Tethered Nomad

As most of you know I was hiking in Utah this past May.  I was out there with two dear friends, Karen Specht and Barb Zingg.  All three of us are readers and so had our books handy at the end of each day.  Barb’s book caught my attention, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild.  Didn’t really comment on it at the time, but the title caught my interest so once home I found the book in the library and checked it out.

Oh my, I fell in love.  The book is right up my alley and I fell in love with the author also.  Craig Childs is an author who writes like a poet.  How he phrases his thoughts grabbed me by the heart and did not let go for all 337 pages.  I committed then and there to read all his books as I can….I tend to take on more reading than I can handle.  

I am now on my second Craig Childs book:  Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America.  If the topic is of interest, and it is, then it too has grabbed me.  He presents a travelogue of how early humans explored North America.  Not fascinating to everyone, but fascinating to me.  

So I am reading along in the chapter titled The Long Coast and Childs is sharing a conversation he had with Jenya Anichenko, a coastal prehistoric boat archaeologist (who knew!!) who emigrated from Russia to the US and who is currently a researcher at the Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, Alaska.  She is sharing her experience of leaving her home and moving to a totally new environment; unlike Childs who has wandered the world but always returned to his little piece of it in the American Southwest.   He defines his experience as a ‘tethered nomad’….I like it, brought to mind immediately my life.  

I haven’t traveled as much as many, but I’ve done my share…and I am definitely a tethered nomad.  Never thought of it that way before, but it is true.  My family moved to Florida from Southwest Ohio when I was 9 years old.  I stayed there until I was 20 and then returned to Southwest Ohio….the only one in my immediate family to do so.  I remember living in Pinellas Park, Florida and dreaming at night of playing in the snow and making snow angels.  My sub conscious yearned for my home.  

Five years after my return to Ohio I headed out again, this time to Alaska.  For two years I had a blast, making fabulous friends, working for US Fish & Wildlife, loving the long summer days and northern lights of winter.  But I was still tethered; I managed to return to Cincinnati annually for dentist appointments, GYN appointments and just to check in.  Alaska was an epic adventure but once again the urge to roam struck and this time I went even further out on my tether, to Guam.  

Spent 10 months on Guam with a Cincinnati based boyfriend who had a 32’ sloop named the Palumin Tasi.  We rented a house in the next village from the marina and I worked in an advertising company while he worked at a NASA Tracking Station.  When not working we sailed and maintained the boat.  It was a wonderful 10 months right up to the day a 200+mph typhoon struck dead on.  We were young and stupid, but we did survive.  I was on the first plane out of there, headed back of course to Cincinnati. 

Since then I’ve wandered the world, more or less, but never left my home base of Cincinnati again.  Don’t anticipate that I ever will.  Am I genetically predisposed?  Don’t know.  Have past lives cemented me here?  Don’t know.  Just know this is my place, tethered by free will I suppose.