Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

  The garden became my proxy for settling down.

  I would tell my friends how my next trip would be the last. Then they would see me jet off to this Southeast Asian country or that European city. And, when I’d come back, I’d promise that no, THIS one would be the last one.

  “We’re sick of hearing how you’re going to settle down,” they would retort. “It’s a lie.”

  “No, I swear this time I really mean it. This is my last trip.”

  But they were always right. It was a lie. I was trying to have it all.

  I understood now why alcoholics in a 12-step program give themselves over to a higher power: It’s because you need something big and powerful in your corner when you’re fighting an addiction. You need something to surrender to, someone to hand the wheel over to.

  When I wasn’t traveling, I was living New York City in an attempt to settle down in the most cosmopolitan place I could think of. I hadn’t even been in my first apartment for two weeks before I bought a cheap flight and hit the road again to Europe and then the Caribbean. I’d just concocted this whole lifestyle plan so I wouldn’t land myself in trouble with anxiety or burnout, and here I was back on the road. That was my life: I’d get back, get the itch, and scratch it.

  Here’s the problem: Because of my online presence, leaving wasn’t that hard to do. The chorus egged me on, and when you’re getting praise and jealousy for setting off to exotic locations, it isn’t that hard to buy a ticket and throw a few clothes in a backpack. Then you get there, you have your fun … and then you come back to the same empty apartment and the same persistent questions about the new (bad) habits you’ve built.

  Except I just couldn’t do it anymore. The writer Mary Anne Radmacher once wrote: “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” I wasn’t the same guy who was coached by some backpackers in Thailand to cast out and set off for the unknown. I had a deeper sense of who I was, because I had seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.

  I couldn’t let go of that self.

  I knew that my longings for family and a relationship and some stability weren’t just stray thoughts that popped into my head. They were real things I wanted. I was ready for them.

  I was trying to beat these thoughts back and tune them out.

  If I go away on one more trip, they will go away.

  But your demons and desires travel with you.

  And I could no longer ignore them.

  * * *

  WHEN CHARLOTTE ARRIVED IN MY LIFE, I realized that for the first time I had found someone to settle down with. I had found the companion I always wanted. The nerd, the politico, the traveler, the artist, the person who made me laugh, challenged me, and made me feel loved.

  When I landed in Australia, she greeted me at the airport. She held up a little sign and surprised me with a card. She knew I had always wanted that. We smiled and kissed each other. On the bus ride back into town, we stared at each other and smiled. It was if we had never been apart.

  We settled into our Airbnb in downtown Melbourne, which we planned to use as our base before traveling on to New Zealand together. It was a luxurious one-bedroom with hardwood floors, walk-in closets, a king bed, and a giant kitchen.

  After a few days though, our honeymoon ended.

  You learn a lot about a person when you travel with them. Forced into a compressed ever-changing environment, you learn how they deal with change and stress, overcome challenges, and interact with people. You learn if your lifestyles line up.

  But you learn even more when you leave the travel bubble and live with them in “the real world.” In a shared space, it’s not lifestyle you learn about, it’s personal idiosyncrasies. Do they squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom or the top? Do they replace the toilet paper roll so that it unspools from the top or from underneath? Do they leave lights on, do they leave laundry everywhere? Toilet seat up or down? Sleep with the heat on or the heat off? Air-conditioning at 67 or 71? Will you still have the same fun with that person you met on safari when you’re dealing with questions like these? With commutes, bills, and whose turn it is to clean the dishes? When you don’t have things to do 24/7, when you have to go to work, do laundry, go grocery shopping, will you still get along?

  For Charlotte and me, it wasn’t a sure thing. The real world was proving harder than we thought, and it turned out we didn’t know as much about each other as we thought we did.

  We decided we would each plan a day for the other. She loved libraries and cafés, so I booked her a tour of the library and walking tour of famous cafés. She booked a trip to see penguins knowing I love, well, anything. We both hated each other’s day. She hated walking tours. I hated long bus rides. Little comments about how long a walk was or how inconvenient the weather was, were seen as personal slights and criticisms of the other person’s decisions. It turned out I had work but she didn’t, so my work days left her feeling stuck and stranded.

  We began to fight about our expectations and our desires.

  My panic attacks revealed the nature of the stress my dual life was causing, I realized something else: I wanted routine and a schedule; the white picket fence, kids, a dog, a family. I wanted to wake up, go to the gym, write, run my blog, start that garden, and see my friends.

  I didn’t want to travel the way I had been traveling anymore. I had seen the world from a backpack enough times.

  Charlotte went to travel with her friends around Cairns, while I went to Perth to visit a friend. Away from her and with time to think, I realized I couldn’t go to New Zealand. All I could think of was home, my bed, my roommates, and a stable life.

  In Perth, I realized the truth: my travel burnout was permanent. It was time to put away the backpack.

  I didn’t want to travel anymore. I wanted the exact opposite of that. I knew in my heart this was the right thing to do—the same way I knew leaving all those years ago was the right thing.

  I had grown over the last decade, and the last six months had given me the answer to the question Scott’s death had brought up: what did I really want?

  I wanted a home.

  As I began to picture New Zealand, my panic attacks came back. The idea of sightseeing and working at once, never giving either the full attention it deserved and feeling guilty for that, was just too much for me. I was too unhappy on the road.

  How would I break this to Charlotte?

  What would I say? How would she take it?

  When I looked at Charlotte, I could picture the life we’d start together. I could picture our home, minivan, kids, and garden. But I could never ask her to change her travels for me. I couldn’t take that from her. I had spent ten years as a nomad. I knew how long she had been waiting to do this. I could never make her choose and, if I had made her, she would have resented me for it. This was her trip.

  And I knew first hand how important they are.

  When I met Charlotte again in Sydney, I broke the news to her: I couldn’t go to New Zealand with her. It would break me. I was trying to break a cycle and, as much as I loved her, I needed to heal a bit and get my head in order. Going to New Zealand would only exacerbate the problem. She was coming back to the United States in three months, and there was no reason I couldn’t be the one who greeted her at the airport. We could still talk every day.

  She cried and said she understood.

  Over the months, we stayed in touch, but our chats grew less frequent. A gulf of my own making had developed between us. She traveled all over the country and I laid the foundations of a routine. My passport collected dust in my drawer. I woke up early every day. I went to the gym again. I started cooking again. My eye twitch faded away. My anxiety became less severe. My panic attacks went away. I grew more peaceful. I never once missed travel.

  But I did miss Charlotte. As I lay in bed at night in my apartment, I wondered what she was up to. What was she doing over in New Zealand? I had no idea, because she went longer and longer without u
pdating me.

  In my mind, I still held out hope that when she came back to the States we would pick up where we left off. Yes, we fought in Melbourne, but it wasn’t over anything big.

  By the time Charlotte came home, I had left New York for a quieter apartment in Austin. When she came to Austin to visit some friends, we agreed to meet up. We talked about the past few months, and our future. We opened up to one another, and it became clear that we had never really fully expressed our feelings and our thoughts. To her, when I got on that plane home, our relationship had ended. The conversations online and through chat never really made me sense the pain and hurt she was feeling.

  To me, she had never really understood the extent of my panic attacks, anxiety, and desire to slow down. I had retreated into my shell and thought I had explained things well to her, but it turned out we both had walls up.

  We both read each other wrong.

  And now it was too late.

  She was going back to New Zealand, and I was home where I wanted to be. There was no way to go back to where we were before. It would be like chasing ghosts. There was nothing left to say.

  We got up and hugged, and then I watched her walk away.

  It’s strange seeing someone walk out of your life after envisioning a future with them—marriage, kids, old age. Like a writer getting a blast of inspiration, I saw how the story developed, played out, and even ended. But then an unexpected wind blows all the pages out the window and the story is gone forever.

  Timing is everything. Charlotte and I started out with a future but soon found we were in different places in our life. That is life. You grow and change over the years and hope that the person walking beside you grows and changes with you. You hope your roads run parallel. You hope that you are running the same race.

  For a while, it felt like we were. But before long it became clear that, while we were in the same race, we were at wildly different points. She had many laps to go, and I was at the finish line.

  * * *

  WHEN I STARTED OUT ON MY TRAVELS, home was a dirty word. It was a boring place where you commuted to work and sat in traffic and missed the train. It was where life grew stale. A place of death.

  I didn’t want to stay home. I wanted adventure. I wanted excitement. I didn’t want to waste my days inside an office building, and the more I traveled, the less appealing home became to me. Coming home meant boredom. The road was where I felt alive, and I couldn’t let go of that.

  But now, having uncovered the reasons for my panic attacks and feeling drawn toward starting a home with someone I loved, I realized another deep truth: there is nothing wrong with change. Even Peter Pan grew up. Even I had to stop traveling.

  I had just been too blind to see it before.

  I had been wrapped up in my nomadic identity for so long that I failed to realize that the original reason I left—to become a better, more confident me—no longer applied, and hadn’t for years. I had all that I needed in front of me. I had friends. I had work that I loved. I had stories. I could talk to strangers. I liked trying new things. I could make conversation.

  But most, I was okay with myself. I was satisfied with who I was, what I liked, and everything I did.

  Peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows aside, I had come home from my original trip the person I wanted to be.

  That is what finding home feels like.

  Originally, the reason I loved Thailand so much was that it was a place that had all the elements I thought a life should have. But home isn’t a place. It’s not a destination. It’s not where your heart is. Home is wherever you are in the world. It didn’t matter if I was in New York City, Austin, Bangkok, Paris, or my parents’ house outside of Boston.

  For me, after 2008, home was a million places, because home is where you feel at peace with yourself, and I was comfortable everywhere. That’s something I learned as a nomad, and something I won’t let go of even after I stop being one.

  With Charlotte, I was holding onto the past because in the past, the travel version of me was the one who felt in control of his life. Why would I want to give that up? Travel had made me who I was, and I thought leaving it meant going back to the old me.

  But it didn’t. There is no old you. There is just the you that you are right now. You are always a work in progress. You are always ever changing. The world moves on, time passes, people come and go, and the future is always uncertain.

  As they say, that is life.

  But it took me a long time to come to realize that.

  I had resisted change for so long because I wanted to resist the passage of time.

  I wanted to be a young backpacker forever. I wanted to live in the nomadic bubble, the place where Charlotte and I found love, where life was carefree, everyday was Saturday, and it was always an adventure because I thought it was the only place I could be happy. It was where I found myself—and thought that was the only place I could be the me I wanted to be.

  But I was wrong.

  As I sat on my balcony overlooking Austin, I realized that I could make my life anything I wanted it to be. Being happy didn’t depend on traveling—or on not traveling, for that matter. Being happy with who I’d become felt like something that was true no matter where I was.

  Most travel memoirs are about escape—and they end in either death or defiance. People just keep pressing on; or they croak. My story isn’t so canned and predictable. Spoiler alert: I’m not still a backpacker clutching to a dream, and I don’t die at the end of this. This is a deeper, more elastic story than that. It’s about what you find at the end of ten years of ceaseless, relentless travel.

  What you find is that truism of self-discovery so well expressed by Jon Kabat-Zinn: Wherever you go, there you are.

  What you find, after enough breakups, bad habits and head-splitting headaches in hostels with beautiful views, is what Emerson meant when he referred to travelers who travel away from themselves, “he carries ruins to ruins.”

  So you look deep into that part of yourself and decide to give regular, real life a chance again. In one place. For good. You think you’ve found the girl you want to settle down with and you start planning it out in your head. You get that same exciting feeling that you did when you first started traveling—that this is the right adventure for you. Of course, real life is never simple. The girl—she doesn’t want to settle down. She wants to travel. But you move anyway, hoping that when she’s ready, she’ll come to you. You commit to it.

  My friend Bill likes to say that trees grow because they have roots.

  I, the acorn, had been blowing in the wind long enough. If I wanted to grow any further, I’d have to grow roots so I could continue to reach for the stars.

  It took a few months in Austin for the restlessness to wear off, for me to find my bearings.

  It was easier said than done. Even when I cut down on traveling to what I thought was “slowing down,” my friends joked that I was still barely around!

  That December, I did an interview with Andy Steves (son of the famous travel writer Rick Steves). Knowing I was cutting back on my traveling, he asked about going from nomad to non-nomad.

  “Is it hard to settle down after such a long time on the road?”

  “It’s even harder than deciding to travel,” I firmly replied.

  But it’s the hard journeys, you learn as a traveler, that are most worth the effort and the struggle and the risk.

  * * *

  TO ME, the road is and always will be a place of wonder and endless possibility. It’s where magic happens. But you can find wonder and magic wherever you are. You just have to look closely enough. And sometimes you don’t have to look very far at all. Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s right outside your front door.

  Most people think of travel as this thing you do in faraway lands. They think that travel is about getting on flights to places where people don’t speak your language, places with different customs, a different history, different food, and different climate.
That’s travel. It’s the act of going to the exotic.

  I don’t agree with that definition of travel.

  To me, travel is the act of going somewhere new, doing something new, meeting someone new, and connecting to as much of it that feels right and good to you.

  That can be in a country half a world away. It can be in the next town over. Or it can be a staycation where you explore your own town (which I think is always a good thing).

  Travel is the art of discovery. It’s about visiting a place you haven’t been before, and learning both about the things that make it unique and the things that tie it to the greater human experience. A place like that can absolutely be your own backyard. It’s something that took me a decade of travel to fully appreciate but it’s also something I’ve known since the very beginning of my travels.

  When I started my inaugural trip around the world, in fact, I drove across the country for the first time. It was the summer of 2006 and I set out for a two-month road trip around America before I was to fly to Europe. I’d never been off the East Coast and wanted to see my backyard before I saw the world. How could one understand the world if one didn’t understand his home?

  The great American road trip in the model of Jack Kerouac or John Steinbeck seemed too irresistible to pass up. It was an opportunity to live the great American dream. I imagined open roads, interesting diner stops chatting to locals and waitresses, and exploring the great national parks of the West I’d always seen pictures of.

  Having never left the comfort of my Boston-born bubble, I had some firm, preconceived notions about hillbilly Southerners, conservative cowboys, and middle-class rural America from ingesting a diet of cable news and pop culture throughout my life.

  Though they were my countrymen, I couldn’t think what we would agree on. I viewed them as gun-toting, backward, hate-filled, religious zealots who wouldn’t match my youthful liberal outlook on life. I looked down on them with the vanity of youth.