Today I am going to tour the Armed Forces Retirement Home. I have been researching it and have spoken to 2 others about it and am going to explore to see if this is the right place for me when I can no longer travel.
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The drifter's lament.
Being a drifter was lonely, but invigorating.
By A.M. Hickman • 5 Dec 2025
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Photo by A.M. Hickman, edited by Russell Nystrom
Photo by A.M. Hickman, edited by Russell Nystrom
Dear readers,
About a year ago, a Tangle staff member introduced me to a writer named A.M. Hickman. He had just published a fascinating piece on his Substack, Hickman’s Hinterlands, arguing that America wasn’t unreasonably expensive — Americans themselves were simply demanding more out of their lives: living in urban hotspots, seeking out fancy apartments or big houses, refusing to take bets on up-and-coming areas. Hickman told this story through his personal lens; he resides in upstate New York (but, as you’ll see in a moment, is also a bit of a nomad) in a rural, dilapidated town that also happens to be incredibly cheap and quite beautiful.
I loved the story; it felt like a fresh narrative, delivered in a wholly unique voice. I began devouring Hickman’s writing — on class, on the birth of his daughter, on the death of his mother, on what it’s like to travel via bus through rural America, and even on his longing (and our shared affection) for the desert.
So, a few months ago, I got Hickman on the phone and pitched him on the idea of writing for Tangle. What stories was he turning over in his head? What piece did he want some help with from a sharp and unique editorial team? What was he working on next?
He was brimming with ideas, but one in particular caught my attention: a story about how he missed being homeless. Hickman had spent years as a kind of nomadic “bum” (his words) hitchhiking across America, and in a flourish, he described all the ways in which he felt more alive and more intellectually stimulated during that time in his life than any other. I was intrigued, and I pushed him for a draft.
Today, I’m proud to be publishing that story in Tangle, from one of my favorite up-and-coming writers in America. I hope to publish more of Hickman’s work in the future, and if you enjoy the piece, I encourage you to sign up for his newsletter and support his work.
Best,
Isaac
The Drifter’s Lament
A Report From an Apocalypse.
In the long history of the human race, a great deal has been said about “loose women” — but curiously, far less has been written on the topic of “loose men.” To say that I have suffered from a grave and ghastly “looseness” of not only morals but also of mind would indeed be true. Prone to intemperance and the mad flightiness of the rogue, I have so often lived what I could only describe as “a dissipated life.” Loose morals ravaged me, and my grasp upon my own morality was looser still. At an early age, I cut myself adrift. Or, if I am to be charitable with myself, I was cut loose by forces larger than I was.
Adrift indeed — and above all, always a drifter.
Doddering from place to place, mumbling to myself, tippling madly — I lived life as a foolish young buzzard lives, roasting under the desert sun or hiding from the dark, chilly rains of desolate coastal ranges. I did not work a job, nor did I retain a fixed address, own an automobile, or sleep indoors on any but the rarest occasion. Living life as a scavenger, I subsisted on discarded food, slept in ditches, engaged in petty malfeasances of all forms and flavors, and was hopelessly pinned down in a miasma of cynicism and snarling snark. With great gusto and reckless abandon, I hated “society.” So I left it; and for many years, a thicketed, greasy, unshorn beard hung down on my face like a filthy rag — the national flag of the dropout, the punk, the ne’er-do-well, the hobo.
This was my life — a life so loose that I could not even abide the conventions of time or of calendar. I was unregulated by every definition of the word.
Above all, the nature of my dysregulation was geographical. I suppose I fancied myself a sort of self-made guerrilla sociologist, and the nature of my research as such was chaotic in the extreme. My inability to remain in any place for all but the paltriest lengths of time was famous amongst those who knew me; I was both the king of the “Irish Goodbye” and the patron saint of the startling and unannounced arrival.
Raising my thumb lazily on the sides of the highways and roads, I hung my hat on fate — and for long bouts of time I rarely spent more than one or two days in the same place. I would enter any automobile that flung the door open for me, regardless of where it might take me or who might be behind the wheel.
And so I found myself mesmerized by the unfathomable randomness of the American byways, and found randomness itself to take on a sort of quasi-divine form. It became a primitive, pagan-esque religion for me; I reveled in the strange and often hilarious contrasts between my various hitchhiking rides.
It looked something like this:
I get into a brand-new minivan with a family of Mormon missionaries in Oregon. In a misguided attempt to show their son what one who has “failed at life” really looks like, they find themselves aghast at how their young child delights in my zany adventure stories. The boy concludes the encounter by declaring that one day he himself will be a hitchhiker and a hobo! Father’s brow furls with disgruntlement; mother looks sullen and depressed. They give me a 20-dollar bill and a Book of Mormon; they flash weak smiles then deposit me on a rainy roadside. Promptly, a glue-sniffing nutcase brakes for me. So I pile into his filthy coupe where he regales me with racist phrenological theories and tales from his life as the owner of a pet rat (the rat occasionally interjects from his pocket), and he swerves all over the glistening highway as he huffs his potent glue from a paper bag, murmuring.
Following a ride, I might find myself at a gas station or a truck stop, slurping on a chili dog, shoplifting a soda, or digging expired sushi out of the dumpster (still cold!). A sixteen-year-old girl asks me to buy her Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and I oblige, so long as she gives me some extra cash for a 24-ounce Malt Liquor as her “tax.” I put the booze in an extra-large Slurpy cup, hunch myself by the door of the station — in a corner where the cashiers cannot see me — and hold a sign that says “California.”
I hold the sign to communicate to passers-by that I am, in fact, headed anywhere but here. And in a few minutes, a man with a rose tattoo on his neck accosts me, screaming at me to “get a job” (doesn’t he see that I am working right now?). Just seconds before it seems he is actually going to attempt to start a brawl with me, a lonesome-eyed, cougar-esque blonde in her mid-40s grabs my collar and escorts me to her rumbling Camaro, and we speed off.
Just as we pull onto the on-ramp at a worryingly sporty 70 miles per hour, I realize the woman is wasted drunk. But no matter — she is about to tell me her entire life story over the next several hours, including many jarringly personal (and even clinical) details I’d rather not know. At midnight, she will leave me to sleep beside some kind of cistern for cattle in a dusty agricultural town that I have never seen before.
Then I wake, and begin again.
I may do something like this every single day for months on end. In actual fact, I did it for years on end. I hitchhiked over 100,000 miles in a five-year period; I passed well over 1,000 nights sleeping rough on the road — sometimes very rough. And beyond my five traveling years, I passed another three in all as a stationary “bum” in various college towns, sleeping everywhere from people’s couches to dorm rooms to makeshift encampments in bushes or on riparian floodplains; I even slept for some months on an aluminum Jon boat I turned into a “micro-houseboat” (which the police later stole from me). So it was for me: the consummate drifter, dropout, vagrant, itinerant, and vagabond — and a man whose grasp on morality, life, labor, and mind was so profoundly loose I am sometimes shocked to remember that the atoms and cells that compose my body did not drift away from one another just as surely as I drifted across the map of the United States of America.
Drifting — photo of and from the author
Drifting — photo of and from the author
To the well adjusted denizens of the morally upright corridors of this country — those sterling souls to whom terms like “malt liquor” and “dumpster-diving” could only elicit vague unease or acute disgust — my life was a damnable tragedy. For a young, able-bodied fellow — especially one who is literate, never slack-jawed, curious and surely capable of some sort of productive behavior — to decouple himself entirely from all comfort, routine, and surety of good fortune in order to pursue an aimless life of vagrancy is a waste of perfectly good human resources.
And many times, people approached me with some ambition to “put me in touch with” various “resources” for people suffering from a “plight” like mine. It was all very touching, and frankly, a little stupid. For rather than speaking to me as a fellow man, or conversing with me about the finer details of who I was or why I was living as I was, I was almost always presupposed to be a tragedy. The visual cues were serious enough to nearly ensure that interpretation. But to my mind, my life was no tragedy. I rather enjoyed it. Of course, if I were ever to vocalize this enjoyment to those who sought to save me from my hellish plight as a homeless drifter, I would only elicit blank stares of bewilderment — such an admission would violate the narrative.
But in fact, more than having enjoyed it, I miss it. I miss being homeless.
It is with immense fondness — wistfulness, even — that I look upon my years as a rough-and-ready vagabond. No doubt, I’m nostalgic for my traveling period partially because it liberated me from my crumbling rural hometown; it isn’t as if anything great was waiting for me back home. Instead of languishing there, I sought the thrill of exertion and adventure and I got it in spades. Even years after the specific nature of my drifting has taken a different shape, I cannot help but pine for my rough days again. And though in many quarters, I am expected to write about that period of my life as if it were all a dark and twisted travail of completely Dickensian proportions, I cannot write about it like that. The truth, in many ways, is that those years were among the greatest and most fascinating of my life.
And how could this be?
Because, in my own estimation, to be a vagabond is to be honest. For most of human history, life was one long and apparently endless tenure of drifting vagrancy. The period of humans as “rooted” and “civilized” creatures is mostly a novelty of recent marque. Indeed, great European estates would not exist if not for the daring fellows who ventured out from the Cradle of Humanity in Ethiopia. Our salt-of-the-earth yeomen, our wizened old local characters and landmen of a most rooted variety — their own ancestors were drifters, just as I was, and as I still am.
The nomad has cast the very seed of the ones who scorn him and hunt him down. He is the rhizome buried deep within the roots of those who pity him; his kin and forerunners were the living precursors to settled civilization.
As true as any of this may be at the scale of all of humanity at large, it is particularly true of America. The society formed upon the mysterious soil of the New World was, by nature, settled only by those who departed from the Old Country — and more than this, by men who swaggered around a barbarous and wild continent continually for centuries. To this very day, the American is not a stranger to the U-Haul, nor to the cross-country interstate voyage in search of his fortune. Many vigorous people, individuals as well as families, regularly pull up their stakes in search of their personal El Dorado elsewhere as a matter of course.
So natural is this sort of thing to us that, about a century ago, the pioneer of Italian fascism Julius Evola quite aptly called modern Americans “the nomads of the asphalt” (wisdom can come from mysterious places).
Yet even for our American mythos of pursuing opportunity, our collective psyche appears to be ill at ease with our natural proclivity to wander. The “nomad” identity in the United States is almost exclusively the province of those on the fringe — to adopt the term for oneself would be considered madness for a well heeled American. This is even true if he does, in fact, move constantly — whether posed to a truck driver or a doctor, an academic or a soldier, a ranch-hand or an oilman, the question “Where do you live?” expects an uncomplicated answer.
At each interval of his sojourns around the country, it is imperative that the American everyman takes up residence somewhere — usually in houses that are built so poorly they really might be considered “semi-permanent structures” by anthropologists in the distant future, as would be the other buildings in which his commerce is conducted. And there, at his residences, he keeps up appearances as a civilized, settled paragon of sedentary contentment. This is true even if the intervals at which he maintains fixity upon the map are exceptionally short and sporadic.
A temporary residence — photo from the author
A temporary residence — photo from the author
At each of these intervals, too, should our “nomad of the asphalt” find himself face-to-face with a bona fide tramp, he will act somewhat appalled at the destitution of a life so adrift. In so doing, he is genuine; his appalled countenance is no fabrication — even if it creeps onto his face the very minute he himself is loading boxes into another U-Haul truck. And so it is that we find the modern American’s “nomadism” to not only be of asphalt and Interstate Highways, but also of drywall, air-conditioning, telephone bills, and pay stubs. Each somehow legitimizes his peripatetic nature; each is a soothing palliative distracting him from the real shape of his condition.
Yet even in the moment when the decidedly mobile American workingman is face-to-face with the drifter, and even as he may dial the police (or as he may launch into a red-faced soliloquy about how the drifter should “get a job”), a strange obliqueness overtakes his gaze as he looks upon the vagrant — a kind of discomfiting recognition that rattles him. For what is he looking at but a radically simplified version of his own ethos? What is he looking at but a naked depiction of the last breaths of his early American heroes — the settlers, the pioneers, the frontiersmen he has watched on the silver screen through so many classic old Westerns and films? To him, the rambling vagrant is a sight that is at once repulsive and (quietly) one that harkens to something deep and primordial within himself.
Wordlessly, the vagabond is a living, breathing reminder of the essence of America’s genesis and continued uneasiness on the map — he is the foil, the surface on which old, ancient memories of nomadic journeys are projected. Viewed in this light, the drifter’s coarse, haggard looseness upon the surface of the country is only a testament of a disturbingly honest variety.
If all of this analysis might seem disturbingly self-aggrandizing coming from a vagabond, well, I’ll state for the record one major obstacle to any self-aggrandizement I could derive from it: I quit that life. Though I continue to live on the road, the life of the solitary vagabond is now behind me. It was anything but a sustainable way of living and traveling — in fact, it nearly killed me. But its unsustainability was not revealed to me for the reasons that many who are removed from the drifter’s life would imagine. On nights during flash-freezes, when I was poorly equipped for sleeping in the snow, it did not bother me. Nor did scuffles with junkies, running from the police, scoring huge bags of donuts or boxes of pizza from dumpsters nationwide; in fact, it thrilled me. That lifestyle was the closest analogue to the hunter-gatherer’s life that one can obtain in the modern landscape. It was adrenaline, adventure, and survival all whipped up into a kind of manna for my hungry, stripling spirit.
Instead, what killed the tramp’s life for me was the profound and radical loneliness that such a life involves. It is a loneliness so all-consuming that it is a close cousin of the Nietzschean abyss; a meditation on the transitory finitude of life — an exercise in Memento Mori so all-encompassing that one begins to feel the magnetic pull of Death himself, if only for lack of good company. Moreover, this loneliness seems to constitute a kind of crossroads, or a point of departure from the timeless human tradition of nomadism. For, though the hobo does bear some similarities to the primordial germ of peripatetic humanity — and he does live much of the same life and bears many of the same inevitable scars — he is different from Early Man in that he travels without a tribe.
In anthropological terms, the extent of the modern vagabond’s isolation is extremely aberrant. No precedent for it exists except in cases of banishment. Yet if the tramp’s life can be said to be a kind of dysfunction, it can only be deemed such by way of his profound and soul-killing isolation — and not by his penchant for traveling. For let us not forget that a full 97% of all human societies that have ever existed since the dawn of our species have been tribal hunter-gatherer societies. All have been nomadic or semi-nomadic. There is nothing aberrant, then, about rhythmic and purposive travel in human terms; in fact, it has been the normative form of human life for at least 200,000 years. But, crucially, the vagabondage of early man has always involved a tribe.
In spite of this historical norm, the last living vestiges of our nomadic forebears now lie mostly in ruin. Less than 0.3% of the human species is now living as tribal nomads; what few groups remain exist as fugitives whose nomadic way of life faces countless pressures. No true nomadic tribes remain in North America now. This year, in fact, marks the 150th anniversary of the surrender of the last Comanche warriors, the last genuine nomads of the New World. And so it is that there is no tribe for the tribeless American hobo — not anymore. The machinery of an ultra-novel, market-based anthropology has made sure of that.
One wonders if one day, the papers will run the headline “Last Descendant of the Last Nomadic Tribe on Earth Dies in Hospital.” It isn’t hard to imagine.
Yet many of the forces that have (deliberately or not) conspired to create this apocalypse for nomadic peoples are, paradoxically, tied up with an economic system that seems to generate displacement as a matter of course. Indeed, the very system that seems to have had a naturally disintegrative impact on nomadic cultures is also a system that basically envisions all human beings as fungible, interchangeable, globalized human resources, to be pushed and pulled and moved freely by free markets via both domestic and international migration.
The disintegration of rural America has been one example of this, though it has not been a death about which much fanfare has been made. None of the powerful interests that steer our collective economic ship seem to have envisioned any meaningful alternative to the apparently ineluctable trend of urbanization; they treat this phenomenon as if it were a force of nature. The tacitly forwarded solution to those caught before the slow death of rural America is simple — move. Yet those of us who harken from dying rural hinterlands and elect to leave will only leave as atomized parts of a society that has been outmoded and abandoned. Those of us who stay will only languish.
Therefore, at the bottom of it all, the net result of our era of politico-economic history appears to be a monolithic world system that offers only the worst of both the world of the nomad and the world of the settler. The salt-of-the-earth ruralite lies uprooted and scorned. Meanwhile, remnants of ancient nomadic tribes live under constant threat, and their New World cousins — the tramps, hobos, and drifters — seem to make little headway at forming anything resembling a functional inter-generational tribe.
What we receive instead is a paltrier kind of nomadism served with a bitterly meager helping of settled life. Now, the fungible “human resource” is a nomad without a tribe save that of an ever-changing cast of co-workers, whose only rhythm is provided to him by the anonymous hand of the market. If and when he should find himself settled, for however long, he’ll find himself purchasing a “house” for a stratospheric price on a bank loan — and the house, cheap and flimsy in its construction, may barely outlive the life of the loan. He’ll conduct his business in a series of quickly constructed and often modular buildings which are, by the standards of our architectural forebears, glorified drywall tents requiring constant maintenance, each of them frequently razed and rebuilt as needed. His civilization will leave no ruins but parking lots; he will leave no Cathedrals for his offspring — and they shall wander the earth like Cain, without a tribe, without so much as a single thread tying them to the earliest Pleistocene dawn of a wandering mankind.
Where exceptions to this paradigm may appear to exist, one gets the sense that they’re only the fleeting remains of a bygone time — soon to be paved over, digitized, and commercialized whenever the pallid hand of “economic development” should wish them gone.
From this perspective, perhaps the nomadic urge constitutes a kind of “ultimate default” for mankind. One wonders whether all of human history can be summarized as a series of apocalypses during which phoenix-like civilizations have risen and fallen — and if during the apex of each society’s flaming collapse, men did not return to that peripatetic default. Were such returns all tragic? Or did they awaken those living them to something ancient, something we’ve always remembered and yearned for?
In our time, as rumors of “the death of the West” swirl and circulate, I have wandered a haunted landscape as an alien and a stranger, not unlike countless others before me. I have worn the mantle of a grave and dark solitude that has left me indelibly marked; some ancient thing has been roused in me that may very well be a kind of hidden anthropological universal, natural to human beings everywhere. Now, as my wife and I gaze upon our infant daughter, I wonder if this ancient thing will be roused in her, too.
I say this as she is among the last remaining descendants of continuously nomadic peoples of European extraction — a fact that I did not learn until meeting my absent father, well after I’d already hitchhiked my hundred-thousandth mile. He — another “loose man,” as it were — had not attended my birth because he was in jail in Orange County, California. He spent his subsequent forty years or so as a carnie traveling the West Coast. His father had been an itinerant ranch hand in and around Idaho, Utah and Nevada, as had his father. And my great-great-grandfather, it turns out, was a showman and a Celtic Traveller in the Highlands of Scotland. Like me, his pedigree was nomadic for innumerable generations, both in the Isles and in Mainland Europe.
When he told me this, everything clicked. Everything made sense. I had only roamed, perhaps, in the shadowy and formless way that presented itself to me at the time, having fled the rusting ruins of my dying hometown in rural Upstate New York; I had no tribe to find, no circus to join, no memory of my forebears save the one etched wordlessly into my blood. It came to life in me; some ancient thing moved through me from long before to carry me to my true home: the road.
That road wends its way through not only God’s uncountable infinities of beauty, but also through the apocalypse wrought by the hands of modern man. A world without tribes and without homesteads. A world made by machine and not by hand — the endless strip mall, the endless big-box boulevard, devoid of both nomad and settler, where every tribe has been disbanded by the dismal rationality of the market.
It is there that men like me drift the world over; unmoored from all, in poverty not only of place but of a people, walking not solely to gratify the unshakeable urge to wander but also to hold fast to those last threads of our unnamed forebears who walked in their own apocalypses, too. There is some memory there, some ineffable and unlikely hope — a thing that cannot die but can only be pushed down, like Whack-a-Moles, only to rise tauntingly again.
That old history, that old thing carved in so much bone and in the ruined, hard-used soles of so many ancient, long-buried boots and wagon-wheels, it sings with the old Irish Traveller Pecker Dunne as it walks:
Oh, the road isn’t easy but it’s what I choose
I’m not always a winner but I’ll never lose
I’ve the pride of me race and the last of the few
And I live like my father taught me
Now I’m on the road again, travellin’ still
Summer and winter, keep travellin’ I will
Though the road it is long and I know it will kill
The last of the travellin’ people
Traveling | photo of and from the author
Traveling | photo of and from the author
A.M. Hickman is a writer residing (sometimes) in upstate New York. You can find his newsletter, Hickman’s Hinterlands, here.
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