Foreword to a conversation

By DAN HODDINOTT

I’ve come a long way from riding ice pans during spring breakup, and then from standing on the side of the road, as a teenager, thumbing a ride with whomever had the goodwill, the curiosity or the desire for company with a wind-whipped, rain-soaked, long-haired restless soul who had just started to recalculate the dimensions and boundaries of the world that had been handed to him. Since then, I’ve set sail in seafaring ships and inboard skiffs, ridden jet planes and jalopies, parachutes and pairs of boots, motorcycles and lawn mowers, elevators and elephants, fast cars and magic carpets — always headed somewhere, in whatever direction the ride was going before our paths intersected. Not to discount the lift of wind and wave, which has, in the meantime, also kept me in touch with my place in the grander scheme of things, and has served as a faithful gauge to measure just how far I’ve come.

If I’ve gone anywhere at all.

Brig Bay point or San Francisco: you still need a jacket in June. Bonne Bay or Big Sur: a cold wind still presses itself against the slope of the gallant hills. Bide Arm, Sapling Ridge or St. George: I can point out a whole array of wholesome people leading contented lives that resonate with the meaning they’ve found in whatever form the story of a coming savior has reached them.

A traveling man is doubly blessed — or not at all, by half — for certainty is but a friendly face met in passing, or a long-sought harbor that is not overly interested in having you stay around. Either-or. Restless like the wanderer, certainty never stays long enough to encourage, nor to bog you down. For all I know, each other is what the two of us have been seeking all along.

It took me years to figure out that I didn’t have to reach any particular destination (nor abandon an old one) in order to be eligible to do what I longed to do; I just needed to pull off the road and do it. The driven will always find a way to prepare themselves to do things well, no matter what the where happens to be. You can learn that lesson just by re-reading this paragraph.

A new book of poetry I am preparing for print is about such a journey. Similarly, though from its own perspective, my CD Sighs of the Times is too. Come to think of it, most of the serious creative works I churn out at this stage of life tend to examine the process of passing through towns and cities, streets and alleyways, highways and byways, straightaways and pathways.

In traveling country roads and city streets, one often finds himself with head down against the wind, and whatever may be blowing into or out of town with it. And too, the temperament and shifting moods of the people who occupy the streets.  And everyone you meet is affected, in the same way, by your having been there on that particular day. But most of all, a journey is about change, whether good or ill, and how you react to it.

Perhaps that is my muse.

I’m good with change, I’ve found. At least, for the most part. A willing traveler should be accommodating of things having changed by time he returns, if he ever does. And should be keen to learn the language of life spoken in whatever foreign locale he lands in.

Nonetheless, it is a challenge to discover structures you had counted on suddenly gone. Or someone has, without your say-so, recalculated the nature of agreed-upon beliefs — doubly so were they transformed for mere convenience by blocs that have gained more power and influence than you. Boundaries are redrawn, with the frantic frequency our leaders topple dictators and kingdoms they’ve grown weary of supporting (or whose turn has come for exploitation). Beliefs change. Fire-breathing absolutists now show their fangs in foolish grins as they dance with the unwashed masses they failed to cleanse. The intellectual response to social engineering has become obedience, and to oppression it is embrace.

Whatever.

The only thing that unsettles me without remedy, really, is the uncertainty of permanence.

Life, and the trends that move it along, can be baffling. Inconsistent. Also inconsiderate. Unfair too. It can, at the same time, be sublimely beautiful. The difference, I have found, depends as much as anything on how much you’ve packed to take along on the trip, and thus how much is hanging off your shoulders that you have to keep an eye on — protecting from the snatching hands of bandits or your own forgetfulness.

Travel light and you’re much better prepared to receive each moment as it is, instead of how it might threaten or nourish the other things in your charge to keep.

And when you’re thumbing your way through life, you learn early that fortune lasts only as far — but every bit as far — as the good man who picked you up wishes to take you, or the numbers printed on your ticket allow. It’s never long before you find yourself on the edge of the road again. But, like the willow on the wind, or driftwood on the sea, you always do end up on some hillside somewhere, or on a beach or in a cove, and have the mechanisms at hand to do something when you do get back up.

Something is, after all, the only thing life requires you to do.

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