Not everybody fits in -- or wants to. Civilization: what a drag. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm thinking of guys like Christopher McCandless of recent times, or, further into the past, men like Johnny Appleseed or the mountain men who walked off into the wilderness with nothing but a Hawken rifle and a possibles bag. Lots of these joined Indian tribes, marrying into them and living happy lives far from the settled life of the East. One of my ancestors was such, lighting out from Pennsylvania after the Revolution and living the rest of his life west of the 100th meridian.
We've always had hobos, tramps, drifters, vagrants and vagabonds passing through, but not part of, the workaday life. I've read that after the Civil War the country was full of them, most veterans of the war, many suffering from what we would now call PTSD, who just couldn't go back to the farm or the shop. So they hit the road.
I have some sense of how the outsider feels, having been a service brat growing up on a series of navy bases, most overseas, never really having a hometown of my own, even a school. A semester or two in Guam, three in Japan (broken up between Yokosuka and Sasebo), one in Sicily then Naples, another in San Diego, then Whidbey Island, thence to South Korea and back to Japan.... Year after year. So when I finally settled in the States to finish out high school and go on to college, the country I found myself in was not at all like the America I envisioned growing up. I was like a dodo bird, not realizing that all these people swirling around me had not grown up in a "straighten up and fly right, good order and disciple, all ship-shape and Bristol fashion" world, and lots of them were dangerous. I almost lost my life twice before I wised up. Well, I've written about all that before. No need to go back over it. But the thing is, I get it. I get it about feeling like -- being -- an outside observer, of not quite understanding what's going on, missing cultural references that everybody else implicitly understands and often not even realizing that you are missing something.
I'm not just talking about living in the States. I lived so long in Japan that it feels or felt, I should say, more like home in many ways than did the USA. There were times when I felt almost like I was Japanese, but then something would happen that would jolt me out of my illusion. To Japanese I was always a foreigner, an alien. I might forget that, but they never did, and once in a while something they said or did made that clear to me. Often I was hurt by it, by the rejection, the dismissal, the insult. Finally, I got it through my head that my home, my native land, was America and only America and I had to make it so, even if I didn't really know how. Fortunately for me I did have relatives, including those I had spent vacations with as a child, my parents wanting me to get to know them and also, as I realize now, to not become too isolated from the country of my forefathers. So I had someplace to call home, settle into, travel the byways, walk the paths and streets that generations of my forebears had done. I could stop by a local store and casually chat with the cashier who, it would turn out, was my second cousin. I could have lunch in a diner where my grandmother, as a teenager, had worked as a waitress during summer vacations. So I could ease into being at home in this far land in a way that I never could in Japan or anywhere else in the world but here.
But I'm lucky. Were this place some city, especially one back in the horrid East, I couldn't stand it. I would flee. But to where? I would have no place to flee to. If I were a man, I could become a vagabond, wandering hither and yon, maybe join the merchant marine and sail from port to port. Or maybe even become an ESL teacher drifting from Seoul to Dubai, defensively sneering at the "straights" with serious jobs, becoming ever more alienated and resentful with each passing year of all those with houses and cars, investments and money in the bank living their boring lives. They don't know, I would tell myself reassuringly. Know what? Why what's behind the curtain. But as a woman, that's really not an option. Plus, I just don't have that kind of personality: I'm not sure there is a "curtain," and if there is, I don't want to know what's behind it. So I don't know what I would do. I don't care to think about it. Well, I started this post wanting to say something, but I see I've just rambled. So I'll shut up. Wait -- I did want to say that I "get" outsiders and I think that society needs such people, those who don't buy the "received" view of the world, don't give a damn about status or career or wealth and would rather sit on a park bench than drive a Mercedes. We can't all be that way, but sometimes don't you wish you could just chuck it all and thumb a ride on a big rig or swing aboard a freight train and just go? Just go. Not me. Not any more anyway. But how about you?
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"The Vagabond's House," a poem by Don Blanding first published in a limited edition of 2,000 imprints in 1928, it went on to sell 150,000 copies. It is here read by Franklyn MacCormack in the middle of the night over WGN radio in 1965. WGN was a clear-channel station broadcasting a 50,000-watt signal that covered most of the Midwest. Long-distance truckers and train crews, all-night workers in gas stations and diners tuned in to listen to MacCormack read poems by such poets as Edgar Guest, Robert Service and Don Blanding, dreamers and drifters, folksy and familiar, all once wildly popular, now forgotten.
"There is a difference between an ideal that cannot be attained and one that is senseless."
~Sidney Hook
