Home

I don't know why, but I've never felt at home anywhere. I grew up in a suburban sprawl near San Francisco with restless parents. We upgraded neighborhoods every four or five years, requiring me to swap schools without ever changing cities. I don't think these are the reasons.

By the time I was 30 I'd lived in 26 places if you counted the cars and the boats. I count them because as a transient I first felt what other people described as "home." I remember Bob's Youth Hostel in Amsterdam with a fondness some people reserve for their childhood dolls. There's a beat-up cabin cruiser in Charlotte Amalie that does it for me, and this old couple's Pontiac Bonneville that I once had to drive from Fort Lauderdale to Oakland in ten of the most lived-in days of my existence. We were making a go of it in Key West with about $200 between us when I found the letter he was writing to Emma. "I'm trying to let her down easy!" was his excuse. I couldn't get out of Florida fast enough.

Heading offshore in a freshening breeze makes me sigh like a matriarch at Thanksgiving dinner. Or driving across the Texas panhandle, a winter gust clawing to get in through the passenger window… Deciphering a Hungarian timetable in the rain is akin to curling up next to a fire with a good book. I want speed bumps, not a fuzzy blanket, diesel fumes instead of cookies fresh out of the oven. It's a cliché to say I’m at home on the road, but I like to be moving and to see things for the very first time. That's it, that's home for me.