Taking Road Less Traveled May Not Be for Everyone

I’ve known there are people like Don Ewing out there, and they’ve always made me jealous because they’ve done what I didn’t have the gumption to do.

Most of us hear a voice in our heads while we’re teen-agers that starts laying the rap on us that shapes our adult lives: Sink some roots; work all your life; plan your future.

Don Ewing heard a voice when he was 16, but instead of telling him to get cracking, it told him he should move to Australia. Since he was living at the time on a tame and tidy block in unincorporated Orange County between Garden Grove and Stanton, the idea seemed a little far-fetched.

But Ewing listened and when he graduated from Rancho Alamitos High School, he rode a motorcycle around Europe. It’s been off to the races ever since. Since then, he has hitchhiked around the world and been to about 40 countries. A house painter, he works enough each year to pay for his pleasure and education--which to him comes from traveling the world.

So now he’s sitting Monday afternoon in his parents’ home--the same one he grew up in--a 40-year-old guy playing a taped phone message from Vladimir Sergeyev in Moscow.

The phone call was a follow-up to a letter Sergeyev sent to Ewing, responding to his ad in an English-language newspaper in Moscow. Ewing’s ad said he was looking for Russian families to house him for $10 a day during an upcoming trip to the former Soviet Union. It’s a trip that has Ewing as excited as any he’s taken in the last 10 years.

“Traveling has got soul, it’s got depth. I’ve made friends all over the world,” Ewing says. “There’s so much depth in that lifestyle versus the typical 9-to-5 routine forever and ever. What’s interesting is that once you get out there traveling in the world, into that travel groove, you meet people all over the world doing the same thing. Three years ago in Guatemala, I met a 40-year-old architect and his 39-year-old wife who managed a clothing store and they had quit their jobs and were traveling three years around the world.”

Sergeyev, a 37-year-old child psychologist with a wife and four children, has invited Ewing on a raft trip on a Russian river and says he can house him either in Moscow or a suburb. “Both are rather simple, but a cordial reception is guaranteed,” his letter said.

On the follow-up phone message, Sergeyev says, “Looking forward to the time when I can see you and talk to you.”

Ewing got 65 responses to his ad and selected three host families. Reading between the lines, Ewing says, he senses both a strong desire among the Russians to meet an American and references to economic hardship.

One woman offered to show him around Moscow and added: “For my work, you can buy in Moscow for me ladies shoes. My size is 36. Now in Moscow ladies shoes cost minimum $30, maximum $47. Or you can buy it in America.”

“Reading these letters, some of these people are leading really tragic lives,” Ewing says.

Ewing is heading for Russia in late August and plans to stay into December. What awaits him when he returns is, as always, unforeseeable.

Whatever happens, he says, he won’t second-guess himself. “People work their life away until they can retire. Then they have the freedom to do what they want. I reversed it. I know when I’m older, the future may not be that secure, I won’t have a pension, but I will feel that I’ve lived a completely full life. To this day, I’m 40 and I’ve not regretted it one little bit.”

He sees his lifestyle as an alternative culture. “The strange thing is, when you go out and do it and get introduced to this alternate culture, you think this is the proper way to live and the other guys have got it wrong. But it’s not for everybody. Some people have got to have security, a house and steady income. I’m a little bit nervous when I come back from a trip and the boss doesn’t have work for me, but it’s still worth it.”

OK, Don, I’ll say what I always say when I run across someone like you.

Maybe next lifetime, I’ll follow your lead.

In the meantime, the rest of us can ponder taking the road more traveled: Sink some roots; work all your life; plan your future.

Gee, ain’t it great?