ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter opens with a basic question that also extends to wandering. Tourists and travelers both wander at times, but what is it that distinguishes tourists from travelers? One thing, according to anthropologist Valene L. Smith: discretionary income. Clearly, this is a flexible distinction. Travelers and tourists, like wanderers, come from all income brackets. The van-dwellers who inhabit nomadlands, however, mostly wander away from social systems that provide discretionary income, living at subsistence levels. Discretionary income for many wanderers is conspicuous by its absence, while tourism and travel today are big business. The American travel and tourism industry in 2017 generated over $1.6 trillion in economic output, supporting 7.8 million US jobs. Travel and tourism also accounted for 11% of all US exports and 32% of all US services exports. This chapter proceeds to examine three major instances in which wandering is associated with issues of loss and gain that fall outside the model of discretionary income: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (1798), Chaplin’s figure the Little Tramp (1915), and the important Anglo-Saxon poem known as “The Wanderer” (c. 975).
