The Wanderer

Since I have yearned after the hidden heart
I am become the wanderer among the stars of this revelation
And the term of my journeying afar
Is as that of the viewless winds.

When he set his foot again on his hometown after five months of awkward, and failed, struggle to make a home in another, far town, he meant to stay forever here. But things don’t approve his plan. His girl, whom he had left back in the town that he had just been left, begs him endlessly to come again. A call from his mother from the other end of the island added to the list of the places that he would have to visit in the months to come. These, and scores of other things, made him wondered whether he was meant to drifted away like this forever.

Now he thinks that he is not a traveler, or an adventurer with fixed goal to achieve something with his life. He is more a wanderer without enough time to settle in one place, without a definite goal for his journey, without a fixed aim in any direction that he’s heading to. He is just drifting in the wind blown by other people dear to his heart and to whom he cannot resist since they are too dear to him. And hadn't he pass many things in his journey: the great and small cities of the island, the winding roads that connected them, the narrow, historic strait between the islands?

Once he often thought of the sailors of the past ages: how they had bravely chosen to put their life on bet with the nature. Some achieved a considerable success, like the ex-sailor writer Joseph Conrad, while some had ended their adventures at the bottom of the seas. They’re brave, proud men who were driven by their lust for adventure, of the necessity to prove oneself against the one-thought-to-be unsurpassable nature.

A captain’s name which he can’t anymore recall, one of the main characters of Jack London’s Sea Wolf, enters his mind. The name is not there but the captain’s actions are remembered best: a gigantic man with lush beard like a forest and a lump of toughness toward himself, his sailors and toward nature. The captain was indeed a hard man, with brutal discipline and firmness of words. He brought his ship drifted around the Pacific, from the coldest waves to the warmest regions and rarely set his foot on land.

Suddenly he realizes that he is indeed a wanderer. He is the captain in a new name and a new body with different adventure. His seas now are the distance between cities where his dearests live. The captain wanted to have the fullness of the danger, un-comforts, hidden glory of his adventure. The present captain still wants all of those sadness, hardship, and silent happiness. With this in his mind, he feels a peace coming from the far horizon, steadily coming to him, and he closes his eyes full of thankfulness for anything that life had brought to him. ***

Note: the verse is taken from The Wanderer, a poem of Australian national poet Christopher Brennan.