My Brother's Travels

Lee answered the call of the road
Instead of heading back to college
After our voyage to American Samoa.
He became something
Of a world traveler
And a hippie vagabond.
I sometimes wondered
What my life might have been like
Had I gone on and done the same.
He spent some time over in Figi
Then hitched a ride on another sailboat,
One whose mission was to disrupt
The French nuclear tests
Being executed at that time
On some of the remote coral atolls.
They did that
Green Peace fashion
By sailing to ground zero
At the time of each scheduled blast
To force its postponement.
That must have been interesting!
Eventually he ended up
In New Zealand
Sheep herding of all things.
From there he drifted on to Australia
And sometime later
Found his way
Up to Indonesia and New Guinea.
We finally met again
Almost two and a half years later
In Thailand where I was serving
As a Peace Corps Volunteer.
He even spent a while
Bumming around down in Peru,
But he headed back to the US
And has stayed there ever since.
There was a time
When we each thought
The only times we would
Meet each other
Would be in passing
On some far corner
Of the planet,
But life never went
Exactly the way
Either of us planned.