No Cure for New Year’s Wanderlust

If I were to think back to times of great peace and joy, they were such simple, fragile things.

I return to riding at Price Canyon ranch in the Chiricahua Mountains on horseback along a narrow trail  900 feet above a rock canyon floor on the first of the year with a widow from Vancouver named Joanne. She had red hair, smooth whiter-than-white skin, and green eyes. Life had put her through the wringer: messy divorce, assault and rape, and financial devastation in the space of eight months. She was a geologist helping companies find oil underground. I was on vacation from a 70-hour work-week as editor of a trade magazine. All of my problems stemmed from overwork.

At the main ranch house—a low, one-story home built in the middle of a grove of apple trees–we awoke to endless pots of fresh, hot coffee and the lowing of cattle. They fed us a hearty three-meals a day on a package deal and we had unlimited riding on seemingly endless acres of sagebrush, rocky hilltops, and golden open fields of long, willowy grasses whispering in the breeze among fallen century trees.

This was a working cattle ranch, not a “dude ranch” as the rancher’s wife reminded me. We did ranch chores, riding for four or five hours each day. She had packed sandwiches and lemonade for our lunch and after riding all morning we stopped on a saddle-back ridge out of the wind to rest, water the horses, let them graze, and let us eat.

My peace was so complete that when my horse, a big red Apache named Jake with a long patch of white on his nose, shed a shoe heading up the canyon, I gave it to Joanne rather than keep it for myself. We both could have used additional luck in the year ahead, but she needed it so much more than I. And freely giving away what has been freely given to you brings such a deep, profound satisfaction.

That’s the kind of peace I wanted—still want. I would have done—would do–almost anything to find it again. But it got lost among the layers of the ensuing years. Among work, and moving, and cancer, and striving for success and scraping out a living. I know that precious tranquility exists still, under the maps and old photos or in a file somewhere, occasionally crying out to me, faintly. But I just can’t say exactly where.

And that is what I still long to do: wander. Wander and seek it once again. To wander in the hills around Douglas, Arizona or among the Saguaro cactus in bright sunlight on the edges of Tucson, or walk in the rain in Denver, or fall asleep to the lullabye of impossibly blue Pacific waves on a sun-drenched Malibu beach.

I want to wander endlessly and be endlessly fascinated by roadrunners and tumbleweeds, the cry of coyotes and the magnificent surprise of bright cactus flowers and scurrying lizards, with their teal hides and yellow-white spots–“express” lizards someone joked–after a spring rain, or wander along the streets of any small urban downtown and see what I haven’t seen before and do what I’ve never done before and smell enticing street cooking and feel that endless peace.

I want to stay at a B&B in a Chicago neighborhood and come upon an unexpected community craft festival with music and dancing and buy a two-toned African Paducah wood drum from an artisan who hand-crafts them. To spend more money than I should have on that beautiful rectangular drum with its harmonic design where every note you hit sounds right, claim it as mine just because I woke to the gentle sounds of its melody at the B&B and because the artist just gave one away to a wide-eyed little boy, who played it like a pro, whose father couldn’t afford to buy him one.

I want to buy a denim jacket in a Douglas, Arizona store that has embroidered onto it wild Asian animals with jewels for their eyes—a jacket that fits me perfectly that everyone will compliment for decades to come. I want to buy cheap sherry in a Mexican border town and drink it sitting with POWs I have just met around a campfire on New Year’s Eve, or make expresso coffees for doctors and nurses at a big health center in Denver and treat myself to a strawberry milkshake as I drive home past antique shops, beyond city boundaries into red rock canyons on a highway where a rainbow touches down in a field and I turn to see if there’s a pot of gold waiting there.

Here, upstate New York during COVID lockdowns, I have stopped wandering. I understand this necessity and I concede that if you take a moment to consider, things can be kind of pretty here at times. Or at least, almost interesting if you’re in the right frame of mind. If you put your wanderlust to sleep and if the light is just right and the weather cooperates and a glimpse of sunshine lingers for more than thirty-seconds–you might see a peculiar kind of beauty. You might be persuaded to filter out the peaceful discoveries that once made you feel alive

But these memories and this longing remain a kind of soul-sickness more deadly than any pandemic. And it can only be cured by answering the call to rise up and just go. And wander.

There is no peace here for me like the one on that mountaintop in Arizona. There are only dingy, gloomy, cloudy gray days. It doesn’t matter how “bright” the gray is—as someone recently, euphemistically said to me (someone who was leaving for a warmer climate). It won’t ever turn into gold. As Robert Frost wrote: “Nothing gold can stay.” Which I misread to be: “Nothing good can stay.”

Nothing turns to nothing.

And, somehow, I have to come to that heart-place where nothing tries to stop me from searching and hoping and wandering and questing for that kind of fragile peace again. And maybe finding it. Or come to that mind-place where I no longer stop myself.