And I Ain't Got No Home in this World Anymore

     Odysseus was a very clever man. He was able to mask victory in defeat, to hide brazenness under a thin veil of humility. He was the Grecian master of sarcasm. As the Trojan War drug on for many years too many, Agamemnon and the rest of the Greek force was getting rather tired of fooling around in Anatolia and wanted to get back to drinking goat milk and olive oil on the mainland. Then Odysseus had a fantastic idea. They would let the Trojans, who mind you had fought just as hard as they with half the resources and had held out as long, let them think they'd won; dangle victory in front of them and they'd be forced to seize it. Brave men, Noble men assault a city's wall, break down its gates, meet its occupants in battle; fortunately for the Greeks Odysseus was a wily man. In that day when a general was defeated he would give up his horse to the victor as a symbol of his subservience. Odysseus suggested they build an enormous wooden horse from the ships of the men who had died (they wouldn't be needing them to get home) , hide inside it and then jump out at night and murder all the Trojans during their celebrations of a false but truly deserved victory. And it worked, the Greek armies waited just offshore and once the infiltrators hidden within the bowel of the horse were safely withing Troy's impenetrable gates, they slaughtered the guards and opened them. The Greeks poured in and with much glee proceeded to rape and pillage the city to its foundation, leaving only the line of Aeneas to escape and start life anew. I'm glad Odysseus was punished by Poseidon. He used the horse, symbol of Poseidon's power to play one of the dirtiest tricks known to the classical world. He made the Trojans feel false relief, only to have it redoubled when they realized their mistake, such pain provoked on another human being should never go unanswered.
     My dream journey does not involve getting lost on the way home to my wife for twenty-some-odd years, but it does involve quite a good bit of honest-to-god rambling. My ideal journey is a journey, not only back to a place but also to a time. I wish to roam around with the migrant laborers of the 1930's and document their lives, the hardships and the victories and the loss. I wan t to go to a time when men were men who worked hard and were as honest as they were simple. Running from bulls, hoping freights in Tuscon, building dams in Washington, just living and working and walking and living. Amen.