Built To Roam

I was sitting outside tonight working through logistics for the next run , maps, routes, the usual way I always do before a trip. And somewhere in the middle of all of it I just kind of drifted.

Started thinking about the people I know who have never left their county. Who have never driven somewhere without knowing exactly what they'd find when they get there.

Like, Who have never felt that specific kind of quiet that comes from being 1600 miles from anything familiar, watching the landscape change through a windshield, not entirely sure what comes next.

I think about that a lot actually. More than I probably should.
Angel and I have put something close to 30,000 miles on this life in the last stretch alone.

I didn't set out to document it or brand it or turn it into anything. I just couldn't stop moving. Something in me requires new geography the way other people require routine. I genuinely don't know how to explain that to someone who doesn't feel it. It's not restlessness exactly. It's more like... orientation. Like the moving is how I think. How I process. How I figure out what's next.

The virtual maps spread out on my lap tonight weren't just logistics. They were something else. The next migration.

Studies suggest the average American spends the majority of their life within about 18 miles of where they grew up. EIGHTEEN MILES!!! Their whole life. The full radius of their existence.
I'm not saying that to be glib about it. There are real reasons people stay. Family. Work. Cost. Obligation. Roots that matter. I understand all of that.

But I also think a lot of people just... never question it. The radius of their life shrinks down to something manageable and familiar and they stop noticing.

The curiosity that might have once pulled them toward something new or unknown gets quieter every year until one day it's just gone. And they couldn't tell you when it left. Reminds me of our BMX bikes to the store just a little too far away.....

That's the part that gets me.
I looked up from the baseball field lights tonight tonight and watched a few birds cutting across the sky and just kind of stopped.

There's something about watching birds move that short-circuits whatever you were thinking about. They don't deliberate. They don't weigh the pros and cons. They just kinda..meander.. go. where the wind blows them..

And I started turning over everything I know about migration.

Bar-headed geese cross the Himalayas. Not around them. Over them. At nearly 29,000 feet, where the air is so thin that most mammals lose consciousness, these birds are beating their wings and navigating by instinct toward somewhere .....Rüppell's griffon vultures have been recorded at 37,000 feet commercial aircraft altitude. A vulture. Riding thermals that most humans will only ever see from a pressurized cabin window with a martini in their hand...

Below the waterline it's the same story. Salmon navigate thousands of miles of open ocean and then find not just the same river but the exact tributary, the exact stretch of gravel where they were born. No GPS. No map. Something internal that we still don't fully understand.

Then ..Gray whales make a 12,000-mile round trip every year between Arctic feeding grounds and Mexican lagoons. Arctic terns fly pole to pole — something like 50,000 miles annually. They see more of this planet in a single year than most humans will in a lifetime.

The range of the natural world is staggering when you actually sit with it.

Then I wonder about how people still just hang around Regency Square on parham rd and the same old bar and the same ... I mean I get I love the Ole country store ... but I think about.

Toddy — my Giant Schnauzer,has crossed the Rockies, slept in the Arizona desert, watched the Atlantic roll in from a Carolina beach, logged tens of thousands of miles in the back of this van. He doesn't know any of that. He has no concept of the distance. He just wakes up every morning in a new place and goes nose-first into whatever is here.

No hesitation....Just range.
There's something almost embarrassing about watching a dog model something that most humans can't manage.

The birds don't wonder whether to migrate. The salmon don't weigh the pros and cons of the journey. Something in them just knows the distance is the point. That the moving isn't separate from the living it is the living.

I don't think people who stay put are wrong. I just think some of them are missing something they don't know they're missing. A version of themselves that only exists in motion. A kind of thinking that only happens when the landscape is changing outside the window and there's nowhere to be except wherever you're headed.
Maybe the range isn't incidental to the life.
Maybe for some of us, it is the life.

🐾 Where's Toddy | #WheresToddy #VanLife #Migration #LifeOnTheRoad #Wanderlust #GiantSchnauzer