When I was a little boy, I went outside to take my first journey…to the local grocery store. To my parent’s relief a neighbor retrieved me before I got too far along.
During a high school trip to Portland, I snuck out of the hotel room in the middle of the night to a shuttle to the airport. I didn’t have money for a ticket, but I just wanted to be around the milieu of travelers and traveling.
I dropped out of college after three years to run off to the nearest biggest city, Little Rock, just to “forget about life for a while” at a local piano bar.
Many in my family have grown weary of my wandering, yet I can’t seem to but help myself to ample servings of adventure. I feel a kinship with John Steinbeck’s feelings on travelling as set forth at the beginning of “Travel’s With Charley”:
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and the vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”
I have tried to adhere to the wisdom handed down: to go to college and settle down and have a family. But, each time I try and follow these precepts, the yearning to roam I’ve managed to minimize for a time grows until its pull is inescapable; it would seem that I should finally give into my basic nature than to futily resist it.
So, I have purchased a ticket to Berlin where I will focus on cultivating my photography and my writing; I leave September 6th. I will be selling prints of my travels, but you can get my next roll of film here:
https://cash.me/$CliffordGagliardo
Stay tuned to this page for new photos from my new adventure.