Off the beaten track

Somewhere in Arizona: Celia, Maureen, Pat and Gwenda

I do love road movies – Thelma and Louise, Kalifornia, Bonneville, to name a few. Christopher McCandless, the subject of Sean Penn’s brilliant film, Into the Wild, gave his savings to charity and opted out of ordinary life altogether, just like some of the people in American Nomads, a documentary I saw last weekend on BBC4, written and presented by British writer Richard Grant.

Richard – who’s a bit of a nomad himself – meets and hears the stories of  people living itinerant lifestyles in south-western USA, and I think it’s true to say that there are as many stories as there are people. From the ex-Wall Street banker to the travelling preacher, from the rodeo riders to a mountain man known as Yogi. There was certainly nothing ‘typical’ about any of them, and the romance of the open road was tempered with its inherent dangers, most movingly in the case of teenage Comfrey riding the freight trains.

As Richard drove through the desert, I pictured another car making its way along those same roads 50-odd years earlier – a 1949 Ford topped with a pair of antlers and carrying Maureen, Celia, Gwenda, Pat and Molly. Like Richard and like some of the characters in his film, they, too, dared to step out and venture into the American wilderness for a while rather than just admire it from the window as if it were simply some majestic painting.

Several of the friends they made during their wanderings had something of the nomad in them (not really surprising in a land where people have always been on the move): the teachers who headed for the wilds during the long summer vacation, the hunters off to find game in Alaska. Some of them are still wandering now, in their seventies and eighties.

This post is a celebration of the wandering spirit and is dedicated to all the nomads out there, and to anyone with restlessness in their soul.

(Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads by Richard Grant is published in the UK by Abacus. In America the book is published by Grove Press as American Nomads – Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers and Builders)

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