Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25233
Traveler Bruce Northam has a ramble resume that touches two-thirds of the planet. He is the author of the travel handbooks In Search of Adventure and The Frugal Globetrotter. "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion." -Isaac Newton Action is the antidote for despair. A travel plan, like the rudder on a huge oil tanker, is a necessary evil. A good travel plan will get you there safely-perhaps with style and ease. A bad one will get you where you're going eventually, but might mean arriving in airports and train stations at inopportune times, packing poorly, losing things and spending more money than you have to by staying at expensive places because you didn't research the cheap places beforehand. And without a travel plan, you're not going anywhere. Immediately following 9/11, I took to the US road again for the first time in ten years via Thumb Luck. New York City wasn't the only place experi- encing a renaissance in human warmth. Destinationless, in way-northern California, I never waited more than five minutes on a hitching segue that land- ed me in Humboldt County's Lost Coast. There seems to be a new trust out there on the American road. Yeah, I know, hitchhiking may be dangerous, but in times like these, crime seems to have taken a back seat to dismay. Now's the time to reinvent NOMADness on Earth. Nomadic behavior nurtures world peace-an Earth where "I no mad at you, you no mad at me." Don't get even, get odd. Stagnant people seldom make history. Right now, some travelers are fearing for their in-flight lives. Others are taking advantage of slashed airline fares and the planes are filling up. Of course, some people would stay home even if flights were free. But for all of us, our glo- betrotting bravery has a price. • 41 Prior to my terrorist climate hitch-healing all over California-and the week before the attack-I was in Berlin, Germany, and I came upon an omen - small, neatly scripted graffiti, barely decipherable in the dusky crimson glow of an underground nuclear fallout shelter beneath the city: "He who shoots first, dies second." The shelter was outfitted with its own air and water purification sys- tems, an unintentional safeguard against panic in the event of nuclear fallout. When I stepped into the shelter's in-house morgue, a separate room for people who died from radiation exposure, I joined an elderly Englishwoman who was staring into a corner, deep in thought. After two moments (hers and mine), she whispered that she'd lost her home to a Second World War bomb. Silence expanded. Then she guaranteed that in any war, truth is the first casualty. If there is an upside to this new world order, it's the certitude invari- ably shared by travelers: The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money. In this new climate of world terror, American patriotism swells. Wherever you may roam, your country is never forgotten. Watch your back and remember, not all who wander are lost.