The original definition of walkabout according to Merriam-Webster circa 1908 is "a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian Aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work." Only much later did a travel writer identify this with a spiritual journey, and today, our understanding of the Aboriginal walkabout is that of a pilgrimage into the wilderness taken by adolescents to trace the paths, or "songlines," that were taken by their ancestors.
All of the above is applicable to me.
My days back in Kansas have been long and frightening. My father lies languid in his limbo-deteriorative state, and we stave off the anguish of his suffering and our other overwhelming fears. Every day I think about running, not just from the situation but from everything I love.
But happily, instead, I go on walkabout.
At first, my walkabout was of the 1908 Merriam-Webster variety, an "occasional interruption," or distraction, from the "regular work" of grieving my father's condition and being strong for others. But somehow it has expanded to be a metaphor for our more spiritual understanding of the term. Indeed, I am an adolescent, especially in spiritual matters, and my walkabout is truly a following of the paths and "songlines" of one ancestor in particular ... myself.
This all may sound rather confusing, so let me explain myself in two parts.
First, my adolescence: There is something unnerving about my return to El Dorado, Kansas. Currently on hiatus from any kind of "day job," I stay at my parents house, the house where I grew up, and sleep in the upstairs loft that served as my bedroom since I was a small child. My parents moved to this house when I was three years old and have lived here ever since. My first truly vivid memory was of this room, where I now sit writing this blog. We were moving in after a long drive, and I guess Dad had gotten most of the furniture moved ahead of us. The upstairs loft was shared by all three boys (we were 3, 7, and 12 at the time), and as I crawled up the stairs to look at our room, I saw a stuffed Winnie the Pooh on the bed that was to be mine. Even now, the memory is like watching a home movie. I recall running at full-tilt across the room, screaming with delight. The bed was against the east wall, and as I write here now in the same room, my laptop on an old card-table that's been in the family for generations, I can see my shoes sitting next to the bookcase at the very spot where Pooh Bear and I first became friends.
I spent the next 17 years in this house and in El Dorado before going off to college in Emporia, a mere 56 miles up the road but it may as well have been Paris at the time (I make the comparison in the afterword of my novel, Pitch). When I was 12 years old, I took over my brother's paper route for the Wichita Eagle, which meant that I had to get out of bed bright and early--5:00 a.m., to be exact--pick up a bundle of newspapers that would be dropped in front of our house, wrap each paper individually in a roll with a rubber band, pile those papers into my newspaper bag, and walk the 770 square feet of neighborhood that composed my route. Can you imagine a world where a 12-year-old boy walked the streets at 5:30 in the morning without fear, not looking for trouble but actually earning a living?
Everything about coming back to El Dorado--sleeping in my old room, sitting at the table in the same nook in our kitchen, surrounded by everything that shaped me in my formative years ... yes, I become an adolescent. It is hard to think of oneself otherwise, especially when so many of the accoutrements of his adult life have been removed from sight and he is once again waking up in the night to his old habitat, listening to the distant sounds of trains that never change.
I am an adolescent, and daily I go on walkabout, traversing the songlines of ... myself.
In Midnight Oil's song "The Dead Heart," they sing of the Aborigine's walkabout: "We follow in the steps of our ancestry / and that cannot be broken ..." So when I get up each morning now, walk ouf of my parents' house, and walk the same route I walked every morning from ages 12 to 20, which ancestor's steps am I following?
Myself, of course. I am my own ancestry.
It may be hard to grasp, but this is the point of the novel, Pitch, in which a rift in time allows a sober alcoholic to come face-to-face with himself in the form of the violent monster he used to be. At one point, the sober version of this character refers to his past self as "dead." When he chose the path of sobriety, perverse creature he used to be died, kind of a reverse version of Obi-Wan's explanation of how Darth Vader "murdered" Annakin Skywalker.
It's a crazy idea, and perhaps it's too morbid for most of us to consider, but I believe as we grow and as we change, whether for better or worse, our past selves die. Think about it. I do. A lot.
I think of the many children who have been in my life--nieces and nephews and stepkids--and what they were like when they were small: wide-eyed, impressed by the world, bursting with joie de vivre, and inseparable from my side. Today, they are different. That doesn't mean they are bad people; it just means that they are adults, growing into adult dreams and passions, seeing the world through adult eyes ... and they will never be those adorable children again. This is a great tragedy. In essence, those children are dead. We will never see them again. We will never hold them, bounce them on our laps, feel them go to sleep in our arms as we read them Good Night, Moon. Yes, they have been replaced by exciting, interesting adults but ... the children are no more.
My adolescent self is no more. I may find myself stepping into his role whenever I return here, but when I rise in the morning and go on my walkabout through that 770 square feet of paper route real estate, I am still the man I am today. Somewhere in the past, the 12-year-old me charted this territory and blazed these trails. He created songlines for me by listening to his mix tapes on his Walkman as he made his morning rounds with a sack full of the Wichita Eagle. On the corner of Olive and Denver, he sat catty-corner from the house that looks like a castle, contemplating life while listening to "Fooling Yourself (Angry Young Man)" by Styx. On the corner of Ash and Topeka, he paused to rest under a tree, listening to "Reasons" by Earth, Wind, and Fire and pining for a girl he'd met in church camp the previous summer. Over there along Pine, he rode his bike at top speed while Kansas sang of a "Paradox" at top volume in his ears.
There used to be a row of old houses there on Pine. One of them had apartments upstairs, and the 12-year-old Matt always looked forward to going inside to deliver the papers when running this route in the dead of winter. Today, those houses are gone, and a bank sits on the corner where once stood an old full-service filling station. The thrill of biking this street at night was the way the houses and the trees seemed to crowd the curb, creating a canopy like a tunnel.
Today, as the picture indicates on the left, it is all gone.
And so here I am today, following in the steps of the ancestor that was me, hearing the same songlines from the era echo in my ears as I walk. Every morning, seven days a week, I rose to do this route, rain or shine, snow, wind, sleet. My father assured me that this job would build character and refine my soul. If that was the case, it took awhile for the refinement to catch hold. Nevertheless I did the job, and for some reason--perhaps the strong example set by my father--I never questioned it, no not once. As tired as I was each morning, I never looked for excuses or put it off. Every day it was the same--rise before dawn, roll your papers, and deliver the news to the masses.
Today, that 12-year-old boy is dead, and a grown man follows in his footsteps. A grown man goes on walkabout to distract himself from his daily work. But most of all, he searches for that boy's character, for his willingness to do the job without question, for the good person the boy was destined to become before falling prey to the drink and turning even his most beloved customers against him.
That character is out there. That is why we follow the songlines of our ancestors. Even if those ancestors happen to be ourselves.
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