Musings of Nomadic World Wanderers
In 2023, thirty-year Teton Valley residents Peter and Jeanne Anderson sold their home north of Driggs and adopted the international nomad lifestyle, living from a few days to several weeks in a single location before moving on. Over the past two-plus years, they have visited more than thirty countries. Below, the couple share observations and musings of living life without an address.
If you’ve ever considered becoming a permanent nomad, we’re not here to persuade you one way or another. We’re not going to offer advice on drifting untethered around the world. Our avenue, of unceasing wandering, is certainly not for everyone.
But we can describe what our meandering path has offered us, and what it has required of us.
My wife, Jeanne, and I recently entered our third year of living nomadically. After three decades in Teton Valley, and almost fifty together, we sold or gave away nearly everything: our house, cars, and most of our accumulated possessions. At a time when many couples downsize, we obliterated. Examining each thing we owned, we asked, What for? We held onto a few sentimental items, though even those few things seem now to have little point and may soon also become history.
Our possessions include passports, small suitcases, light waterproof daypacks, some clothing, and odds and ends for living. We wear the same handful of outfits day after day. We dress well, not fancy. Perpetual anonymity suppresses any tendency toward style-awareness. Our oft-repeated mantra: No one knows us; no one cares.
This brings us to our first observation on soul-level gain and loss. When one lives as we do, never in one place for more than a few weeks and often only a few days, agility is paramount. Translation: minimalism. One pair of shoes, a few socks and underwear, some tops, a sweater, a rain jacket, a couple of scarves; our wardrobes evolve, but don’t grow. If we like an article, we keep it. If it wears out, disappoints, or bores, we replace it. But one possession departs for each gained.
In our homebound past, we tended to accumulate multiples of things. Nomadism squeezed acquisitiveness out of us. Since we cannot possess much, possessing things has lost value. For us, the mere idea of owning a car, for instance, with all that entails, has vanished, and welcome riddance. We’d both had cars since we were sixteen; now we take public transport or walk. The renunciation of one form of freedom can open pathways to others.
Having experienced abundance and parsimony in turn, we’ve decided this mandatory minimalism has had a positive effect, a net gain. We glow with our nothingness.
Here’s the second point about a traveler’s soul. If a person exists as half of a pair—a couple—nomadism stipulates a specific condition: solidity. A couple must be together and aligned in a deeper sense. Fortunately for us, our current life trajectory has been our intended end-state since we met in the ’70s. Travel formed and defined each of us since childhood. World-wandering and the curiosity and sense of wonder underlying it were our foundation and framing. So, for us, it was not a relationship strain to up-and-leave for good.
But we’ve met or known of many couples who only discover on the road, that they were not on the same page after all. Setting off on indefinite wandering together because you both like to travel makes as much sense as opening a restaurant because you both like to cook.
Comfort, noise tolerance, activities enjoyed and disdained, energy levels, preferred climates—these and many more parameters must be in sync. Wandering travel will test your partnership and display the results daily, like an oscilloscope whose evanescent lines indicate the weaving dance of your respective souls.
It goes without saying: Your adorable and sometimes exasperating partner, at times fearless and rock-like, also billows moods, expressions, frayed jokes, tiresome hair, gimcrack comments, harangues, and personal-isms. Perhaps she overrates her likability, and he his profundity, or vice versa. Being on the road together, strangers in a strange land, is the definition of togetherness.
We both love ancientness, public art, grand buildings, and languages we don’t understand. Neither of us cares for tropical heat or air travel.
Neither of us has gravitations at home, namely children, grandchildren, or aging parents. The pull of these orbs usually disarrays a couple’s thoughts of indefinite travel, we’ve observed. Intended wandering becomes yo-yo tourism. Nothing wrong with that, but there is a soul-level difference between traveling a lot and having no home address.
A third and rather obvious requirement of the peripatetic life is an innate comfort with adapting. Consider lodging: With no end in sight, every few days or weeks a new accommodation for your hands, eyes, feet to learn—new layout, kitchen, doors and locks, furniture, smells, switches, mattresses, toilet and faucets, heat, colors and textures, and domestic rituals.
To successfully navigate nomadism, a traveler must constantly adjust tactics. One cannot be a hammer, for which every problem is a nail. One must be all tools used in life’s bricolage.
Finally, a comment about a nomad’s aspiration. A nomad-by-choice is someone whose lifetime hope is to wake each morning and think, joyously: This is my life. I am here today. I may not be here tomorrow. This is a wonderful place for many reasons. But I may never see this place again (and probably won’t). Today is enough.
Honestly, we’re not sure that anyone does attain that zen-like peace within motion. But we’re close. Perhaps as close as we’ll ever be.
