The Wayfarer

I am possessed by a strong wayfarer archetype. I can remember singing “The Happy Wanderer” in assembly in first and second grade: “I love to go a wandering along the mountain track, and as I go, I love to sing, a knapsack on my back, Val-de-ri, Val-de-ra” and going home soon after school and trying to figure out how on earth the wayfarer does it: folds the skimpy bandana in just the right way to hold all necessary belongings, ties the knot in a way that the bundle will hang so pertly from the stick. Marvel was: I had a bandana and an old mop stick, found treasure, left magically on my path for me to puzzle together for my own future wanderings. I’m sure I set out from the car-port once or twice. By the time I was fifteen, I was stowing away on trains, my knapsack neon orange on an aluminum frame.

I have written away for years about the French draft-dodger Francois who, the first year of the orange knapsack, read me Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage” and winsomely urged me to walk with him to Trieste. My friend Venetia and I had worked all summer in a beach kitchen in Naples to earn the cash for our first backpacking trek to Venice. I really did believe I had it in me: to abandon my friend, my family, my life and take off with this hippie guru of the startling blue eyes. If we walked barefoot, all the more romantic. Money? Who needed money? I kept Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book in a pocket of my backpack and fully subscribed to the Biblical injunction that one can live like the lilies of the field, without worry, as the wind blew. Francois was reading Hesse’s Journey to the East, which also seemed a sign—I’d read all of Hesse, at least all that I could find in the little bookshop near Mergellina that specialized in existentialism and seemed to carry only Penguin paperbacks. Had read all except perhaps Journey to the East, though Francois efficiently offered the plot summary and thereby expanded my sense of mission in taking off with him and the rest of The League. I was part of the grand migration, part of a mystical call to adventure. I was ready.

Even if I balked before actually setting off with them, the call to adventure stuck with me and pulled me through draft after draft of a novel about my lost experience. The novel itself, though never finished (perhaps because I am still living it!), guided my journey down its academic course when early chapters got me launched into graduate school and became part of a master’s thesis and Ph.D interest in the picaresque. Indeed, the writing of the novel brought me back to Italy as soon as I found my life clear enough to leap.

Recently my Australian friend Michelle and I discovered a shared dormant interest in Hesse. She, too, had wandered Eurrail in the early seventies with copies of Beneath the Wheel, Damian, Narcissus and Goldman in her backpack. Neither of us had read Hesse in thirty years, but one day Michelle discovered an Inn in Montefalco that prided itself on being the “home of Hesse” in Italy (there are actually a dozen or so inns that boast such--he wandered!); it was perhaps there that he worked on Peter Camenzind, his first novel, inspired by the life of St. Francis. Michelle and I began comparing notes on our own dusty interest in the novels and the significant impact they certainly had had on at least our youthful wanderings and, perhaps ultimately, on the choices we’d subsequently made that had led us both toward adult lives wander-lusting through Italy. Suddenly, amidst our reveries and delight over the mysterious wending course that had led to our friendship, a kind of chill came over us: Could it be that we’ve been traveling together with The League all these 30 long years without knowing it? Wasn’t that, in fact, the plot-line of Journey to the East? A group of idealists sets off on a journey to the east only to lose sight of each other, become disillusioned, resolve that the “great experiment” has been a failure. Then decades later, the narrator H.H. reencounters one of the lost, only to discover that they’ve been traveling the path together all along--The League is intact.

Wow! Michelle and I looked at each other. Wow! For a moment we are bug-eyed, like a couple of seventies stoners.

“When the ways of friends converge, the whole world looks like home, for an hour.” Hesse

I ordered Journey to the East and Peter Camenzind from Amazon.uk yesterday. Stay tuned for further inquiries into Hesse.

And meanwhile, scroll down to the bottom of this blog and see some lovely pictures taken by Laura Pruitt of the wayfarers crossing the ridge of Subasio between Assisi and Spello.

Val-de-ri, Val-de-ra…