energy to growing underground to find a reliable source of water. These plants will remain in this earth until the end of their days, but they send their children out, hoping to find more stable earth along windy passages. Migration is a natural survival practice; for instance, Britain has no native fauna or flora. All are immigrants.

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Looking back throughout history, with the migration of humans, animals, plants, and even my own family, I can’t help but see a world that is free, open and unbordered, where we are all travelers and learning from each other and untied to physical locations. But I remember there are those who are perfectly happy in their cocoons, like my grandma, who hates to travel, and there are those who want closed borders and those who have a hard time saying goodbye to all that they know, wishing to keep the world as they experience it. And there are those who want that freedom, but don’t know how to set upon that path or the road seems too daunting, like a maze of walls going nowhere.

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