Fifty-five and Still a Nomad
Six years ago poet Todd Boss embraced the flexibility of "work-from-home" by becoming a middle-aged globe-trotter, bouncing from one temporary residence to another.
It’s midnight and raining when I arrive in the Blue Ridge mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina. I locate the Hillside Avenue address, but instead of knocking on the house door, I slip through the side gate, as instructed by my Airbnb host. Using my iPhone as flashlight, I navigate among trash cans and weeds … and sure enough, there it sits, diminutive beneath towering trees — the “unique craftsman-built backyard cabin” that, for the coming month, will be my sixtieth home in four years.
I dial the keypad code and the door clicks open. It’s “unique,” alright. “Bleak” might be the better word. The main floor is just one shallow room on a cold concrete slab: in the dark I can make out a rudimentary kitchen, a table, a woodstove. Upstairs I find a bed and a tiny bath with a shower and a waterless sawdust toilet.
There’s Spanish sand in my shoes, Portuguese grill smoke in my clothes, and a JFK boarding pass in my pocket.
My damp backpack lands on the wooden upper floor.
I land on the bed.
Many people dream of living the life I live — nomadic, freewheeling, unattached.
Cold, weary, and disoriented, I wonder what I did to deserve it.
I seem to be at a gate. A flight crew of angels appears out of nowhere. They take my expired pass, scan it, and welcome me aboard.
Falling asleep is like falling out of the world through a body-sized hatch that drops me not deeper into the earth but out the other side, to where the universe is…
***
We are too soon old and too late smart. I was 49 when it first occurred to me that “working from home” meant I could work not just from Minneapolis coffee shops and co-working spaces … but from anywhere.
It was 2018. I was in good health. My divorce was settled, my teenage son and daughter had adopted their mother’s antipathy toward me, my career was stalled, I’d ended a new romance by issuing a restraining order, and my country was in the throes of a slobbering authoritarian delirium. I’d lived in Minnesota for 25 years, long enough to grow weary of its parochial suburban conventionalism. I worried that if I subjected my soul to another dark Minnesota winter, I’d need a fishing shanty and an ice auger to reel it back into the light. I wanted out.
We are too soon old and too late smart. I was 49 when it first occurred to me that “working from home” meant I could work not just from Minneapolis coffee shops and co-working spaces … but from anywhere.
But where to go? I’d never been one for bucket lists. I harbored no retirement fantasies. Cruises and resorts didn’t interest me. I’d once backpacked Europe as a college student, hostel to hostel, and I wasn’t doing that again. Living out of a van seemed a rendezvous with claustrophobia.
On a whim, I ponied up for membership in an online house-sitting platform. Immediately an email arrived: dozens of “just-listed” sits, in countries around the world. The gigs offered no remuneration, just a free place to stay. But when I took out a pencil to add up the bills I would not be paying — internet, electricity, city trash and water, parking, insurance, taxes, HOA fees — I realized that, if I gave up my permanent address and began house-sitting instead, my only living expenses would be travel, food, and health insurance.
I applied for a handful of sits, and surprised myself by landing one: A month with “two elusive housecats” in a Tuscan villa. “Use of our Fiat included.”
My cursor hovered over the ACCEPT button. What in the world was I thinking?
As if to test my luck, or re-tempt fate, I applied for more sits the next morning, and boom: Two weeks in a suburban Berlin condo with twin Samoyeds and use of a bicycle, ten blocks from a train station. And boom again: Three weeks in a converted barn with a chicken coop and a “spirited” Jack Russell Terrier near Oxford, England. I’d applied using the gig dates as my guides — like puzzle pieces, they fit neatly onto my calendar with no more than a travel day in between. The photos accompanying the listings looked promising: well-appointed homes surrounded by leafy neighborhoods, fields, vineyards…
I lifted my eyes from my laptop screen and looked out my apartment window into the swirling Minneapolis snow — sameness drifting on top of sameness…
Solitude, kind weather, creative inspiration, socialized medicine, and free accommodations awaited. I would be serving others. Loving their animals. Living their lives. To do this, I would have to give up every comfort I now enjoyed.
My heart pounded as I committed to them all: ACCEPT. ACCEPT. ACCEPT.
I could almost feel my soul nibbling the end of my line.
In the lobby downstairs, I found myself (only half-facetiously) writing “Trump” on the “Reason for leaving” line of my lease-cancellation form. “Wow,” said my building manager when I told her what I was doing, “how long will you be gone?” But I had no idea. How long could I expect to be on the road, aimless and alone, at my age, in countries where I didn’t speak the language, time zones apart from friends and family? Was it insane to wish away the comforts of a daily routine? Would my work suffer? Would I ever find a companion? Would my children resent me?
And what should I do with my car, my moped, my bicycle, my skis, my furniture? Storing them would necessitate moving them twice, plus monthly storage fees mounting indeterminately. Why store them like a sane person, when I could sell them to finance my new mania?
“Wow,” said my building manager when I told her what I was doing, “how long will you be gone?” But I had no idea. How long could I expect to be on the road, aimless and alone, at my age, in countries where I didn’t speak the language, time zones apart from friends and family? Was it insane to wish away the comforts of a daily routine? Would my work suffer? Would I ever find a companion? Would my children resent me?
Within days, newlyweds, single dads, and collectors were answering my Craigslist ads and walking away with rugs, mattresses, sporting equipment, and appliances. (“How often has this been used?” asked the church lady who came for my food processor. I chopped one finger into the air between us. She counted out the cabbage.) I gave hundreds of books to a prison literacy project. A young post-grad moving into the apartment next door got my dishes and silverware. A friend took my favorite leather chair. “You can have it back when you come home,” he said gently, as if soothing the demented.
My downsizing took on the zeal of a cleanse. The adage You can’t take it with you acquired real-world overhead-bin and checked-luggage-fee limitations. Everything was up for scrutiny. Is shaving cream an essential? How many pairs is too many jeans? What’s a realistic activity-to-shoe ratio? Why a wallet?
In the end, I saved only enough clothing and basics to fill two carry-on suitcases. My office amounted to a laptop, smartphone, air pods, and a 4”x6” zip-case of supplies. A few button-downs, a few tee-shirts, three pairs of pants (including only one pair of jeans) and two pairs of shoes would have to suffice. So as not to wrinkle it, I wore my only remaining sport jacket to the airport.
The airplane wheels lifted from the tarmac. And I was free.
***
POW! — an explosion bolts me upright in bed. Where am I? My eyes search the darkness. Oh, yeah: Asheville. Craftsman-built backyard cabin. But what the hell was that noise?
I push myself from the bed and peer out the windows over a tin roof that sheds half the cabin’s tiny main room below. In the glow of neighborhood lights I can see that the roof is littered with ripened walnuts in their soft green casings, big as racquetballs. Two more, loosened by a storm gust, pummel down — POW! POW! I’ve booked a month here. That’s going to take some getting used to.
In religious art, walnuts signify wisdom and discernment. There’s nothing to do but let it in: I crack the window to let the sound of the rain acclimate me. A cool wind sifts, redolent, through the screen. I shuck my shoes at last, peel off my travel clothes, and climb back into bed — under the covers this time. Tonight, I am a man who lives beneath churning Appalachian storm clouds and the ripening wisdom of hardwoods. There are worse things to be disturbed by.
***
As a nomad, I’ve gotten used to a lot of things. I’ve had no choice. Then again, that’s the choice I’ve made. In Tuscany, I got used to pulling my host’s Fiat deferentially to the side of narrow motorways so that locals in Alfa Romeos could roar confidently into the cypress-lined zigzags ahead. In Berlin, I got used to walking forested acreages where Nazi soldiers once trained, and brushing snow-white Samoyed dog fur out of my clothes and blankets in exchange for night-long cuddles and wet kisses. In Oxford, I got used to waking to the rooster’s crow at first light, 5am, and running a rodent-crazy Jack Russell through mown hayfields to the Thames. I got used to Euro coins. Train schedules. Self-reliance. And time.
Three house-sits turned into six. Six turned into twelve, and twelve into twenty-four. Eighteen months went by, and my sits numbered thirty, dotting the globe. I inhabited thatched-roof farmhouses, hillside estates, urban apartments, and lush gardens in Brisbane, Marrakesh, Singapore, Auckland. I tended thirty sheep from a stone cabin in the Pyrenees. I fed a ten-year-old girl’s goldfish in a Provençal villa, walked a blind labradoodle in London, maintained a backyard swimming pool on Australia’s Gold Coast. I didn’t trouble myself to “see the sights.” I wanted, instead, to live like a local, soak up the vibes, learn the streets. I walked and walked and walked.
When you’re unburdened by material concerns, it’s easier to be present to the world around you. Maybe this is why travel enchants —not because everyplace is more attractive than the place you’ve left behind, but because you’ve left behind more than a place. You’ve left behind the burdens and clutter, the stack of bills waiting to be paid. There’s no lawn to mow, no roof to patch, no driveway to shovel, no storage to manage. As long as you stay away, you’re living the extraordinary luxury of less.
Living with less means stripping away the stuff that insulates you from the livewire of existence, the electrical zing of the universe. When you travel, with none of the usual stuff to distract you, the world seems more vivid, and your interactions with it seem more meaningful. But it’s an illusion. The world is neither more vivid nor more meaningful. You’re just more available, more present, more vulnerable. The change is in you.
We were all minimalists as children, weren’t we, when nothing much at all belonged to us except books and toys? We had no agency over our lives, we had no pressing objectives, no goals to speak of, no long-range plans. Only the wondrous now, in its vibrancy and mystery and terror and joy, was really ours. We were endlessly curious. We wanted our hands on everything. We lived for play and exploration. What more, in our advanced years, could any of us really want?
This is the great benefit of being a minimalist, whether or not you travel. I was once married to money. I saw the way certain wealthy people live, immersed in, and surrounded by, artifice and decoration and the exigencies of the material. I consider myself cured. I have no wish to age fossilized in my own carbon footprint, juggling the cleaning lady with the pool man and the lawncare service.
To go naked of possessions is to be exposed, au natural. We were all minimalists as children, weren’t we, when nothing much at all belonged to us except books and toys? We had no agency over our lives, we had no pressing objectives, no goals to speak of, no long-range plans. Only the wondrous now, in its vibrancy and mystery and terror and joy, was really ours. We were endlessly curious. We wanted our hands on everything. We lived for play and exploration. What more, in our advanced years, could any of us really want?
I’m trained as a poet. My motto used to be an exhortation pulled from a Rainer Maria Rilke letter: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself. Tell yourself you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.” But Rilke himself travelled extensively throughout Russia, Spain, Germany, France, and Italy before settling at last in, of all places, Switzerland.
So now my motto’s modified. I say: Blame your life all you want. If it seems poor, it’s probably poor. Get your poet ass out of there. Rilke did.
***
The pandemic upended international travel and the house-sitting economy, but I wasn’t done being a nomad. I returned to the states and rented Airbnbs or stayed with family and friends. I turned 50 in New Zealand and 51 in Spain. I turned 52 in Austin, and 53 in Santa Monica … in the arms of a beautiful woman.
We’d met in the summer of 2019, while I had four back-to-back house-sits on the California coast. A mutual friend introduced us. A few weeks later, she turned up where I was sitting dog Kizzie and cat Callie in a genteel brick colonial in Greenville, South Carolina. And that winter, she turned up again, minutes before midnight on New Years’ Eve in Barcelona, where I was watching a crotchety old hound in leafy L’Eixample. She stepped off the airport bus under the city’s towering monument to Christopher Columbus and we kissed as fireworks lit up the sky.
Four years later, she’s still my steady, but there aren’t any strings attached. Neither of us wish to re-marry. A Grammy-winning performer, she travels too much herself to insist I settle down with her in Santa Monica or anywhere else. “Besides, I want you happy,” she says. “I think the nomad life agrees with you.”
Funny how strong those unattached strings can be. Their dotted lines of gravitation are a far cry from the metaphorical ball and chain, but I’d do anything to keep them strong.
“Dad, you got yourself a hottie,” says my son. He overcame his adherence to his mother’s version of our divorce story, and visited me in New Zealand a few years ago, where he had so much fun exploring that he joined me again a few months later in the Yucatan for some cenote diving, and then, when the pandemic brought me back to the States, joined me on the road full-time for a year and a half. He wore my only sport jacket to his first job interview in Page, Arizona at 17; got his GED in Austin, Texas at 18; and learned the basics of kite surfing in Long Beach, California at 19, where my LA “hottie” had frequent opportunity to lavish her unconditional love on both of us. Through all of it, he had the chance to re-write the story of his father through the lenses of time, space, and perspective. And he wrote his own story, on a canvas that wrapped well past the horizon.
The pandemic upended international travel and the house-sitting economy, but I wasn’t done being a nomad. I returned to the states and rented Airbnbs or stayed with family and friends. I turned 50 in New Zealand and 51 in Spain. I turned 52 in Austin, and 53 in Santa Monica … in the arms of a beautiful woman…We’d met in the summer of 2019, while I had four back-to-back house-sits on the California coast.
As does mine. If you were to drop a pin on that wrapped canvas for every new friend I’ve made along the way, you’d find it dotted with connections personal and professional. My creative career is (knock walnut) lately thriving as a result.
Yes, the nomad life agrees with me. When everything else turns disagreeable — my challenging career, my faltering finances, a destabilized democracy, and a dysfunctional family — all of it sometimes a synchronized avalanche of no — travel says Yes, let’s go, the world is vast, you could still be anyone. Somewhere there’s a light rain falling through walnut trees, as the sun drops into the Smokies. You’re still able. It’s never too late. Go.
***
On hearing of my travels, people often ask me to name my favorite place. I tell them it’s impossible. How can I reasonably detail four years of enchantment? I want to tell them, for example, about the little crossroads town in the Charentes where the quiet black creek ran beneath a mill ruin, just as equally as I want to tell them about the poolside Mérida hacienda where the neighborhood’s open-air bars filled up at night with hardworking people, smoking and drinking in the doorways, their faces roseate against street-lit pastels. The fact is, I fell in love everywhere I went. If I wasn’t enchanted on arrival, I was enchanted by the time I left, by the animals in my charge, of course, but also by the quirks, colors, and rhythms of my adopted haunts.
Enchantment has been my only souvenir. But what a fond keepsake it is! A view of the world un-mediated by news anchors or social media sensationalists. A sense of the deep warmth and kindness and variety of the world’s people. A renewed faith in the sturdy intimacies of the sharing economy. A feel for the planet unvarnished by the faux luxuries of the travel industry. A recalibration of the terms of success. Joy in the least pleasures. Patriotism not for a country or a set of arbitrary parameters but for the whole boundless citizenry of Earth. Sometimes I think I’m beginning to see it clear — the enchantment with which we’re invited every day to appreciate the kaleidoscopically faceted world in which we live. Too late smart, perhaps, but none too soon.
I wake in Asheville, the storm long gone. I’m 55. There’s work to be done.
The shower is good. I learn the ways of the sawdust toilet, and then I climb downstairs to greet my new home.
The radiant in-floor heat has come up, and the concrete under my bare feet is bone-warming. Out every window lies total privacy, a blue ridge of hills emerging through mist beyond the neighborhood trees. Skylights in the ceiling, lost to me upon my midnight arrival, now shunt leaf-shifting morning sunshine across the room. The majestic black walnut tree that terrified me awake last night is a different companion now, lavishing me with a different harvest, a blessing.
The vibe is DIY simplicity. The walls are paneled in what appears to be salvaged lath, still bleached from another home’s plaster. The entire cabin, in fact, is made of salvaged materials — wide planks, tin tiles, repurposed windows, plate steel kitchen counters. All lovingly fitted together. I’ve stepped into someone else’s carbon footprint, which in turn was once yet another’s. The owner/builder, Michael, comes by, to welcome me and I pour him a cup of coffee. He’s about my age. His inquisitiveness gleams as a twinkle in his eye. He tells me where, within walking distance, I can get the latest Covid shot. He tells me where his favorite hikes are. We compare stories from our childhoods. Then, after deflecting my praise for his cabin’s arty workmanship, he kindly offers to take me salvaging Saturday with his friend Paul, before he shakes my hand and leaves me to my thoughts.
A new friend. A new adventure.
It’s inspired a new poem.
The cabin’s only table has no foundation. Suspended from ceiling beams by sturdy rope, it creaks agreeably beneath my elbows as I settle down with my laptop to work.
There’s a breeze, and… Pow! goes another nutty wallop of wisdom on the roof.
I’m going to love it here.
This essay is loosely adapted from “An approach to this book,” from Todd Boss’s fourth poetry collection, Someday the Plan of a Town (W. W. Norton, 2022) More about Todd Boss at toddbossoriginals.com.
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LOL about the lease cancellation. I'm with you!
I have extreme mixed feelings about this essay. Incredible life -- but, as the child of a similar nomad, I admired my father's life while watching my mother slog away to raise the children left behind.
Wow! What an inspiring story! At the age of 66 and a year before retirement, I sold my home, gave most of my possessions away, put the rest in storage and moved to NYC. It was perhaps the best year of my life! I love big cities and they don’t get much better than New York. On retiring, I left NYC, spent Covid in a smaller city and then hit the road. For the last 3 years I’ve moved around Europe living in London (3 times), Paris (twice), Dublin, and Prague while visiting other cities along the way. It is not always easy, but it is always rewarding. And it is not as expensive as you think it is! I have made new friends at every stop, explored beautiful cities at a leisurely pace, and learned so much — language, history, food, culture! At 72 I know I can’t do it forever, but what a life I’m living now. Thank you for reminding me of that. Safe travels to you!