A few months back, one random Monday afternoon, I picked up a hitchhiker. I’ve done it before, picked up hitchhikers, but even as I pressed on my brakes to pull over I was aware of something, some urge directing my impulse. It felt spontaneous, rash somehow, like I was reaching out. I had just moved to the area only two months previous, so it almost felt comfortable to be doing something so exciting and out-of-the-ordinary. Much of my life had been exciting and out-of-the-ordinary of late.

In the few seconds it took me to drive by and make the decision to give this particular hitchhiker a ride, I determined he seemed a solid dude. Scrubby and tired, but grounded. Resigned to whatever outcome the day would bring. He was slowly ambling his way along the side of the road, walking backwards, one foot deliberately behind the other, thumb at attention. His skin was a tan and leathery sort of middle-age, his clothes–once colorful–were various shades of dirt brown, and he carried a pack on his shoulders that stood taller than his head, jangling with pots and pouches and bundles that hung from its various loops and zipper pulls. I fairly slammed on my brakes to come to a stop in the middle of the road while he jogged, clumsy from his load, up to my car. He pulled open the door with a breathy, “Hi! Hey there. Thanks–thanks for stopping.” He unceremoniously threw his pack onto my back seat before settling into the passenger side with a grateful sigh, cooing the small white dog I hadn’t noticed into curling up on the floor by his feet. In my little two-door hatchback he all of a sudden looked huge, with layers of clothes and bags, and a perfume that filled every corner of the car–a slightly sweet, but sour smell that was not entirely displeasing. The little pooch immediately fell asleep.

“Thanks, really appreciate it. I haven’t gotten a ride since before the Golden Gate Bridge. Ganja here won’t even walk anymore.” Ganja was the name of his dog, an ode to one of his top three priorities in life besides food and shelter, he later told me.

“Yeah, no problem.” I replied. “Very glad I stopped, then. I’m Adele.”

“Richard.” We shook hands.

“So where you headed?” I asked.

“North.”

“Well I’m just going to Bolinas, maybe only 5 miles north of here. That ok?”

“Oh yeah, just drop me off anywhere I can set up camp in the woods. So long as it’s headed in the right direction, I’m grateful for any ride.”

“Cool. So what’s up north?”

“Oregon.” Richard answered. He told me he had been traveling up and down the west coast, between Mexico and Oregon, for about five years by the time our paths crossed. Richard was a drifter.

There are a lot of drifters that pass through my town, which, as it turns out, is situated on a popular migratory path for transients, including folks like paid farm-hands and casual backpackers. This was not something I knew before moving here, but there is an uncanny synchronicity between just how much transients influence the spirit of my new town, and my own proclivity for transience. Though I’ve never had the will to drift as unremittingly as Richard, I adopted a drifting mentality from a very young age, manifesting as sheer excitement each time my family relocated (which was often), or, in my twenties, as the more familiar gap-year, globetrotting backpacker, and then into adulthood as an inability to live anywhere for longer than 2 years at a time. It’s this period of drifting in adulthood that has started to wear me down a bit.

But I really get the urge to drift. I can feel it physically, like a deep tug within myself; a knowing that tells me when I’m mentally ready to move. When a girl I was working with at a local farm told me recently she was thinking of heading on in a month in the direction of Oregon as well, I had a truly somatic response, like a tingling wave of electricity moving from my head out to my hands and feet. I was envious. It sounded so appealing: living mobile, traveling alone, moving through change. Not to avoid responsibility or accountability or anything like that–bills, relationships, dreams, the future, these things follow you wherever you go–but simply to not stay in one place. Staying in one place inevitably makes me antsy and depressed after a time. I get bored. I feel myself running out of inspiration to engage with my surroundings. Migrating elsewhere means adapting and learning: finding new places to discover, new challenges, new relationships, new life lessons. I enjoy the work of figuring out new roads and landscapes, both environmentally and socially. I like to imagine early European explorers must have felt the same tug, or nomadic tribes, bands of hunters-and-gatherers. All people that followed the seasons, drifting with the tug of their reality. People inspired to move, until they’re inspired to stay.

I had so many questions for Richard: What was the longest you stayed in one place? How’s your gear holding up? How long has Ganja been journeying with you? What about your family and friends, are you able to stay in touch with them? Do you want to? Is that even an option for you? I settled on: “So what’s in Oregon?”

“There’s a farm up there, good people that I met awhile back. Really felt welcome. Gonna go up there and trim some bud.” (Side note: this is what my farm friend was also planning to do in Oregon. Evidently migrating north for marijuana bud-trimming season is an established route for many drifters in this area.)

Richard continued: “I’m tired. Been traveling for awhile now, don’t really catch a lot of cars so I’ve been doing a lot of walking. I’m ready to stay in one place. Ganja is too. I’m ready for a home, ya know?”

No, I didn’t know. In fact this was it, the crux of much of my own personal tumult. The nugget of turmoil that fed The WAiF Project. I even felt myself startle a bit at the word “home.” I felt both envious and repulsed by the idea of it. I envied the thought of finding relief from a constant internal seeking, but repulsion from knowing stagnation would suffocate me. Both Richard and myself had evidently defined “home” as staying in one place with no immediate intention of leaving.

But is that really what home is: a place where you stay with no intention of leaving? Or is ‘home’ a concept that evolves alongside ourselves, breathing in rhythm to how we define and adjust the boundaries around different aspects of our lives? Perhaps the concept of home doesn’t evolve at all, it’s only us that pivot around a willingness to settle, to be at home.

I’ve come to believe the answer is a contradiction; an evolving constant. Home is both a source of security, and a reflection of our changing selves. Both an anchoring point, and a platform for expansion, which, like all dualistic components of life, requires balance so that we neither lean too heavily on it out of a need for security, or expand too much away from it in the need to be individualistic beings. Perhaps for some, like myself, the dance between these two extremes continues our whole lives.

I think what I saw in Richard as I drove by him, what directed my impulse, was not the drifter I identified with, but the drifter heading toward home. Maybe it was something in the slouch of his shoulders that communicated an embodiment of the contradiction for want of both security and freedom.

Fifteen minutes after picking him up, I dropped Richard off in a grove of trees half a mile from the 24-hour honor-system farm stand that greets folks entering Bolinas. As I watched him gather his belongings and step out of my car, I struggled with whether or not to invite him to my place for a warm meal, perhaps continue chatting and exploring a connection, but decided against it. The experience somehow felt enough as it was. “Goodbye, sister,” he called out as he closed my car door.

Goodbye, brother. Thanks for the ride.