Wanderlust

Boundless experiences await the summer traveler. Bound for climes exotic, we go. In and out of wonders we wander, lusting for new sight and sound and taste and smell. It's touch and go, and clearly touched we are by the lust of nomadic necessity. We traipse, meander, stray, and roam. We are like plants putting out tendrils that pull us beyond ourselves. Just like the wandering Baudelaire albatross, we spread vastest wings that grounded merely hamper. Such is our summer romance.

But wandering, lonely as a cloud, I might find myself in Britt, Iowa. There I might encounter full time wanderers.

In that town, in August every year since 1900, there meets the National Hobo Convention. Some in rags, some in tags, and some in velvet gowns: they come. Covered with the moon they are, asleeping in the open, they bring a language and symbols and heritage uniquely theirs. Among the ranks of hobos are some of our greatest verbal artists: John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Eugene O'Neill, Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Jack Black. And hobos have composed their own ethical code. The first rule is to decide one's own life, not allowing another to rule over you. Other rules call for respect of nature, law, and all others, particularly children and the vulnerable. There is also injunction to be clean, to help others, and to work well, especially at jobs that no one else wants.

H.L. Mencken draws lines of distinction. He defines hobos as wandering workers, different from tramps who wander, but work only when forced to do so, and from bums, who do no work and do not travel.

Is home really where the heart is?

And what is home and where is hearth? And what is the heart of the matter?

Do we go abroad, shaking the dust from our feet, taking with us no extra cloak? Is this the sacred heart?

Are we peripatetic philosophers, roaming from particulars to essences? Is this the work?

Perhaps we hobos are, in the midst of it all, poete maudit, accursed poets looking at the unfolding life like children with noses pressed against pane glass too thick and too expensive for penetration.

We are on earth, among the scornful, albatross exiles hampered in grounded walk by too giant wings. Like heroes on a journey we are unbounded out of common appearances and conceptions.

We are on a walkabout.

We have gone utterly beyond.

This we sing, our pirate ditties, chantings that sound simultaneously, from our one throat, an impossible harmony. The winds lift us, continually depositing us in technicolor lands on the other side of non-existent rainbows.

So wonderful it all is. But then, the Sartrean nausea beckons.

What is more emetic? Is it the vertiginous boundless, the kaleidoscopic changings of our hobo meander?

Or do we vomit more in the face of our fossilized capture by time and space and expectation and prescription?

There are more than 100 million homeless worldwide. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty reports a growing trend in American cities to criminalize homelessness by making it illegal to sleep, eat or sit in public places.

And all the while, even in our own safe homes, we still struggle to find a balance between the nauseas of entrapment and vertigo, of fossilization and evaporation. Annihilation comes in matching pairs of smothering and abandonment.

In our hobo hearts we all work to be, to be freely comfortable, neither toiling nor spinning, lilies of fields, dancing daffodils, rooted and rootless. This is our true lust: to defy both existence and non-existence.

This homeboy homebody, close to home, at home, brings it home this way. On the road there must be syzygy, the sacred meeting, the merger. There must be hieros gamos. There must be apotheosis.

In the ever-changing waves of the pirate sea this is the home of homelessness beyond nausea. With you at heart I wander in the wonder of lust that is both unsatiable and fully satisfying. The farthest shore is home here and now. Everywhere I look you kiss my face.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be weari n g a pirate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.