#nomadlife

not a single city soul would know me,

so not a single city soul could hurt me,

then maybe,

I can finally heal—

A girl is galloping on her horse, and a young man is awaiting her at the start line. As soon as she passes him, he can start the race. If the man is able to catch up with the woman before they reach the finish line, he may steal a kiss. However, if he fails to do so, the woman turns around and now she is chasing the man. When she does so, she whips the man to signify her victory

Midnight in Varanasi, a city on the Ganges in northern India. I am on the back of a motorbike taxi, riding through narrow streets toward a dark suburb to meet a young stranger I found online. He speaks maybe three words of English. The air smells like cremation fires and diesel smoke. My rational brain knows this is absurd. My body does not care.

He leads me up a concrete staircase to a bleak room lit by the harsh flicker of a single fluorescent tube. I see a twin bed in the corner, a wooden table with two chairs, and a tapestry of Lord Shiva watching us from the wall. We have barely turned the lock when a heavy knock breaks the silence. His face goes pale. “A friend,” he whispers. In a country where men stay in the closet for life and marry just because that is what is expected, a knock at the door is never just a social call. It is a threat.

Panic. I am shoved out the back exit into an unlit alley, standing in the dark with my shirt half-buttoned, trying to find a ride back while stray dogs circle nearby. The ride back is long. The shame is longer.

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last long ride in Gulf Shores

its definitely harder to leave this year, because I won't be coming back to Alabama. I had a chance to get into a members only campground, so I nabbed it. I know I will also love wintering there, but I'm going to miss all the shenanigans we would get up to at this campground😢

In his 1987 book, The Songlines, the British author and traveller, Bruce Chatwin wrote, "A journey is a fragment of hell."

My wife and I have been journeying together for nearly 38 years. Except for eight years in Australia, in the early '00s (during which we lived in seven different houses in Sydney and its northern suburbs), we haven't settled anywhere for very long. Indeed, the longest we've stayed in any one 'home' has been the three years we've lived aboard Wrack and since 2023, she has sailed more than 2,700 nautical miles, from the English Channel to northern Morocco, and from there to Spain, the Balearic Islands, and the southern coast of Sardinia. During the same period, we have also spent several weeks at a time ashore, in Berlin, Tangier, Truro (Cornwall) and Rome.

We might have sailed even further east across the Mediterranean if, at the end of September, last year — a year which began with my wife being hospitalised twice, in Spain, with heart problems — I had not suffered a heart attack while visiting our son in Rome. I underwent an emergency procedure, a balloon angioplasty, to unblock an artery. After a sluggish recovery, I spent most of January, this year, in bed with COVID and a painful lung infection.

Neither my wife nor I can ignore the portents, let alone the physical and psychic toll. We are tired and frail. The time has come to stop, to stay in one place — if not a home, then at least a long-term refuge or bolt-hole — and shape a different sort of life, no longer peripatetic but persistently still.

It's not going to be easy. We have few options and multiple financial, social and legal obstacles. Still, we're determined to be settled within a couple of months.

I'm ill at ease with the prospect of returning to a shore-bound world that is anything but settled or predictable; in fact, it's downright scary. But my wife longs for a real home and feels we won't have any peace until we find one. As she puts it, "We need to get somewhere we can start again."