Wanderlust

Moez Surani, in his GEIST Magazine essay "Driving to the Grave of Thomas Mann," (http://www.geist.com/articles/driving-with-maurice-sambert/)  recounts this delightful exchange over why his friend Maurice Sambert would take such trips, and why he was so interested in the final resting places of writers past: "We spend all of our years living in different houses, in different cities, we travel around, trying different cultures, and all we are looking for is the place where we want to die. Then we stay there and wait for it. We wait to be taken. For these writers, it is the final decision they make." 

Apart from the fact that we can finally afford it, maybe that's why I have developed a desire to travel a bit more these last few years. I don't mind having lived and made a living in Edmonton the last 27 years, and to be counting down an indeterminate few more to retirement. But I just do not want to die here. Or to be interred here. Many people achieve those ends or make their endings in Edmonton--the cemeteries prove it, even of they are not the reason for the city's notorious nickname: "Deadmonton." I just do not want to be one of those people. If I have to wait for death, in terms of climate and amenities, there are so many more comfortable and hospitable places, and in terms of company there must be somewhere with more people I can appreciate and maybe connect with. That might even appreciate and welcome me.

It's not Edmonton's fault. But I have this gnawing sense that I have never truly fit in here. At work, I am in a limbo position between the short-term temporary teaching staff in my department, and the permanent, tenured faculty--not quite part of either. I have made no lasting friendships here, formed no unbreakable bonds. Oh, I have found ways to make myself useful, and all that. But my departure would be unremarkable, and, I think,  largely unremarked. 

Edmonton for me has always been rather an accidental way station: it was not the place I chose to spend by far the longest period of residency in my working life.  It was meant to be a place I came to for an education and to complete a degree and to move on from. Only . . . I never moved on. And I never really committed to it as "home," just as the place I lived. It became by default the place Eva and I married, had a baby, raised a son, and watched him leave for his own education, leaving us behind. 

That seems to be the larger source of agitation and motive for wanderlust. I hate the sense of stasis that comes of living in a default setting and of being left behind when there is so much out there out there. 

Maybe I'm inheritor of the same restlessness expressed by Tennyson's Ulysses, who found he could not abide sitting, that he could not rest from travel. It's just that I never was that much of an adventurer to begin with, so the urge is rather late in arriving. I might not have spent all of my life traveling, but it is time to get on with it, time to shake off routine and be en route.