Jack London called it the call of the wild - evoking, perhaps, the blood-curdling cry of a lone wolf searching the Yukon for survival and maybe adventure, writes John McNamee. But who can say there is not a wolf in all of us, thirsting to roam beyond the boundaries of the routine?
Young people today travel in greater numbers than ever before, thanks to affordable flights to virtually all parts of the globe. But back in the 1960s, the travel destination for most Irish students seeking summer jobs was a cannery in England, when peas were processed by companies such as Chivers Hartley, Birds Eye, Smedleys and Batchelors. In these vegetable emporiums many a struggling Irish student earned the vital money to get through university.
I operated a packing machine in the dispatch department of the Chivers Hartley factory in Peterborough, Lincolnshire. Sometimes, when the factory was at its full capacity, the shift could last up to 36 hours, but the overtime pay was most welcome. As the pre-dawn light began to filter through the factory windows and the stars and the moon began to melt, the conversation touched on the future prospects of dental, medical students and engineering students, future teachers and scientists, film-makers, actors and musicians. We were a generation full of hope.
Little did I know then that my own odyssey was just about to begin. After an attempt to become a medical student while working as a pathology lab porter in Nottingham General Hospital, I found I had little calling for physics, chemistry and biology, so one bleak autumn morning I headed out of Nottingham on the train to Dover and the ferry to Dunkirk, France.
Being short of francs I carried a flask of coffee and some bread and cheese. I hitch-hiked, mostly by night, until I crossed over the Pyrenees into Spain and arrived in Pamplona, where a Kenyan friend of mine was at university. Then after a short rest, I hitch-hiked onward through Spain. After a stop in Alicante I crossed to Gibraltar. Thanks to an offer from two Parisian couples who had a trawler converted to a yacht of sorts, I gained an inexpensive passage to Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.
In the company of Roy and Pete from London, two American girls - one from Detroit, the other from Chicago - and three students from the deep southern states, we set sail through the straits of Gibraltar, making our first port of call in Agadir, Morocco.
Agadir, after the earthquake in 1958, was almost a new town, though some of the old Mosques still stood intact in sharp contrast to the corralled-off Club Mediterranee, with its modern architecture, situated in a prime area of the beach. We had Christmas Day dinner on the deck of the boat. It was all a long way from Dublin.
After a spell in Las Palmas, "holiday capital of Europe", I got a job as a steward on a German tanker. To collect our cargo of oil we crossed the ocean to Venezuela and chugged 150 miles up the Orinoco river. Then it was onward to Bayonne, New Jersey, via Tobago and Trinidad. I made a visit to New York city and the top of the Empire State building - then the world's tallest - and bought The New Yorkermagazine for the first time. In early March, after another trip to Venezuela, despairing of the isolation and cabin fever of shipbound life, I jumped ship in New Haven, Connecticut.
I hitch-hiked to Washington DC, then on through Kentucky and the Blue Ridge Mountains, to Memphis, Tennessee, and the seafront city of Biloxi, Mississippi, where my adventures came to an abrupt halt.
I had the misfortune to hitch a lift to New Orleans with a woman driver who got pulled in for speeding. After being questioned by the traffic cop, I was taken to a de facto courtroom at the back of a local fishing tackle shop and fined for vagrancy. Not having the $5 to pay my fine, I spent the night in the county jail. Next came an interview with immigration officials, resulting in a 17-day stay in a New Orleans prison before I was deported on a flight to Dublin.
But in spite of my misfortunes, the travel bug was in my blood. In the summer of 1967, after another season in a canning factory, I spent six months in Iceland earning my passage to New York, where I arrived in May 1968. After hitch-hiking via Detroit, Michigan to visit two brothers living in Toronto, I went on to Banff, Alberta, nestling deep in the Rocky Mountains, working in a restaurant as a busboy. Amid the breathtaking beauty of the Canadian autumn, I reached Vancouver Island and got a job in a hostel for the homeless and disenfranchised of Victoria. Shortly before Christmas I arrived in Los Angeles where I worked in the grandly named International House of Pancakes in Santa Monica. The summer of 1969 was spent in the San Francisco area, where I worked on a programme for homeless young people close to Sausilito. There were excursions to Boulder and Aspen, Colorado, Utah, Taos, New Mexico, Santa Fe, Toucon and Phoenix, Arizona.
In retrospect I see my restless wanderings had to do with a journey that was really internal, a search that young people in all times know very well. Nowadays, approaching my 60th birthday, like London's lone wolf, I think first and foremost about the need for rest and the safest route to my lair.
• John McNamee is director of the "Out to Lunch" poetry series, now in its ninth year. Readings take place on alternate Fridays at 1.15pm in the Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. Admission is free. Forthcoming poets are Iggy McGovern (February 16th), Mary Turley McGrath (March 2nd) and Gerry Hanberry (March 16th). The collected poems of John McNamee,A Station Called Heaven , is published by Weaver Publications at €13.95.