Will My Wanders Never Cease?

Danielle Truscott

Word Count 751

In 1991, as a fledgling newspaper reporter in the South, I investigated a newly launched, state-facility treatment program for “middle”-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Patients’ symptoms ranged from trouble remembering something as simple as their own names to losing track of time and place and experiencing hallucinations. 

Perhaps the most well-known symptom is the progressed Alzheimer patient’s compulsion to wander.  

I spend a day on a ward. In a music therapy session, I play the triangle, keeping time to cross outbursts and woeful inquiries. I chat lengthily with Captain Jay, a lifetime merchant marine in full uniform of sorts—red Union suit, slightly shit-stained, decorated service jacket hanging misshapen on a now shriveled torso, and a Gilligan’s Island-style captain hat. His room is a decorative maelstrom of nautical-bilia. 

Mostly, I observe the wanderers, who comprise the population’s majority. On the ward’s floor, through hallways and activity areas, thick red painted lines like tracks form a highly specific route, a wanderers’ path. Beautiful in its way, it reminds me of a red version of the lesser-known New York Abstract painter Harold Krisel’s 1971 silkscreen Blue Curves. It compels, literally, which is its clinical purpose in the program: stay on course. Which is, of course, the opposite of true wandering.

I’m staggered when, per my assignment, I follow the track to its end. There, a crowd of patients stamp in place—some gently, calmly; some increasingly agitated—before a closed elevator.

There’s no way out. That’s the point. The elevator is forever out of service, never again going up, down, or even opening its doors. The mass of bobbing women and men wait. 

For what? What will happen to them? Will they be stuck in lostness forever?

As a young child, I loved home, the woods and streams and backroads of the rural Connecticut, one-traffic-light town I grew up in. I loved my friends there, my teachers, house, school. I loved the particulars: the Danielle-shaped branch-hammock high in the backyard oak tree I climbed, to read in solitude. There was, in this home life, a wanderlust “lite:” following abandoned railroad tracks to cross forbidden trestles across the river’s narrower turns; getting lost in search of yet undiscovered sledding hills; riding bikes in gangs to the next town over to explore rumors of frogs’ eggs becoming tadpoles in a drainage ditch.   

But before I was able to experience real wanderlust, I experienced the yearning for home. I became homesick just as I had learned “home.” When I was eleven, my folks split. Mum, in an unofficial fugue state of fury and grief, moved my sister and me from place to place, state to state, country to country. We lived in other people’s homes with them; we were separated and lived apart from one another.

She did not have wanderlust, but oddly something more akin to the patients’ march along a perverse “wandering” course: keep leaving where you’ve been; keep going somewhere ahead, compulsively, along some track.

It exhausted and confused me. The more Mum’s emotional track led us on our wander from home-which-was-not-home to home-which-was-not-home, it felt to me, as a child, as if we’d wind up, as the patients did at that elevator, at a nowhere. At a closed-door waiting.  

For what? What would happen to us? Would we be stuck in lostness forever?

I did develop a longing to be far away. Mum finally settled in New Jersey. It was not home; it made some deep homesickness in me burgeon. And that set in motion a wanderlust that lasted for decades. I hitchhiked through Ireland, sleeping under bushes outside Queens University in Northern Ireland during “the troubles.” I moved far away from my family, twice to cabins in the remote hills of North Carolina. I traveled to Malawi, Africa, on a small-town newswoman’s budget and with help from a boyfriend, via South Carolina, Chicago, Amsterdam, and Johannesburg, riding free across the country in the backs of sugar lorries. Stopping to complete a NAFTA-article interview at the Brownsville, Texas/Matamoros, Mexico border, I drove to from North Carolina to Guatemala toward the end of that country’s civil war, during a coup. 

I think that perhaps what we seek to be far away from, to wander for, to feel homesick for, is ourselves. And there comes a time when they coexist and we are, if not satisfied—Are we ever satisfied?—finally, ourselves.