december-2009

Ramblin’ Man
What happens when a boy’s obsession with
traveling becomes a very grown-up affl iction?
I’M WRITING THIS not from my apartment
in New York but from my parents’
South Florida living room overlooking
the Atlantic Ocean. Why? Because three
days ago I needed to do laundry and
wanted to go for a nice, long run on the
beach. There were other problems, too.
A street lamp outside my window had
started to go out. At night, its bulb fi lled
my block with a loud, brain-rattling
squeal. Also, I’d run out of dishwashing
liquid—not to mention paper towels,
bottled water and microwaveable
macaroni and cheese—and the dishes
had piled up so high that I’d invented
a new verb (“ziggurating”) to describe
BY MARTIN MARKS // ILLUSTRATIONS BY NATSKO SEKI
their slow creep toward the ceiling.
Those were all things I didn’t want
to deal with. And so, two days later, I
showed up in Fort Lauderdale—1,100
miles away—with my duff el bag and a
pair of running shoes.
“Martin’s home,” my mom called out.
My dad popped his head around the
corner, a bit bewildered. “Oh,” he said.
“Did he leave?”
I could understand his confusion. It
was my second time down here in less
than 10 days. But it used to be worse.
Much worse. A few years ago, I was
traveling so much that my New York
friends thought I’d moved back down
diary
CULTURE | DECEMBER 2009
ROME IF YOU WANT TO And Sydney,
Paris and Miami—all at once.
to Florida, while my Florida friends
had no idea where I lived. Truth was, I
was living everywhere, yet nowhere. In
any given month, I might be paddling
down tributaries of the Amazon in a
dugout canoe, crashing in a tent outside
Pompeii during an especially hot
Neapolitan summer, grading papers
in the smoky terminals of Malpensa
airport, hopping a bullet train from
Kyoto to Tokyo, or surfi ng at San Onofre
State Beach. In 27 years, I’d lived on
three continents and traveled to all
the rest (except Antarctica, which is
too cold). There was always another
suitcase, another ticket, another fl ight.
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