ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter, beginning with a quick review of the extensive contemporary writing on the topic of walking, identifies wandering as, by contrast, a relatively neglected subject. The initial task, therefore, is to describe the qualities that distinguish walking from wandering, such as the Indo-European roots that associate walking with gait and wandering with spatial movement. A series of essayistic reflections follow, less concerned with isolating specific features of wandering than with introducing a series of reflections on wanderers and wandering, from Odysseus and Huck Finn to Carl Sagan and Bobby McGee. As another means of widening the focus, the author identifies himself as a “secret wanderer”—who has spent decades wandering without knowing it. At its most urgent, the wider focus includes contemporary climate migrants on the move, children crowded into detention centers, refugees in tent cities, and rising violence directed against wandering strangers. It seems high time to think openly about what it means to wander.
