Wanderlust Kings

I have begun to feel that the adventurous mind is a diseased mind. The adventurer sacrifices safety and comfort for the perilous, often dangerous. They seek to pit themselves against odds stacked against them, they like to walk as close to death as possible and come back to share the story. How then can such people be thought of as reasonable, even cultured. Of course there are many types of adventurer, there are the mad, the vainglorious, the courageous, the list could go on and on. However it is the willingness in most to strive beyond normal goals that makes them so intriguing.

Of course fame and privilege is a powerful motivating factor in many such people, they will only leave their doorstep if it means they will come back with money in hand. I am more interested in the people who trek without expectation of reward or recognition, they plunge head first into the wild places to see them. Though now we live in a culture that thinks that adventuring is a cathartic process, meant to be an almost religious experience, a person communing with nature. I don't like that idea, when I explore a new place I look at it in wonderment, I marvel and consider who went before me. To hope for an afterlife for myself would be to surrender to the possibility that I can see all of this when I am dead, to put off what I should do in this life for another, to surrender to the fear of the unknown.

I am so badly inflicted with this disease, this need to explore I am certain it would be the death of me in any other time. If a person suggests that a passage is impossible I will be the first to volunteer to conquer it. Is it though, conquering, do I seek to subjugate, or control what is deemed beyond me? I think I want to show the limitless potential of humanity, a path deemed unworkable has its way, we need only apply ourselves to it. I burn with the desire to shuffle off the trappings of society, the pathetic joke that is 'modern life' for the places rarely seen, the mile just beyond the horizon.

Perhaps this isn't a disease, a corruption of thought. Perhaps the explorer isn't a vestigial part of society, in a world downloadable to a desk top. Perhaps we simply too keenly feel the need human urge to learn, to know. I want to see the world, but not as a tourist, I wish to see the peoples and culture, I wish to understand their society and their history, swim in their lives and envision their history. I am not the Victorian explorer, I can't judge the lives of those I meet by my own standards. We cannot discriminate against the cannibals and naked peoples of the Amazon or East Asia. We are only worthy of viewing it, containing our fear or misunderstanding and returning to the world and informing. I want to fill in the blank spaces on the map, though non are left, they are the holes in my map, my understanding of this world. I want to see the crown jewels of Europe, the seats of Empires long laid to waste by time and environment. I wish to pass through the deserts of Arabia, to feel the blistering heat of the Nefud, so I can understand what it meant to those who would dare to have done it. I wish to see the decadence of the oil barons, their poor hidden from the rich contractors, man made islands, like Ozymandias warning against the desire to be timeless. I want to see the spice markets of India, the open sewers, and the jungles in the north that hid the Thugee from British view. Nepal, Burma, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Ulanbatar. I want to ride a train into Siberia, and ponder on the Romanov's, visiting Moscow I would look for black cats and checkered suits. Africa, the jungles and gorillas, the booming diamond industry, the crushing debt and fear of witchcraft. Name the town and I wish to see it, no matter how small or far removed ask me to go there for a day and I will, so that I can tell the world what lies just outside their border.

The rainbow array of flags, tied to the mountains, when each one blows away a wish is granted. Gold hammered day and night into thin strips to be applied to statues of the Buddha. the bones of Saints and pieces of the 'true cross, in reliquaries, thousands passing by in reverence. Xingu tribesman, sitting in a canoe, fishing with a string and hook, a trick they learned from a dead Englishman eighty years ago, they store the catch in ceramic pots, identical to ones they made seven thousand years ago. I am desperate to not read these stories, you cannot hope to ever know it all, but knowing even a fraction of what it means to see the sun rising over Alexandria, Tokyo, Kinshasa or the Mato Grosso can sustain a soul their whole life. The search is endless, the empty space in a persons knowledge can never truly be filled, but it is the journey that makes it worthwhile.

I cannot be one of those who satisfies themselves with stories, with imagined empires, I cannot sustain my being with mere illusions as so many do, with games, movies, half hearted promises. I fear I will burst if contained too long without the road before me, locked in a job, locked in a life not even worth contemplating. I live only in fear that I will never leave these shores, or that if I do, I will never come back to tell my story to my close few friends who would care to hear it. i sit now, looking out the window at the trees, blowing in the wind. In my mind I am floating past them, over them, looking forward, traversing the miles in seconds. Rushing over everything, taking it in and I am seeing the world fly by, the people, the animals, the rugged mountains and soft green hills. Yet I am here, and must remain here, with this one tree. To me now, the rest of the world is as distant as the Moon, visible, but too far to touch, to see the powdery silt of its surface fall through my hand and fall like a microscopic snow. This is the anguish of an explorer, to know that there is a beyond, but to not have the means to attain it. It is what brought Walter Raleigh to the executioners block, it sent Magellan to his death at the hands of natives, it guided Percy Fawcett to his unmarked tomb in the Amazon. So it is for the explorer, let the mind perish with inactivity, or send the body to perish in pursuit of the next horizon.

I am not an ordinary man.