For most of my adult life, I have had a steady feeling of wanting to be somewhere other than where I happened to be at the time. As strange as it sounds, being unsettled was a comfort, knowing that around the next corner would be something new and unknown, possibly even exciting. I can trace such feelings to my earliest memories, walking with my parents along the forest preserve trails following the Des Plaines River near Chicago. The river led to somewhere; I wanted to follow it; and I wanted to explore the forests on the other side. But I was only a child, and so I followed my parents instead.
As a young man, I traveled by motorcycle, planning my trips over the colder months, hitting the highway every summer. Around Lake Michigan, to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Mississippi River I searched for remote areas, obscure pathways, and what I perceived as untrammeled wild areas.
My destinations were varied, but they had one commonality: natural surroundings, far from the sounds of traffic, steel and concrete, the bustle of cities, the smoke and debris of modern progress. It would have been foolish, though, as some do, to denigrate the roads that brought me to my destinations, the vehicles that carried me, the society that could produce such products, or the farmlands that sustained that society. These are all necessary and good. But for just a short time, I longed to remove myself, if only temporarily.
These days the wanderlust is well below the surface. And I often wonder why. Is it because I no longer live in a big city, but in a rural area with abundant forests, fields, rivers, and wetlands near my home? Is it simply age? The restlessness of youth has undoubtedly waned with age, and I have actually visited many of the sites that held a distant mystery when I was younger. Perhaps my waning wanderlust has something to do with finally marrying in my late forties and becoming a homeowner with a few acres of land. Most of the time, I can truly say that I am where I wish to be.
And yet, waning does not mean dead. I still make my plans as much as ever. My search for natural surroundings, though, tends to be closer to home: Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, our cabin at Quiver Lake, and other nearby sites. And yet, sometimes when I see a sharp-shinned hawk on its spring migration to the north woods, perhaps the northern shore of Lake Superior, I’ll want to follow. It’s happened before.
[Note: This post originally appeared in the Pekin Daily Times blog, "A View of Nature."]