Jerome wanted to know everything we could tell him about Wanderers. He was ravenous in his curiosity.
"How did you become Wanderers?" he asked.
"Some of us were born into that culture and raised with its beliefs. Others in our sept became entwined with us in some fashion or another and grew into our family.," I answered. "There is no test, unless it is to be accepted to a sept...perhaps you might need to go a few rounds with the resident
Ez Perjezlah. There is no license or fee. There may well be people out there who identify as a Wanderer who have no connection to the culture, but by chance or design or interest, they have come to adopt similar tools for living."
"So you were born a Wanderer?" he asked me.
"Indeed."
"Why all the secrecy then? Why did Wanderers vanish from sight if the culture did not disintegrate?"
"I can only make my own guesses...draw from the history I have learned."
"Please..."
I drew my chair closer to the table to better see his face by the candlelight. His wife Anna had long ago drifted off to sleep on the sofa beside him. Of my family, only
Syha still nodded in and out of restless slumber nearby. She was fascinated by this stranger.
"How is your knowledge of the history of the last few generations?" I asked. I wanted to know where I should begin.
Jerome gave me a guilty, embarrassed look. "Not terrific," he admitted.
"Then I will start at the beginning. Stop me if I'm telling you things you already know."
"It was in my grandparent's day that the United States, Canada and Mexico joined to form the North American Union. They were late on the world stage in this respect. I know Canada was ripe with separatist movements all over the place around the time the European Union was just hitting its stride. On this continent we were very late indeed in embracing globalization. There were many factors which finally brought it about. A lot of old partisan pride had to be broken down. The dire need to pool resources in the face of ecological disaster. A certain amount of economic disaster looming. The US believed it would allow them better reign on security for the continent. Eventually all of the negotiations were concluded and the agreements were signed."
"From that point, the period of adjustment began. Although the countries really weren't all that different at heart, there was a certain amount of shifting to be accomplished as we all melted into each other's lives. It was in the second election after this monumental political change that the first Canadian ran for the office of President of the North American Union as an independent candidate. She just happened to be a Wanderer."
"Now this is not to say that no Wanderer had ever been involved in politics before. It is a culture with a lot of political conscience. We tend to come down on the small "L" liberal side of most issues as a rule, believing for example it's better to talk to people than murder them; believing people should get to choose any family model that works for them and be supported by the laws of the land. But this was the first time someone ran for public office who identified publicly as a member of the Wanderer culture. It made for more of a spectacle than I'm sure she intended.
"Remember, this was a time when people still remembered Wanderers in the public forum. As
Danidesh said earlier, the pendulum does swing from one generation to the next. But this was not so long after we were in the public eye as the Wanderers of Havenshire took to the world stage as arbiters, accomplishing more to diffuse terrorism in ten years than had been accomplished in a century before. We were both respected and yet unknown...and the unknown always churns up some fear."
Jerome was nodding vigorously, "I remember reading about some of this. She didn't win that election if I recall."
"You're right, she didn't win, though for someone with no major party financial backing she did remarkably well. She opened the door for a lot of change in politics...a swing away from the party model...more independents with fresh new ideas began to take an interest...more minority groups believed they could have a say. Some of the largest voter turn out in the history of democracy in North America happened during that election and the next few afterward.
From a Wanderer point of view, the race was significant for other reasons. Even though she garnered a very respectable 9% of the popular vote, the greater her success in the polls, the more fear was generated. Her campaign office was vandalized no less than four times. She received a steady stream of death threats as the race drew to a close. When the election was over, she took her place in the history books and then vanished. She never ran again."
"Where did she go?" Jerome wanted to know.
"Well off my radar. My guess would be she went back home to her sept and did as most Wanderers did, withdrew from the public eye."
"How can an entire culture withdraw from the public eye?"
"For a hundred years we have not talked about ourselves to the world. No one went anywhere, we vanished in plain sight. Some in later generations have found their paths in the wider world. Sometimes strangers surprise us, becoming family. Havenshire still rests on the same city block it ever did, except now it's just a series of forgotten street addresses in a major eastern city. I presume there are a lot of doors joining the abodes and the families come and go pretty much as they have ever done. The Bush? The original community still rests in the same wooded acreage...to this day the Spiral Garden Retreat Center takes its share of visitors...just enough to sustain the families of caretakers who live there. How do I know? I stayed there for a time as a young girl, learning part of my training in light with a kind teacher there. And our sept? We are just nomadic performers, fellow travellers to almost anyone who asks about our life. Sure, we share teachings in movement and meditation; share stories rich in history. But we are strangers who move along the road quickly and are forgotten. I think in many ways we have it easier than the clans who live under the scrutiny of constant watchful neighborhoods."
"But why vanish at all?"
"Because it was safer. Because that election was just one more reminder of how different we are. We are a culture who not only embraces change, but make change a cornerstone of our lives. We are always gong to be scary because we will always represent some unknown. Also because we had spent a generation putting ourselves out there as targets and it was getting those we loved hurt. There was no grand meeting, no universal agreement. Wanderers just started to grow silent, like thousands of bells which ceased to chime, fading into ever more faint echoes. The last meeting of the Wanderer Assembly happened over a hundred years ago. There may never be another. The pendulum has swung the other direction for a time."
"But don't you worry about preserving this culture?"
"Gracious no! Culture is irrepressible. All culture is, is a series of things that happen in people's lives. People have tried to legislate cultural preservation. All they achieve is stagnation. Wanderers are just loosely associated groups of people with a tendency to use similar tools which serve our purposes at this point in time."
Jerome looked dejected. Syha, who I thought had been asleep for some time, stirred. Lifting her head from her hands on the table she asked, "what is the matter Jerome?"
"I had hoped I had found something less elusive than a cultural ghost. I guess I hoped I'd found a community I could call home."
"Being different can be a lonely business," I smiled with deep compassion.
Syha muttered something about "The Wizard of Oz" and folded her head back down into her arms on the table as the first rays of the sunrise shone in around us.
"What did she say?" Jerome looked puzzled at me.
"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard," Syha repeated into her left armpit, but a little more loudly this time.
"Syha is a bit of an old movie buff," I shrugged. "I would guess she's suggesting you've been a Wanderer longer than you realize."
