Are We There Yet?

Imagine this scene: We see a tribe riding camels across the desert. The sun is burning; the wind is blowing; the wilderness stretches out before them. A boy riding on a camel next to his dad is whining, “Are we there yet?” The father calmly trudges on through the wilderness. In the next frame, the young boy repeats his question, and you get the feeling that he’s been asking this same question all the long day. Finally, his father turns toward his son and in exasperation shouts, “For God’s sake, we’renomads!”

To realize that we’re nomads is to know the double truth that we’re not there yet… and yet it is possible to know that we are always there, arriving wholly in this moment, fully present in this step, alive to the miracle of the journey.

We arethere whenever we are awake.

The Gully:
My Training Ground for a Life of Travel

Back in the 1950s, when my parents came to northern New Jersey, they probably thought they were moving to the country. Our neighborhood was surrounded by farms and woods. As I grew up, just about all those farms and all those woods gave way to shopping malls and housing developments. By the time I was 8 or 9, there was just one precious plot of wild land left in Paramus right behind our back yard. We called itThe Gully, and it was saved from development because it belonged to the Elks Club. This tiny scrap of wilderness was put to use for their annual picnic. The rest of the time it was my world, my place for adventure, exploration, clandestine pleasures and play. Well, not just mine: All the neighborhood kids played there. If you built a fort, some mean kid was sure to tear it down. Every tree, rock, or bush had a name. I had my hideouts, my secret places of refuge, portals to other worlds, places where my imagination could run wild.

The Gully was not without its dangers. I often came home scratched up and bleeding after fighting my way through blackberry bushes, or covered with the spreading itch of poison ivy. One time my brother and I were hopelessly stuck in mud (sure that it was quicksand), and once my boot came off in the snow and I limped home, numb with frostbite. I was serious about my play, and remember being indignant when my mom called me in for dinner. “But I’m playing!” I’d protest. Being an explorer was my job, my identity, my destiny.

The Gully was a microcosm of the whole wild world that awaited me, beyond the shopping malls, beyond the suffocation of school, outside the confines of suburban banalities. I refused to settle for ordinary. “I’m not from here,” I insisted. “I’m from an island off the coast of Madagascar.” (This was the most exotic place I could imagin