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+I have never felt at home anywhere. When I was very young I desperately wanted to be somewhere else. I was assured by many, living and dead, that this was not normal. That I would need to settle down. What was I running from? Obviously myself they said. They said that it was me, that it was curse, that I could never escape this feeling of out-of-placeness because it was something inside me. I ignored them out of sheer stubbornness. As I grew older I began to wander. I began to explore. First on foot. I walked three blocks, then four, then five all the way to the castaways, the wildest place I could get. The world never felt so large, me never more a part of it, finally in it, finally free to be part of it than when I slipped under that faded gray pine fence, the cracked and splintered last outpost of civilization in my nine-year-old mind, and stepped out into the field of sagebrush and buckwheat as tall as me. Here I disappeared into in a network of BMX bike trails and discarded tires, watched brown and tan gopher snakes and blue throated fence lizards dart under my feet as I made my way down to the edge of the bluff where a cluster of Eucalyptus trees and ice plant held out against the ravages of erosion, trying to keep themselves and us from slipping in to marshy islands of cordgrass below. It was here we came to ride BMX bikes, smoke our first cigarettes and drink our first warm, foamy beers stolen from dad's stash in the back of the garage. It was here, traveling, on the road, however short it might have been that we first found freedom. 
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+I caught a taste of that freedom and never wanted anything else. I looked for more places in the suburbs where I grew up and, to my own surprise found them. Across the street was a drainage ditch. I scaled the fence and followed it for miles, lost in my own private explorations of a world that was new, full of algal growth, darting song sparrows and looping, bouncing flights of Monarch's and Swallowtails. It was here that I first met a local who did not like my presence in his world, a mockingbird attacked me, going so far as to beat my head with its wings before I took off running. But it was right that mockingbird, it was not my world. It was surrounded by but cut off from the everyday world by a mere two feet of hedge. I found the freedom of exploration again. And again. Everywhere I went, so long as I went.
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+It wasn't long before I convinced my parents to let me go farther. First down off the bluffs and into the marshes around the bay, then to the other side of the bay, then all the way to where the bay emptied into the sea and at that point, the bonds were effectively loosed. I roamed where I liked. I started ditching school to explore the bay in fourth grade. By high school I was leaving at lunch and not returning until the next day. Once at the age of eleven, my friend Josh and I managed to convince each of our parents that we were going to the other's house. Instead we stealthily slipped out with our surfboards on our bikes and met up half way between our houses, hid our bikes in the unused drainage ditch, the same one the mockingbird had driven me out of, and caught a local bus for San Clemente. I'll never forget the way I felt, my head pressed up against the glass, watching the world slip by, but also watching the reflections of it in the window as we slipped down the coast, the feeling of being a part of and watching the reflections of the world at the same time. The is still my favorite part of life on the road, the way glass shows the world and you, together, riding along, slipping into the future as it becomes the present, the ever present future of boundless possibility. We were twelve when we stepped off the bus a good 40 miles from home, but for my part, I was much, much older already. We spent the morning surfing, and out in the water, waiting on a wave was the first time I ever recall thinking, I wonder if I could do this forever.
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+The older I got the farther I went. I became (and remain) a huge fan of bus systems. The bus down the coast to surf offered me a way to get where I wanted and asked no questions. You got on, paid your fare and you could get off when you wanted. I became a consumate bus rider in a world obsessed with personal cars. I took the bus up the coast to see punk rock shows in Long Beach. I took it inland to hobby shops to buy model airplanes. I took it everywhere I could until enough of my friends had cars that I began to see a new way to extend my horizons even farther. By senior year of high school I had all but dropped out, and spent as much time as I could zipping around the state. I thought nothing of throwing a couple cans of Dentimore Stew (a quick and easy travel meal I picked up from trips with my father) in a bag with a jacket and fresh pair of socks -- to this day I refuse to put on yesterday's socks. Douglas Adams and I part company in our packing lists, I've never needed a towel, but fresh socks are a necessity -- and heading out for a weekend trip of several hundred miles per day. I made day trips to San Francisco, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, I didn't care when I got there, I didn't care when I left, I was just going and going and going.
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+As you might imagine this did not mix well with education. I did manage to graduate from high school and I went to college, partly for a girl, partly because I found a college at the edge of Los Angeles that was just far enough beyond the traffic that I could make an even quicker getaway for weekend trips. Eventually though it turned out my girlfriend wanted to spend time with me, not with me on the road, and the advantage of missing traffic pale next to the horrors of the Inland Empire. 
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+Around this time I hit upon my first way to combine travel and making a living -- music. somewhere along the way I sat still long enough to learn a few chords on the guitar and I was young and dumb enough to believe that like Fugazi and Husker Du and tk and tk and R.E.M and all the rest of the bands I loved, I too could make a living driving around the United States playing shows. Travel and live music and perhaps if we worked hard and stuck to our guns a modicum of fame and fortune -- what's not to love?
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+up in the mountains, to the vast fields of spring wildflowers in the eastern deserts, to ever shrinking shores the great salt lake.
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+I went everywhere I could every time I could. Farther and farther afield, each trip longer than the last, until I noticed something -- they were right, I was not normal, but they were wrong as well, there was a place I felt at home, a place I felt I belonged, an observer within a system that otherwise had no use for me, I felt something when I was traveling that I have never felt anywhere else -- I felt at home.
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+I no longer felt the vague but persistent despair that would overtake me starring at plaster walls late a night. I would feel the sense of elation and freedome I got some nights when I slept on the couch and cracked the window enough to feel the humid night wrap around me to the cound of tires hissing on wet pavement, the sound of someone going somewhere, the sound of the road taking me home. I would search out these moments of piece. I took to sleeping on couches even in my homes. I lived for years with a bedroom I rarely entered. I slept on couches, turned out the lights early and let the warm nights carry me off in my imagination as I chased sleep out the window and into the night.
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+I snatched trips where I could, as we all do. Why do we take vacations? Why does the concept exist? I think it's because we can only cage ourselves for so long before we go crazy. Americans can do it for 50 weeks and then they need a break. Europeans have less space to beding with, they need to roam further and for longer to feel at pieces, that's why they give themselves 
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+I wasn't trying to outrun myself, I wasn't running from myself, I was just running to feel wind rushing past me, to make sure the planet was still moving, to try to feel connected to it in some small way by reaching out to it, seeing as much of it and as many of the people sharing it with me as I possibly could.
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+In a previous life I was a nomad. So were you. If you grant previous lives as a possibility that is. We were all nomads, humanity is nomadic by nature. We only lost our nomadic ways in the last couple hundred years. That anyone feels at home stuck year round in the same place seems to me about as unnatural as it gets.
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+John Steinbeck felt similarly, writing a journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
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+That absolute feeling of detachment — that space to think and frolic in a little world that’s all your own, that feeling of absolute relaxation when sheer distance from the source renders commitment and obligation moot — is one of the hidden joys of travel, and is ultimately what ropes you in for the long haul. Travel is a psychological enema: you pass through security into the airport terminal, you buy your ticket and step onto the train platform and everything else just flows out and washes away.
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+and knew very little the only certainty that I could ever cling to 
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+and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.
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 ## Prologue
 
 A screaming roar comes down the hill. It has probably happened before. But not for me. Nothing like this has ever happened for me before. Nothing I've ever done compares to it now.