In a café on the outskirts of Little India, I sat across from four men. There was a pot of coffee on the table between us, as well as some pastries that looked as if they had been baked the day before. The gleam coming off the metal from the machines behind the barista’s counter gave everything in the room a faint color of orange. There was a hiss as the machines were operated and momentary signs of traffic from beyond the glass walls that allowed us to peer into the outside world. The chairs were very comfortable as well. All of us at the table were travelers passing through the modern port of Singapore. The city with its skyscrapers carved out of a tropical island was a brief rest, a taste of civilization before anyone moved on to rougher parts. But these men were in a league of their own. I could not compete with them, nor would I ever want to.
Each of us wore the clothes best befitting a traveler. There was a casual, non-descript look about us enough to give the impression of rumpled worldliness. I had just finished doing my laundry, and lacking an iron I had the distinguished honor of being called a man who had been “shot with the wrinkle gun.” In contrast, my newfound compatriots looked immaculate in their appearance as if they had spent hours working, planning, coordinating their outfits with each other. Instead of the professional migrants that they were, they looked more scholarly. If you had met them yourself, perhaps you would have assumed that they had recently embarked upon a lengthy sabbatical. Yellow and red beards sprouted from their faces, with exception of one who merely kept his sideburns long. Just from looking at them, I could not imagine these four figures in any kind of professional setting. They would look comical if they dressed in suits. They discussed literature, and all of them carried books around in their satchels. One of them even held an MFA, which I was a little jealous of because I have always thought of myself as a writer. I was never good enough at it to support myself, and here was a man who earned his daily bread from his pen.
It is true. I was jealous of this man, but that same feeling should really be extended to the whole group. With their beards, their clothes, and their habits, they all looked as if they might have been one person who split into four different pieces. I suspect the original man from which they had split from had had too big a personality to be confined within a single individual. Most likely he had split into pieces the way a cell does during a film presentation of mitosis. The bond of having once come from the same entity probably kept them from separating. They needed each other to do different tasks. Like both parts of the brain need to work together, the same could be said for this group of men. Each of them took responsibilities for various tasks that needed to be done such as the buying of maps and the planning of routes. The writer of the group was responsible for recording all the stories from their expeditions so that he could write them down later and publish. This was how they supported themselves. To see them in action was to see different parts of the same organism working together. I could not imagine a situation in which they could be parted from each other, for the group would surely break down as a whole and the four of them would die. This is how much a part of each other’s lives they were.
I met the group during a brief stay in Singapore. My English teaching position in the Malay Peninsula was coming to a close, and I was exploring the region for other opportunities. The group of travelers was staying at the same youth hostel as I was, and they introduced themselves to me in one of the shared dormitories. Singapore was an appropriately exotic place to meet such a group that defined itself by traveling to as many countries as humanly possible. The morning after I had checked in they invited me to café across the street for breakfast, which was where we all sat and started to talk at length about our various trips to the corners of the earth. Almost immediately they started to list the cities they had traveled to with as much ease as a person recounting the members of their extended family: Bangkok, Jakarta, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Timboktu, Fez, Zurich, Moscow, Cairo, Baghdad, Mumbai, Bhopal, Chengdu, the list was simply endless. They had ridden camels and donkeys when it had suited them, and flown in jets and hot air balloons when they deemed it absolutely necessary. For the most part, I gathered that they simply liked to walk or ride the bus as much as possible.
It was hard to imagine that there were any places where they had not been. As they talked, I listened and looked at all of them carefully. As the sun rose, the light changed from red to yellow as it painted their beards and faces. It was early, but none of them seemed the least bit tired as they munched on bagels and muffins. They explained how they lived and how they functioned as a group, but any question I asked about their origins was immediately ignored. They might have agreed with you if you accused them of having spontaneously appeared out of thin air one day. As if these people were not strange enough, none of them knew where they were going.
“We’ve been on the road for as long as we can remember. Who is to say that we were even born or had a life before this one?”
“But you must have a passport, or some country of origin? Surely you cannot simply walk across the Chinese border and say, ‘Hey everyone, here I am!’”
“We have ways of getting around passports and visas and such. It is not easy, but it works. Besides, we have no country that we could call our home.” This was all a little ridiculous, but I was willing to listen to them just to be entertained.
The writer spoke up. “It has been a long time since we began our journey, and it will be longer still before we end it.”
I looked at them with an incredulous expression that they must have seen nearly a thousand times before. “How can you keep going like this? I’ve only managed to do two or three weeks of travel before I had to call it quits. Not knowing where your next meal was coming from, always trying to find a bed before dark, it was exhausting. Besides, after you’ve been to a few hundred cities, doesn’t every place on earth begin to look alike? How have you kept it up for so long?”
The leader of the group spoke up. He was the tallest, and his beard was the largest. “There are not many people who can continue on as we do. We’ve heard questions like yours before, but we still can’t answer them to anyone’s satisfaction. It helps that we have very few needs except for one: the feeling that we are in motion and heading off towards someplace new. Hearing the sound of an engine beneath our feet or the sound of waves crashing against a hull is a feeling that has a greater affect on us than most people. To know that we are hurtling like a bullet towards the unknown is everything that we live for.” The group nodded to each other, and I had no choice but to admire the simplicity of their existence. Everything except the voyage was a trivial matter to them. They were not bogged down with careers, family, or any concern for the opposite sex. A good day’s journey was all that they needed to stay happy.
When we decided that it was time for all of us to leave, they asked me if I wanted to come with them. They could always use an additional partner in tough situations, and they said they had often traveled with others before because it gave them company. I declined, even though I wanted to join them very badly. I knew that I could not keep up that life for very long, and that I would die of exhaustion and want of a home after a few years. They understood when I told them this, and without making a fuss we made our goodbyes. When they filed down the road, I watched them walk for a little while until they disappeared.
They were monks of the open road. And I envied them for it.
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