When Nomads Find Home
Earlier this year, I was talking on the phone with my parents, telling them about stuff I was doing around the land we bought in Colorado. I had been trimming trees, hauling gravel, and setting up a small garden. In town, Mr. DD and I were having music and art shows, making friends, and getting to know the local scene. My dad very innocently said, “it sounds like you’re kind of…settling down.” I silently gasped at how someone could say something so rude (just kidding, love you Dad).
But, it was, in fact, true. To nomads, words like “home” and “settle down” are dirty, dirty things, to be shunned for as long as possible. But very few people in our modern age are nomadic their entire lives. In both backpacking/digital nomadism and vehicle nomadism (living full-time in an RV, van, or car), there are waves, or generations, of people who get on and off the road.
Making the big decision to hit the road can feel like an exciting step to the rest of your life. It’s not only a new chapter, but if you stick with it long enough, it will drastically change who you are. To stay traveling for multiple years is to point the trajectory of your life path in a whole new direction.
Nomadism is culturally trendy and seems glamorous. But for those who commit to it will quickly understand, it’s a lifestyle like any other with its own routines, logistics, and self-reflection. It’s a complete way of living that will create new habits, priorities, tastes, skills, and community.
Being nomadic becomes an essential part of your identity because your life is so radically different from the norm. You are cramming hundreds of experiences into your every day that others might only undergo once or twice a year. You have to either be very sure in your choices or have a strong enough instinctual pull to put aside any doubt. People living stationary lives in accordance to values you once had may feel farther away and harder to relate to.
Choosing to end a period of nomadism isn’t like returning from vacation. It’s more like a sci-fi story when a character accidentally falls into a dimension where time moves much faster and they live an entire life in 5 hours. Returning to ‘regular’ life can feel like a step backwards, regressing to right where you started. The people you left behind are likely doing the same things they were doing when you left. They are happy to welcome you back with open arms, glad you’ve finally seen the light and are taking actions they fully understand. The nomad might feel compelled to push those arms away, exclaiming, “no, it’s not like that! I’m back in this life, but I’ve changed!”
But transitioning to a more sedentary lifestyle will inevitably involve doing a lot of things that look quite boring and normal and the same as everyone else.
There is a Zen proverb that encapsulates this feeling well:
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Or, for nomads:
Before experiencing all the world has to offer and having it radically shift the way you see everything, get groceries, take out trash.
After experiencing all the world has to offer and having it radically shift the way you see everything, get groceries, take out trash.
The external processes might look the same, but the internal process is transformed. If you had stayed in one spot, would you be the person you are now?
How to Know When You’re Slowing Down
Nomadic Matt, a famous blogger in the travel community, was fully nomadic for ten years. It’s very entertaining to go through his blog archives and every few years find a blog post that declares ‘this is it! I’m done traveling!’ only to watch him hit the road again shortly thereafter. The pull of the constant adventure, activity, and growth that travel offers can be too hard to resist.
In his book, Ten Years a Nomad, Matt shares his struggle as he continued to travel: “the thing I craved more than anything in the world, no matter where I was at any point, was a garden….a hobby that required myself to be rooted next to my rooted plants.”
A garden or other types of homesteading appeals to many nomads. It’s the opposite of wandering...literally sinking your physical self into the soil and getting to know the intimate details of a single patch of land.
Travel offers subconscious development- you let the world sweep you up and change you according to its whims. Being in one spot can be more geared towards intentional development- making things and building practices that only emerge from time, repetition, and care. I think as one experiences more life, the latter becomes more and more appealing.
Other nomads of yore (yore being my 20s, when travel bloggers led the way for my own backpacking adventures) eventually chose a singular home to be close to family, to rediscover familiarity, or because chronic illness forced them to.
Personally, I felt my wheels start to slow their roll for this particular stint about 3.5 years into our vehicle nomadism. We had seen many of the most beautiful places in the American West and were uninterested in the homogeneous nature of the rest. We were growing weary of the travel routine and chores. I felt that always planning where we would be in the near future was interfering with my ability to be in the present. We were going to and from cool spots, but there was also a lot of ‘in-between’ time in transit, staying in very not cool places on the way.
When we passed through the Western Slope of Colorado, we fit into the landscape like a puzzle piece. The most important thing staying still granted us was the ability to expand into our interests beyond travel. Full-time travel is really just that- full-time travel, with limited opportunity to things that aren’t conducive to being on the road, like hobbies that require lots of supplies and gear or a fixed place or group of people. As artists, both Mr. DD and I found our crafts could flourish with less disruption.
Who Am I Now?
When travelers find a home, it can be a challenge to come to terms with the new identity of ‘former nomad.’ No one actually needs that title, but humans love tidy labels they can attach to others and themselves, ideally, for the rest of everyone’s lives.
But one thing almost all nomads have in common is an ever present curiosity and interest in change. To continue to do the same travel and lifestyle your whole life is almost antithesis to the nomad’s desire for something different. It makes sense that many try on home for a while, or slip in and out of different versions of home.
Some friends of mine who had traveled full-time for almost a decade shared that they felt like they failed at the lifestyle because they eventually got a small cabin and then ‘only’ traveled half the year. Because of the world’s desire for fixed roles that define you indefinitely, doing something for just a chapter of life can seem like a quitting of sorts. General society is a fan of this perspective, eager to jump on proof that alternative living is destined to go horribly, horribly wrong, and all those who dared to leap will come crawling back to the status quo.
Because of this ‘gotcha’ mentality, it’s easy for transitioning nomads to have a layer of defensiveness in their choice. Many, as they grow their new little roots still plan on an above-average amount of travel and make those plans well known.
Even within the community, there is a debate about when you are no longer a ‘full’ nomad. When Bob Wells, an RVer of CheapRvLiving.com and Nomadland fame bought acreage to stay on for a few months out of the year, Mr. DD and I discussed whether he was still a nomad or not (Bob himself insists he still is). Does owning land make you ‘settled?’ How long do you stay on the land? Does it have a house or are you still living in your nomadic vessel? When does a place change into somewhere you’re staying to somewhere you’re living?
These are questions I grapple with and don’t know the answers to. I said Bob was still a nomad because he said he was and I think his legacy in that community should carry him through whatever roots he puts down. And if he’s still a nomad with several acres then I’m still a nomad with several acres and I can claim that identity a little longer.
Of course, identity claims can be relative and messy. I’ve felt my hackles raised by the cultural appropriation of someone who’s lived in the same house for 20 years posting a week’s worth of vacation photos with #nomad. Similarly, perhaps historical gypsies, Romani, and Irish Travellers would have been rankled knowing that their lifestyle for which they were deeply persecuted is now trendy. Or even other nomadic tribes, moving between two seasonal locations each year, would have their heads spinning at the pace of a digital nomad who lives in a different country each week.
So I’ve let my nomad identity turn into shades of grey as we’ve inched ourselves deeper into the soil. After we bought land, we could only stay on it for several months before previously made plans had us leaving for several months. Again this year, we are driven away by winter and will be abroad and on the road for 4 months. I’m just getting used to the idea of being planted, but can’t resist pulling those roots up for air.
Peace with this liminal existence can be found through the Buddhist principle of non-attachment. Non-attachment isn’t about being emotionally detached, but rather about not holding onto an idea so hard that you suffer when things change, because they always will. Nomads learn this on the road: places, people, routines, even the version of yourself you thought you were, all shift and pass. You enjoy them fully, then let them go.
When I feel fear that something I’m enjoying might end, I take a deep breath and tell myself that whatever will happen doesn’t exist right now. The only thing that matters is the fullness I am feeling in this moment. I remind myself not to sacrifice my present for an unknown future.
For a nomad, non-attachment is what makes it possible to love a place and still leave, and potentially, to settle somewhere without feeling you’ve betrayed the road, or yourself. It can make transitions easier by simply letting things happen when they feel right and avoiding the desire to keep your notions and ideas preserved forever. It’s the art of packing light on the inside.
Moving On
It doesn’t matter whether I am a nomad or not. For me, the desire to move has been what pushes me through different chapters of my life and always set me down, it seemed, right where I needed to be. It’s taught me why intentionality matters and how to craft exactly the life I want. It’s what I’ve trained my intuition on and how I’ve found my life loves.
This latest round of movement, vehicle nomadism, taught me what I needed to land in a place I could only live in if I had certain skills. It gave me new priorities for living- namely, within nature like never before and a new level of self-sufficiency. I never really thought about where I was headed or should end up in the long term, and thus was immediately ready when the destination appeared.
The type of destination helped too. Rather than return to any semblance of suburbia or a bustling urban environment, we found our favorite parts of vehicle nomadism all in one spot. Our remote, nature-full town is populated by scrappy, alternative, and artistic types. No one blinks an eye when I share that I live in a camper. It’s common to not have running water or to have built your home yourself. One of my neighbors lives in an earthship while another started out on her property in a teepee. Instead of falling back into the mainstream, we’ve found a sort of halfway home that doesn’t ask us to sacrifice the down-to-earth values we’ve grown.
If we are so lucky, life just keeps going, and going, and going. Just as ‘happily ever after’ fails to encapsulate the continuing and varied nature of living, we can’t expect one chapter of our life to define the entirety of it. But it seems unlikely that what made me a nomad will fade away. The spirit of roving carries on with its gifts of adaptability and openness and always drops new adventures into my lap. To live well is not to cling to one version of ourselves, but to keep meeting the road, whether external or internal, with a traveler’s heart.
