Vagabond Song

“Not much is known about
Miscellaneous Jones
He walked a lot of roads
but always wiped the dust from his boots”

From a beer carton full of 15-years worth of rain-blurred and spine-broken journals come these tales of the road, trail and barstool. Setting out from a cabin outside of Grayling, Michigan, Beaudin casts his thumb into the waters of M-72, returning to the music of the open road.

From there he follows the song wherever it leads: the mountains of Colorado, the jungles and volcanoes of Central America, the woods and pubs of Britain and the stunning bleakness of the badlands and reservations of the western prairies.

His journeys are intertwined with glimpses into the life of Miscellaneous Jones, the legendary Ur-traveler. Inspired by Bashō’s haibun classics such as Narrow Road to the Deep North and Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, these nine movements, with their accompanying interludes and caesurae, span over a decade of traveling the highways and byways of numerous countries both on and off the map. They are a search for a poetry of freedom and wilderness – in both the physical and psychic senses of those two words.

Through all the years and all the trips, the direction is the same: Beyond.