Somebody once said, “You spend half your life trying to get away from home and the other half trying to get back.”
That was certainly true in my case.
I often hear people say, “When I retire, I’m going to travel.”
My feeling was always, “When I retire, I’m going to stay home.”
You see, my travel was “front-loaded,” courtesy of Uncle Sam.
I had been to 25 countries by the time I was 20, and to more than 100 by the time I was 56.
If it has a sea coast, I’ve probably been there.
That might sound exciting but living out of a sea bag and saying “goodbye” to kith and kin gets old pretty fast.
In his poem, “Les Fleurs du Mal,” the dissipated French poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), might have said: “The true voyagers are only those who leave just to be leaving,” but I don’t think he had anyone to leave behind.
I eventually did, and that’s when “coming home” became much dearer to me.
For example, when my son was 12, I had been gone nine years of his life.
You don’t ever get those years back.
It didn’t bother me when I was a kid in my early days of serving in the Navy. I once came home on a dare, catching military air hops, from Istanbul, Turkey, on a seven-day pass with $20 in my pocket and made it back to the ship on time.
I think I was home in Lumberton for about four hours, and I had been gone for two years.
As I grew older, however, I was always looking for a way home.
I was once on a ship that ran out of gas in Barcelona, Spain, back when Jimmy Carter, a “Navy man,” was President.
Somehow the national defense budget got upside down, and the fleet was broke.
There was literally no fuel oil available in the entire Mediterranean, and everyone was stuck in port.
The old World-War II era destroyer that I was on was consequently laid up in Barcelona for all of December.
We were “Med-moored,” or backed into the pier stern first with “friendship” lights strung overhead from bow to fantail.
Every day was “Holiday Routine.”
If you haven’t traveled, that might sound pretty neat, but you can only go to so many bull fights, visit so many tapas bars, and listen to so much flamenco music before it becomes easier to stay on the ship and stare at the bulkheads.
“Malaguena Salerosa” just made me homesick; plus, after a week or so, no one had any money.
I remember my big R&R was to stroll up and down Las Ramblas, the pedestrian boulevard, peeling and eating the blood-red Valencia oranges that street peddlers sold for a few pesetas.
Finally, out of boredom and loneliness, and based on my successful Istanbul experience of a few years earlier, I decided to head for the States.
I rode a local bus full of Romani and chickens up to Madrid and checked into flight operations at Torrejon Air Force Base.
I then lucked into a seat on a C-141 Starlifter that was flying straight to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The last time I had been in that type of aircraft was when I parachuted out of one at the Army Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia.
That should have told me something.
We took off immediately and I noticed that I was the only passenger in the cargo bay, except for some flag-draped coffins of deceased service members on their last ride home.
I really hadn’t worked out how I was going to get from Delaware to Mississippi.
My philosophy was “everybody has to be somewhere,” and I was just enjoying the existential moment of being headed toward home.
We got about an hour out, very close to the Atlantic Ocean by my calculation, and I noticed that the entire compartment was filled with this fine, greasy mist.
It was hydraulic fluid, and on a danger scale of 1-10, that was about a 12, because that’s what operated all of the airplane’s flight controls.
It wasn’t “fly by wire” yet.
I woke up the crew chief (who looked like Slim Pickens), but he didn’t seem too upset, and we did a sharp 180 and headed back to Torrejon.
There was nothing else flying west, so it was back to Barcelona and peeling oranges on Las Ramblas.
We finally got back to our home port of Newport, Rhode Island, about six months later at the end of our deployment.
It’s no mystery that the English language has so many expressions evoking home: “down home,” “home boy,” “home stretch,” “home plate,” “home turf,” “home free,” etc., not to mention “homesick;” however, nothing pleases the ear of the world-weary traveler like “coming home.”
Light a candle for me.
Hattiesburg’s Benny Hornsby is a retired Navy captain. Send him a note at: bennyhornsby.com.
