I Dreamt of the Road

My love of travel can be traced to my dad’s stories of far away places he had been to in the Pacific.

He talked about the heat of the jungle and the incessant rain that made it nearly impossible to stay dry. There were the bouts of malaria. However, more than anything else, I remember the wonderful things he had to say about Australia. It must have been like paradise for a twenty-two-year-old originally stationed in the unforgiving Papua New Guinea climate.

Our family trips were anything but magic. But how wise was it to travel across the Badlands with temperatures skirting 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a car without air conditioning?

My own adventure would begin in 1976. Over the next five years with the help of complete strangers, many of whom had little to their name but much in the way of decency and kindness, I hitchhiked nearly 10,000 miles.

It all began in the classroom:

I Dreamt of the Road
I dreamt of the road
when school lectures long were made
and of ways
not meaningful
to logic,
seeking to escape
a spring
spent with theorems.