We All Choose Our Own Paths, Even When We Stay Put

Long ago, on a particularly meditative evening, I contemplated dropping out of society and living on the road in Europe. It was one of those periods of life when you think all things are possible, that life is but a piece of clay to be shaped and that you are the master sculptor.

Then, something caught my attention on TV, and I forgot all about it.

Kevin Palmquist is the rambler I never was.

In the mid-1980s, he took a summer vacation to London. After a month, he called home and told his employer that he, uh, had a slight change of plans and would be back in September, a couple months later than expected.

And although he swears he never planned it that way, a life on the road is pretty much what Palmquist, now 36, has lived since then. After summer trips in 1985 and 1986, he left the United States in 1988 for four years.

He has cut a swath around the world from Berlin to Bali, and the show’s just starting, folks. He sees Africa and South America in his future.

But I’m not doing this column as a travelogue. What interests me are the choices people make, and what leads some of us to drive the same route to work for years on end and others to wind up circling the globe.

“Here, it’s very stable, you can count on things,” Palmquist is saying as he takes a midmorning break from his job as a sporting goods salesman in Fountain Valley. He has the happy, rubbery face of a young Roddy McDowall. “I thrive on the more unusual or the more complex situations. It’s more exciting and more interesting to me.”

Yes, I said, but lots of people think about hitting the road and never do. What made you do it?

“It’s about making choices,” he says. “The biggest thing people fear is the material loss. It took me about two years to get things set up and organized in a direction where I could be self-sufficient and still travel. If you want the big house and brand-new car and that sort of thing, you’ve made a commitment to that, where I’m working toward something else.”

His financial plan was to put money into a mutual fund and use the interest to travel. When your transportation is a bicycle and you’re working while traveling and sometimes getting free boarding from strangers, it isn’t as expensive as it might seem, Palmquist says.

Palmquist doesn’t try and convince people they should drop everything and travel the world. Nor does he consider himself especially courageous or adventurous.

“I think some people live vicariously” through his adventures, he says. “The only thing I trash is when people are not happy in the life they’re living. People say, ‘Gosh, I wish I was doing that, I really want to do that.’ Sometimes, I say, sell your car, you can do it, that’s enough money to travel for a year, easily. It’s whatever makes you happy. Pursue what makes you happy. Adventure is relative. I think having a child and having a family is as wild an adventure that someone could choose.”

Sure, he has stories from the road. Some big ones, some little ones. He speaks with special feeling about a short stay with a nomadic sheepherder’s family in the Himalayas. A local engineer directed Palmquist to the family’s home and when he arrived, the father asked him to remove his shoes before entering. The man then prepared a basin of warm water and washed Palmquist’s feet. “That’s how they welcome you to their home,” he says.

“It’s an education,” he says of the traveling. “It’s about culture, about language, about empathy for the human condition and seeing people who by our standards would be very poor materialistically, but who spiritually are so rich.”

How often do you grapple with the thought of being out of the mainstream, I ask.

“Sure, you do that,” he says, “because that’s the normal path that people take. You ask yourself, ‘Am I a total idiot? Am I going to be 50 and flat broke?’ But I’ve always been able to find work, and, I don’t know, if it gets too tough, it’s very cheap to live in a foreign country.”

I tell him I’m envious.

“You should only be envious if it’s something you really want to do. You’ve given up things to have the life you have here. I’ve given up some things to live the life I’ve led. Life is choices, we all have choices.”

Before leaving, I ask for his home phone number, in case I need to call him back.

He didn’t know it. He had to dig into his wallet for a piece of paper where it was written down.

The man had to look up his own phone number . Written on a slip of paper in his wallet .

That had a really, really nice feel to it.

Let’s see, if I sold my car. . . .