NOMAD BY TRADE

Transient! The word rolls off downward-curled lips in a sneer usually reserved for such lower-castes as prostitutes, shit sweepers, backpackers, and attorneys. Some people seem to think that to live a mobile lifestyle is to be a shiftless lazy no-good bum. Maybe they’re right. Certainly the pan-handlers on the street don’t advance the cause. I’m referring to the people that you tend to smell first, like it or not, before you even realize that what they’re selling is guilt. Thank God for the sense of smell. Bio-molecular scuttlebutt is that half our genes are devoted to it, apparently to know what’s good to eat. It was probably more important in the old days when such things were not written down in cookbooks and therefore much more crucial for survival. Now it tends to have a more negative connotation, i.e. if ‘it smells,’ then it smells bad, at least in most languages, though not Thai. Thai has separate distinct verbs for ‘to smell good,’ ‘to smell bad,’ to simply have a smell at all, and of course the act of sniffing itself. The same verb for ‘to smell good’ also doubles for the act of pressing cheeks with your lover, which in Thailand takes on special importance, judging from the impression Tang’s bony skull leaves in the side of my face every morning. Thais are certainly the most olfactory people I’ve ever seen, addicted as they are to those stupid inhalants which occupy the remote corners of the shopping aisles in most countries, but pay big ad bucks in Thailand, along with multiple products to lighten female skin in six weeks. Where would we be without that? We might be fooled into thinking our spouses live healthy outdoor lifestyles, like all the Western women using products to darken their skin. Nevertheless Tang sniffed me up long before she ever kissed me, so I guess I passed the smell test. Don’t try that with the junkies in Vancouver’s Gas Town.

I can remember when there were still real hoboes, long before beatniks, hippies, or hitchhikers without a cause, hoboes who grew up with the railroad, like Chinese using it as a rite of passage into the country, getting a foot in the door and a leg up the ladder long after anyone worried about Chinese junks landing on the shores and long before anyone worried about Chinese junk landing in the stores. I saw them as a child of the 60’s wandering up the hill below my grandparents’ house in Fort Worth, but I’ve never seen them since. I guess they’ve been supplanted by ‘the homeless’ as the romance of the rails fades. You don’t see many hitch-hikers any more either, but you see plenty of homeless, and the romance is long gone. They’ve moved downtown, too, no longer relegated to the trackside or ‘under the bridge.’ I guess hitchhikers were the cultural link between the two, as I can remember some from my 70’s adventures who had actually ridden rails, though I never really did myself, nothing more than jumping on then jumping off just to prove I could. Though that was probably the heyday of mobile society, there were quickly signs that the bloom was off the rose as those same people frequently succumbed to alcohol and drug excess, replacing TV with cheap thrills at a fairly poor exchange rate I’d say. I know my own wake-up call came when I saw people drinking Sterno ‘canned heat’ to get a buzz rather than buy a six-pack of beer. For those of you who don’t know, Sterno was the jellied alcohol in a can that you simply opened and lit a match to for heat in your little portable stove. It’s worth mentioning but little compensation that the beer then wasn’t much good, either, long before micro-brews and their pubs. In those days I’d drive back from the West to Mississippi with a trunk full of Coors for the Homies, a beer that I would generously compare to piss now.

But I didn’t freak out and go sell real estate or anything. I just decided there must be some way to travel and make money, too. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right. It can’t… any more. It’s funny that I made my living most of my life doing something that hadn’t been done before and probably won’t be done again on any large scale, dealing folk art and ethnic handicrafts. The process of tourism promoting handicrafts promoting cottage industry promoting import/exports has pretty much run its course and left native cultures more or less where they started, usually with improved local economies. That’s all they wanted after all. It’s the northern Europeans and their cousins who have the wanderlust. It’s in our Indo-Aryan speaking blood. We stayed out there on the steppes long after our southern cousins started hanging out with the Semites down on Club Med, learning how to be civilized and corrupt in towns and cities, climbing society’s ladders and jockeying for positions. They act like city people are smarter but anyone knows that’s cow poop. City people are just weaker. They’re servants and store clerks huddling together for safety against the ghosts and fears of their own pathetic imaginations, that they use to substitute for the real lives that they lost long ago, replaced by pictures on walls and silly love songs stuck in the head. The real poetry comes with the wind by the campfire; the real pictures are painted on the sky at sunset, lasting but a moment before the lights turn to darkness and souls take their rest. People of the steppes are hunters and herders, moving with the seasons and changing for their own reasons. They only need cities to prey on, to take what they need and leave the rest. A city of hunters only happens where a campsite becomes permanent and only then by convenience and circumstance, never necessity, for while a hunter may be IN the city, he is never OF the city. He’ll still have a little plot and a few animals, a view of the sky and a view of the future, ready to pack his bags at the slightest provocation, a roadmap etched in permanent memory.

The new landscape includes the web, of course, threatening to catch anything and everything in its sticky filaments. It’s hard to believe now that a computer was ever anything other than an Internet machine. Spreadsheets and databases gave way to e-mail and spam gave way to e-bay and e-banks gave way to MySpace and FaceBook. Now Second Life looks to take up where dreams leave off, a world inside the box, complete with land and money, milk and honey. For the conspiracy-minded this conjures up visions of bio-pods attached to TV screens by wires and tubes, getting their dreams and visions spoon–fed with oatmeal to produce fart-forced bio-gas for the cars in the real world upstairs. This should be where you look for losers and hustlers, a drug-like life for those who have none, hardly the place you find real men, the hunters and horsemen recently arrived from the steppes, right? The Next Big Thing may be fun and fashionable, good for Hollywood and Bollywood, maybe, but not much else, right? Business is done in tall towers; ‘firm’ people wear suits, right? Wrong. This is exactly where you find the hunters, along the borders, the frontiers where fear and boredom stop and Nature and creativity start, a line that crawls along the outskirts of towns and through the subconscious of individuals, fluid and flowing, shifting and re-shaping, to fit circumstance and forge the future. The Way is the main thing, not the bottom line, but the process and the progress. That is the American dream, civilization without cities.