Covid-19 has been a challenge for everyone, and I often wonder what I’d do if I hadn’t figured out how to keep wandering. Sometimes, while I’m training a dog, I will lie down on top of it to prevent it from moving. This is done to establish dominance. Controlling movement is one of the things that establishes pack hierarchy. Particularly independent dogs will squirm or even go berserk at the inability to get free. This is how I felt about sheltering in place.

I’ve wondered whether my independence was a product of genetics or my upbringing. I tend to focus on the former but having fairly independent parents certainly fostered this proclivity for getting bored quickly. When I think about evolution, it exemplifies that resistance to remaining the same. Organisms are always pushing boundaries. I think of myself one of the genetic outliers.

When I was younger, I decided that had I been born a century earlier, I would most certainly have been an explorer. As an eleven year old, I was riding my bike as far as 10 miles from my house. Of course, that was a different time when parents let us out to play, and we didn’t have to be home until the streetlights came on. Still, I doubt my mom knew that I was not riding around our neighborhood but riding four towns away just to see the house of one of the girls I liked in my class.

Getting a car opened up an even greater world, and it wasn’t long before I was making day trips all over the San Francisco bay area. I then went to college in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, and when I wasn’t hiking a new trail, I was exploring a new arm of a cave.

I remember when I first moved to Portland, I bought a huge map of the city and mounted it to the wall. Every day I’d go for a walk, then come home and use a highlighter to mark the route I’d taken. It wasn’t long before the entire map was yellow.

It was in Portland where my marriage broke up, and I began to explore the world. Thanks to a cool app Polarsteps, I am able to electronically highlight my trips around the world. The break up of my marriage also revealed a reason behind my wanderlust. My ex had diagnosed herself as being chronically dissatisfied, something that certainly played a role in our split, but a few years later, she accused me of suffering from the same affliction.

I was flabbergasted. We are nothing alike. She was depressed, and I was always happy, so I asked her to explain. She said, “You are never happy once you’ve done something. You must always follow with something different. You too are chronically dissatisfied”.

I had to admit, she was right. For me, knowledge of one thing leads to curiosity of another, and even today, after two months of working at the dog hotel, I am planning my next road trip through Mexico. Despite the shutdown of the world, I still found the one country where I can unleash my wanderlust.