I walked the streets of Kent, Ohio a few days ago. It is a pleasant spot, a little run down, but with enough university student energy to keep it alive. Its industrial past seems largely behind it, but the inhabitants have not completely abandoned their downtown, and the attempts to spruce up the river are admirable.
What I could not find was any tangible trace of its past as a historical flashpoint. The 1970 student protest and subsequent massacre at Kent State University was a pivotal point in United States history, the place where society realized that student protest and government suppression had gone way too far. An awful tragedy, it was a place where America came to the brink, and somehow pulled itself back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings)
I realize most of the events took place at the university, but tension between the working class town and the more worldly students was no small ingredient in that tragedy. Nowadays Kent is a quiet place, where students seem more worried about grades and parties and work-terms than anything more serious. Fair enough, they will not be young forever, and a few carefree years will do them no harm. Meanwhile, the blue-collar industries are long gone from the downtown, and with them the culture they fostered. Kent’s time as the center of a small-scale civil war has receded into the past.
I walked for a couple of hours, along the river, though calm residential streets, past schools and tattoo parlours, tanning salons and used CD stores. Increasingly, however, I cannot wander around these towns without being conscious of my status as the ‘other’. Newfoundland, for all its other unhealthy habits, is an Island full of walkers. I live part-time in rural Newfoundland, and it is nothing to be miles from anywhere on some dirt road in the barrens, only to encounter a couple of matrons chatting away like magpies as they march past. Such types are rare in towns like Kent. Other than kids on their way from school and Latino nannies, pedestrians are an unusual site in much of Middle America. As a lone male I get self-conscious. People watch me suspiciously, as if I was a robber casing potential jobs, or a remittance man looking for a car to repossess. Strolling aimlessly just does not feel like a legitimate reason to be out and about. The sub-text from a dozen dubious glares seems to be ‘if you are serious about getting somewhere, drive like everyone else, or put on a pair of sweat pants and some runners and get some real exercise’.
No doubt I am being a bit paranoid, but I might be onto something here too. The aimless hike, a legitimate part of literature and culture elsewhere, seems to have fallen entirely out of favour in our modern world. The wanderer has become potentially threatening.
This dichotomy is an undercurrent of many of the bemused encounters we have on the road. People are just fascinated with those who do not feel bound by their own address. I think a lot of musicians are like me. They just like to be on the move. After a while the ‘where’ or ‘how’ doesn’t matter. It is the going that is the essence of the activity. Of course, with young children in our lives, homesickness can be a fierce burden, and heaven knows what important life events we have missed. And yet when we meet our peers, or friends like the Young Dubliners and Blue Rodeo, talk soon turns to the road, its thrills and disappointments, and inevitably, its almost magnetic attraction.
I have been reading a lot lately about the Travellers of Ireland, sometimes disparagingly called Tinkers, more often these days ‘Pavees’, an Irish Gaelic word which means ‘walkers’. They are an enigmatic people. They are not related to the people known as Roma or Gypsies, a race descended from Indians driven from the sub-continent a thousand years ago. They do, however, share a strong urge to nomadism, a desire to live on the move. Most historians agree that the Pavees are of Celtic stock, but other than that no one agrees on anything, and their secretive culture has kept away census takers and anthropologists alike.
They live apart in Ireland, dismissed as poor and of no-account by many people. And yet while their nomadic lifestyle is considered an anachronism and a nuisance, it is not in itself dishonourable. In traditional Celtic culture there is a recognition that some people are compelled to wander, that they will never be satisfied if forced to settle in one place. While having such a tribe camp at the end of your driveway is considered a pain in the arse, no one denies that what the Travellers do is a legitimate way of life.
While knitting together the odds and ends that became my book, it struck me how many pieces were about travelling and wanderlust. Not so much about anywhere specific, as much as they are about the strange joy that comes with being a stranger, wandering around, aimlessly observing, someone who has no specific role in the life of a different place. Many of the interviews I did were about this same topic, although few have stated it so explicitly. Even when the band is doing media, whatever topic we are supposedly discussing, one question always comes up: “you must get tired of the travel…?”
Most journalists take the majority view – to them, and most of the world, it is rather inconceivable that anyone would deliberately choose shiftlessness over the safety of home, even if you are being compensated by quasi-rock stardom. Every so often, however, you hear a different note in the reporters’ voice: envy. You know they have been listening to the siren sound of the wind since they were children, waiting for a circus in which to run away, for a tribe of passing Pavee to come calling, that they are secretly dreaming of the day they will walk away from hearth and home, face to the breeze, all good sense abandoned. Whether they know it or not, it is a desire as old as mankind. In modern North America such people don’t have a tribe or label, and the Pavee and Roma who still roam our roads are not seeking new recruits.
Instead, aspiring nomads join bands, and spend their days walking around towns like Kent.