I sometimes think that it's not so much times that have changed, it is our attitude toward risk and danger. When I was 22, I spent a lot of time on the open roads, hitch-hiking throughout the US, and in Europe. This was despite admonishments from my parents about traveling thieves and murderers, and from my friends about Southern Rednecks who would cut your throat for the simple fact that you had long hair. Drugs were certainly not absent from that era, nor were the numbers of the desparate and the lost. I, too, was a searcher.

Is the urge to ramble, rootless and unconnected, any different today than it was in my traveling days, or when Art rode the rails? It has never been the safe and sane thing to do, but there has always been a sort of romance and poetry in it, and I suspect there always will.Are there no new frontiers, no new things to be discovered? I know this: When you are 22 ,fearless, and unshackled, the main street of a small town in a new state is filled with wonder, each stranger that you meet is a new story to be told, and the highway is a symbol of high adventure. It is we who sit safe, secure, and domesticated who must, in defense of our own respectability and responsibilities, view the traveling life with suspicion. But many of us still hear its call, and cherish in our hearts the notion that, someday, we might again answer.