Before retirement I would often carry my morning coffee to the back porch to capture a few moments of solitude before leaving for work. I now perform this ritual almost every morning, except I no longer have to hurry off to work. It is one of retirement’s sweetest rewards.
Most mornings I arrive before the first sparrow chirps, when the sky is still dark and there is scarcely an unnatural sound to interrupt the silence. About a half hour before sunrise a single bird chirps, then another and another until a melodious chorus echos from every corner of the yard. Their medley continues until the sun finally breaks through the trees, whereupon, like a thousand commuters, they rush off to spend the day as hunter gatherers.
Our yard is filled with trees, shrubs, and flowers, almost all of which we have planted over the past 20 years. It is a micro bird sanctuary, enhanced by the 20 or so bird houses scattered around the yard and an assortment of feeders designed to attract almost every local species. With all of this to enjoy you’d think I would be content to sit on the back porch reading a book (or writing a column), and, if I do get bored, to busy myself puttering around the yard. As Yvonne often rhetorically asks, “With all this beauty why would you want to go anywhere else?”
This is a question for which I have no answer; but the words from a nature program our children listened to on the radio when they were young comes to mind, “It’s because the Great Creator made me this way, Uncle Bob.” It’s true, I seem to have been born with a wanderlust gene. I take satisfaction in knowing I’m in good company, including such eccentric characters as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau.
Without Muir we would have no Yosemite and a number of other national parks. In deed, but for Muir we might not have a national parks system. As an example of his eccentric wanderlust nature, at age 28 Muir decided to quit his job at a wagon wheel factory in Indianapolis and walk a thousand miles to Florida, seeking the “wildest, leafiest, least trodden way I could find.” Then, more by accident than intent, he took passage on a ship departing for California, where at age 40 he married and settled down, as much as such a man can. He was a faithful husband and father, and made a living managing a fruit farm owned by his father-in-law, but, as one biographer described Muir, “His heart remained wild.” Often, after watching Muir become restless with his work, his wife would “shoo him back up to the mountains.”
Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817, and, sadly for all of us, died of tuberculosis at his home in Concord, Massachusetts in the spring of 1862, just shy of his 45th birthday. Muir was 24 at the time but the two men never met because Muir lived a thousand miles away in Madison, Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Muir was deeply influenced by the life and writings of Thoreau, and often referred to himself as a disciple of Thoreau. There seems little doubt that the two would have found each other and become friends, possibly even colleagues and hiking companions, had Thoreau’s life not been cut short.
A key difference is that Thoreau never married. This afforded him the freedom, at age 28, to leave his daily routine in Concord to build a small cabin by a pond owned by a friend where, for the next two years, he would live frugally and immerse himself in nature. This experience is chronicled in his best known work, “Walden”, or “Life in the Woods”.
But Muir and Thoreau did have many traits in common, most notably their love of nature and the gift to write about it. Both men also (in my opinion) had their priorities straight – for them working for a living was secondary to doing what their wanderlust gene called them to do. Because they did I will, one day, have the honor of following in Muir’s footsteps by hiking at least a portion of the 120 mile trail that bears his name; just as I have already followed in Thoreau’s footsteps along the banks of Walden Pond and on a stretch of the Appalachian Trial in Massachusetts that Thoreau hiked more than a hundred years before there was an Appalachian Trail.
There are few things in life I would do differently, if given the opportunity, but listening more closely to my wanderlust gene would be one of them. This is not to say I would not have married my sweet wife and enjoyed a career of service to older adults, but – and a huge BUT it is – Yvonne would most certainly have been “shooing me up to the mountains” from time to time, while others at work would have carried on quite well in my absence.
Fortunately, retirement is granting me the opportunity to rekindle the wanderlust spirit of my youth. I do not expect to have a trail named in my honor, or to write a book about nature that will remain a classic two centuries from now, but I do hope to come close enough to nature to, as Thoreau said, “to see if I can learn what it has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.”
George Brown is a freelance writer. He lives in Jackson Township with his wife Yvonne.