Why is it that a spirit of wanderlust or adventure exists within each person? What is it about exploration and nature that fills the senses and creates a hunger to go and see the world? I have never thought seriously about the “lust” component of the word “wanderlust,” but that section of the word pops out at me now. It is almost primal, innate, instinctive—a hunger within, an inner and unseen brightening of the eyes and a burgeoning quickening of the senses, a ripple of life.
Perhaps it is incorrect to say that this wanderlust is present in every person. It is clearly in many people, from conquering kings like Alexander the Great, to dedicated explorers like Lewis and Clark. It propels astronauts to the moon and sends ordinary citizens en masse out camping, on missionary trips, or on foreign vacations. Then again, there are many people who live in the same town their entire lives, or who have stood in only a couple of states, or who are content homebodies ready to raise children and garden and dig deep roots. Much of me resonates with the latter group—the idea of a homestead, of creating a home, of working with nature in agriculture and beyond, appeals to me strongly. I long for that permanence and rail against transience. My nature is a bit like that of a mother hen, pattering about and keeping everything in order, building and stewarding and creating.
And yet, every several months, I experience what can only be called wanderlust. I can be going along in my life, planting plants, raising dogs, desiring marriage and children, planning for the future, unconcerned with the everyday, unenviable of any change, opposed to motion…and then, snap, there’s that thirst, that lust for something else, for “the world,” for “the wild,” for the unknown, for simplicity and nature and earth and labor and big skies and fields of grass and mountains of awful height and rock. This wanderlust pops up on its own, every once in a while, or it is initiated, sparked, by the smallest of things, like a flashing memory of a grand rock formation in Utah or a short discussion about forests and valleys of the West. It’s a similar hunger to what I feel when I wander into a solemn and quiet library and behold a near infinitude of memory, knowledge, and minds. It’s not visible to observers on the outside, most likely, but it’s like an awakening, like a dog pricking up its ears and getting a glint in its eye and inhaling deeply at a nostalgic scent on the wind that stirs it deeply, a call of the wild.
When I consider what I would like to do and where I would like to go and what exactly I am looking for, I can arrive at real-life locations and things. I would like nothing better than to go travel the western United States for several weeks to several months, going where the wind carries me, driving from one place to another without a burden or a tie-down, seeing things that are permanent like mountains, immersing myself in forests of great age, having no sense of hurry and little connection to the technological, civilized life I would leave behind. I believe such an adventure would be incredibly restful, reflective, beautiful, different, and utterly opposed to the general trends of my life and culture today. The idea of seeing things of history, old trailheads, old churches and fences and buildings, old fortifications, mountain ranges traversed by wagon trains, Indian reservations, the remnants of buffalo and creatures of the past, the supremacy of nature in the form of deer and moose and vast grasslands and sheer peaks and mountain lakes, fills me with the uttermost of wonder and wandering.
What’s interesting, now that I think about it—and what causes me the most trouble in the present—is the fact that this desire to “wander” extends not just spatially but temporally. Yes, I want to go “see the world,” most specifically the West at this particular point in my life. But part of the urge to travel is to act out things that once were and to see things that once were and to, for a moment, exist as though things were as they once were. The idea of visiting a place like Wounded Knee is as much about seeing it in the present as it is remembering it in the past, visualizing it as a battlefield, reflecting on the sides that fought there, feeling that nostalgia and passage of time and the permanence of history. The idea of going to some place like the Grand Canyon is both to marvel at this carved canyon and to feel time acutely, to recognize point-blank that water produced it over years immeasurable by human lives, to wonder at what it must have been like for the first explorers to see this and the rest of the West. What did they FEEL? What was it LIKE? What did the land look like? What was it actually like to see untouched land, to hunt buffalo, to have space and freedom? What was the world like, really, back in the 1700s, 1800s, etc.? Those are questions, temporal ones, that would be raised and that I would seek as I moved about spatially.
And I know that I would never know the answer to them, not quite. The desire to know all of them, just like the desire to read everything fully in a library, arises—I think—entirely from a desire to have a complete imagination, a complete image of the past in its entirety, a complete understanding of every piece, every movement, every person, every emotion, and to hold it all in my own mind and marvel at it all and extract all the meaning and beauty and goodness that I can.
I have no reason at all to mourn the past, realistically. And I imagine that if I had lived back in time, I probably would have still looked either forward or back and thought I was in the wrong time. But here as I stand, I feel great nostalgia for a land, lifestyle, and civilization that I never knew and have barely seen. I feel an immense pull to know those things and to capture and mold that nostalgia into something useable and compact. I want to permanentize the transient, to concretize the abstract, to corral and bridge everything amorphous and scattered, to immanentize the past, to make finite the infinite. This is what the West instigates in me, what the concept of adventure does, what the wanderlust within me springs from. I may remain in one place, but my mind is nomadic across place and time.
Sure, if I set out on a Western adventure and left my little town, there are things I would miss for a moment—my house, job, friends left behind, etc. But if I’m being honest, I think the moment I would step out onto these new lands or beheld the reality of the West, I wouldn’t think again of those past things until it was time to return to them. If I really went out there, I might not return, or if I returned, I would feel that I needed to leave again. Perhaps there is something out there for me. Perhaps I should have more ties or attachment. But I could let it go for a while, in the same way that I could leave behind my first home in Wisconsin and realistically not think about it for much of my time at college. As much as I complain sometimes (well, often…) about impermanence or am afraid to lose people and things or to grow old, from childhood I have always known that there are certain things that would call me away such that I would not look back and would not regret my choice, not ever.
In all fairness, none of those things with that power are real—they are all fictional. There are fictional worlds and stories that, were they real instead of the imaginative manifestations of authors on Earth, I would enter forever. As a child, I would daydream about leaving my present life for the realms of Middle-Earth, the castles of Harry Potter, or the planets of Star Wars. In a heartbeat, I would reject all earthly careers and relationships to become a Jedi or a wizard or a rider of Rohan. As an adult, I don’t daydream like that anymore since the reality of reality is more obvious . One can’t live in dreams. And yet, if a portal opened up in front of me to the space station of Star Trek’s Deep Space Nine or the bridge of the NCC-1701 Enterprise, you couldn’t drag me back. I would have found what I was looking for all along. I would have finally seen clearly what I had all along felt I was (to use Platonic terminology), recollecting, what I was made for, from whence I came. Strange, isn’t it? Idiotic probably. And such will never be. The best I can hope for is what Reepicheep sees going over the waterfalls at the end of the world in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or what the inhabitants of Narnia, at the last, in The Last Battle, see going through Aslan’s door and cry with every ounce of their being, “Come further up, come further in!” The real West, the Utter West, Aslan’s Country—Heaven. If the clouds opened up today, would there be a moment where I thought to myself, “you mean I have to leave this life behind? This is the end of Earth?” Sure, a fleeting one. But such a thought would last only seconds and I would cast it all behind for the wonder and adventure and joy before me.
My theory is that my childhood (and beyond) longings for fictional stories to be real are inherently based on that desire for the Undiscovered Country; those worlds and stories of friendship, sacrifice, love, and beauty call me because they reflect or contain real “pieces” of something that is actually Real or will be, shattered and scattered pieces of glass that, if put together, would form an entire Window and represent an entire World. And, in turn, the American West and the wanderlust I feel for it and for travel, right now, are as real of manifestations of those childhood dreams, those fictional pursuits, that race toward the Ultimate, as possible in this actual world. There is something about the West that speaks to the soul of man, or at least, to my soul, because there is something about the West that is real and true, representative and reflective of God. I don’t think we need to step fully into religious language or biblical quotes to understand this, nor do I pretend that my soul is well-ordered and will always recognize God, but nevertheless, it makes some sense that a sheep knows the voice of its master and has no choice but to follow. If a soul has been taught and aligned to see things that are Good, True, and Beautiful, it will gravitate towards such things and love them because that is the natural and right thing to do. Some things are worth loving without qualification, even if you can’t put the “whys” into words or know what exactly you are gravitating toward. You simply know that there is “something” out there, and, like a moth to a light, instinctively will head towards it. It is a deep calling to a deep. My soul, for whatever reason, must be called by the West, must be called by that unknown and yet-known Voice.
I don’t love the West for its mere physical or intellectual attributes, wonderful as they may be. I love the West and am pulled to it and to the idea of adventure and to a wanderlust spirit because of an undercurrent of “something” intrinsically out there, “something” awful, awe-inspiring itself, something immaterial itself but made visible and concrete in grand things and the material world.
Consider it this way: if the only attribute of a garden was the fact that it produced material sustenance, then it would be a functional work of labor but not one that could account for the strange satisfaction of shaping life with one’s hands and stewarding living things. If books were only reams of paper and not embodied insights into real, live human beings, all full of tragedies and triumphs, all unique reflections of universal human nature and life, there would be far less of a draw to read them. There would be nothing organic or human about them, and thus there would be nothing transmitted about their creators and no higher purpose for which to read them. If mountains were only piles of stone and reality was only finite and visible, to behold the Rocky Mountains would be an interesting bucket-list item or intellectual stimulation fascinated with numbers and heights and ages, but it wouldn’t create this sense of wanderlust that goes to my bones.
I cannot prove any of this, of course. But I have to believe that explorers of the past felt something similar to keep going and to delight in what they did.