The Wanderer

Life without my dad has been almost painfully normal. I’ve always thought about him in another era, one ancient and primal where he belonged, wandering an unknown world. I think he was one of the last of a certain kind of person, and the mundane world I was raised in was crushing at times for him. He was the odd one, the one who lived for extremes and wild places, and telling stories about him sometimes feels like fiction, even though I was there and I know that some people really are the main character, gloriously flawed and inherently special.

As soon as I turned eighteen, my dad let all of his spinning plates smash on the ground with spectacular disdain. He always said that as long as he had us to be responsible for, things just worked out for him, so I guess he read the writing on the wall when it was time for me to move out like my brother had done a couple years earlier. It wasn’t just him, either. The whole economy crashed with him. It was the fall of 2007 and his jobs as a contractor building homes had quickly dried up as the Great Recession loomed. He let our house go to bankruptcy, sold off everything he owned for a pocket full of cash, got his painful old teeth pulled and a nice set of dentures made, and booked a one way ticket to Costa Rica. He didn’t speak Spanish, and he didn’t have any solid plans, but he packed his bicycle so he could get around with a map, and a bag of tools so he could find work as a handyman.

I cried at the airport to see him go. It was terrifying to lose my person to an airplane aiming thousands of miles away, but his step was so light, and part of me had always known this day would come. He used to tell us we’d play “around the world tag” one day. In his life before us, before he was a single father with the weight of our existence to keep him grounded, before he taught himself to be serious and successful and to put his entire being into our childhood, he was the wanderer. He told me once that his whole life, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he was always thinking about somewhere else. I grew up on stories of his adventures, and had even been a supporting character in a few he couldn’t resist over the years, but there was nothing that really prepared me for the sparkle I saw in his eyes as he waved goodbye. He was free, stepping out of the money game and abandoning all of the constraints of our suburban normal for something that made his heart pound to that old beat of feet wandering down a new path.

Days would pass and I’d wait for his emails. Every so often, I’d send one to remind him that, even in his absolute freedom, I still needed to hear from my dad, to know that he was alive in the rainforest or whatever.

“Ground control to Major Tom..” I’d write, and I’d wait. He always wrote back when he got somewhere with internet, sending pictures of the plates of food he got, the snakes he saw, the volcano he rode his bike up and down, the beach he slept on, the stray dogs that kept him company.. I think he was lonely, but so happy.

Finally, after three months, he sent me his flight information. He’d had his fill of building a dam for a farm in the cloud forest, of the ex pats he’d befriended and the rum he’d been swimming in. I picked him up in Detroit the day before Thanksgiving. He was tan and skinny, and gave me a hug so tight I knew his adventures probably included some close calls he’d never tell me about. He showed me his exotic bug bites and told me about a beach he wanted to take me to one day, about the sounds of the jungle at night and the homeless woman he saw once with bright blue eyes. When I brought him back to my apartment, he made a fort on the balcony. Michigan winter was well underway, but he greeted the cold like an old friend, waving away the coat I’d offered him.

“I’m sick of the heat,” he told me as he laid out his sleeping bag. He stayed on my balcony for a week, smoking cigarettes and thinking about somewhere else.