I'm between trips and fretting. It's a rare sunny day in winter, and I'm enjoying it but not allowing myself to be fooled; the dappled sunlight outside the door will soon be replaced by rain that'll seem to go on forever. I need out of here.

This wanting to take off may seem, to some, like a mania or a waste of time. It might also be said to indicate an extreme curiosity. I'm not interested in the why of it; I just want to go. And I don't mean I want to go on a junket--me and seven other writers being shunted between temple and glass blower, ostrich farm and jungle lodge--or on a 10-day beaches-and-ruins excursion with folk dancers in the hotel lobby after dinner. Nor am I keen on a slow jaunt around the world, because I don't want travel to become a job or routine. The most boring human I ever met was a fellow on a train in Italy, back in the '70s; he had spent the previous decade moving from place to place, never staying anywhere more than a week. Maybe he's still at it. But I might stay in Suva or Sihanoukville for a few months if something or someone promising turns up. I share the view of Ludwig Bemelmans: "I always buy a one-way ticket because I reserve the right not to return."

Me, I sometimes like to throw some logs on the fire, put my feet up on old Spot, who's been staying with the neighbours, and unreel pages of the mental scrapbook. This I do when I can't go anywhere. Therefore: there I am, age 12, having run away from home because I hated the suburbs to which my parents had moved six months earlier. I slept this particular night in the alley behind a department store in Allentown, Pennsylvania; it was quite comfortable in the bin where they placed the unfolded cardboard boxes. I was awakened in the morning by the scream of the man who was dumping the first of the days' boxes. I got just one glimpse of him before he ran off in terror. I opened the lid he'd just dropped and saw him hurrying for the back door to the store.

I had run away to flee the suburbs, but I ran away the next two summers out of a lust for adventure. One can find adventure anywhere. I found it in places like Chillicothe, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia, home of WWVA, 50,000 watts of authentic country music. I ran away from my class trip, Grade 8, to attend a stage show in the black section of Annapolis, Maryland, in order to see Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Bobby "Blue" Bland.

I know many people who have travelled much more than I have, and not on business. I remember buying a ticket to Manaus, Brazil, at a travel agency in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1978. The woman issuing the ticket had frosted hair and rhinestone glasses. "Your first time to the Amazon?" she drawled, her jowls quivering.

"No, ma'am," I said proudly. "My second."

She twisted her white-painted lips together, scrunched up her eyes, and said with a smirk: "I've been three times."

But the accumulation of air miles or a catalogue of countries is of no concern to me. It's the spirit of the enterprise. Because this taking off has remained a constant in my life, I am no longer able to view these trips and these places in any kind of chronological order. There is an evolving circularity to my memories. I like to think that the mandalalike quality of the way I view my travels does not indicate any weakening of memory. I recall things perfectly well; I'm just not always clear about the order of them.

I do know that I was in Greenland in August of 1981, and I can still see the actual green hills with white crosses rolling down to a sea where icebergs resembled the white sails of tall ships at anchor. That trip I also appeared in an Inuit rock video filmed on one of those icebergs. I played a typical uptight Danish businessman in a suit, seated at a desk in front of a typewriter, throwing papers around and pulling my hair in frustration while wild and free guitar players danced around me, lip-syncing.

I eventually went to the Amazon two more times, and the greatest things I saw were spider webs like vast circus tents hung across the jungle. I don't know which trip that was.

There in my mind, like an old sepia photograph, is the first sight of the Eagle Plain in northern Yukon, the army camp, and what then was the end of the Dempster Highway.

Frobisher Bay, as it was known, sprawled across the snow...the legless man in his home of cardboard and tin in the back alleys of a town in Cambodia, him smiling and proud, serving soft drinks, snakes visible through the holes in his floor...the phantasmagoric compound of the wealthy eccentric Edward James, rising out of the jungle it imitated, high in the mountains of Mexico's San Luis Potosi state...the dead guerrilla being loaded on the back of the Rhodesian Army's "Rhino", the cannon bursting out of the vehicle's front shield like its namesake's horn...a hobo encampment, with boots, a tin plate, a mirror, a chain, a shirt hanging like a mobile from a tree in Tulsa...the eyes of the wild elephant chained near the river in the central mountains of Vietnam...the barber with his customer on the otherwise deserted beach near Lavinia in Bali...the brown lobby of the low-ceilinged Maple Creek Hotel and the 98-year-old man who had known Sitting Bull...

A thousand images, and more, I hope, to come.

Of course, it is both reasonable and practical that I stay right where I am for a substantial period of time, but reason and practicality have nothing to do with it. My bags are packed. Hell, they're always packed.