An old friend from high school and college days called not long ago to report that he was on his way back to Nepal. That country is in a state of civil war. The king, a feudal authoritarian who deploys death squads against his enemies, controls the cities. Maoist guerrillas rule the countryside. People on both sides suspected of aiding the opposition routinely “disappear.”

“The ex-paradise of hippies has become a nightmare,” according to an article I read. My friend couldn’t wait to get back. In the mornings, he practices his vocation of psychiatrist, counseling expatriates who’ve washed up in Nepal, searching for truth or running from themselves. In the afternoons, he follows his passion for making art. Sometimes he feels as if he’s living in a Graham Greene novel, he said.

We tend to measure ourselves against the friends of our youth and his report filled me with pangs of self-doubt. Where was my spirit of adventure, my imagination, my pluck? I had grown timid, sedentary. In a word, old. Avoiding hassles had become my loftiest goal. Had I set the bar too low? Had I ceased to eat of the gumption fruit? Another friend has put his law practice on the back burner to pursue a Ph.D. at Oxford. And another has traveled from Siberia to Patagonia with his fly rod in pursuit of elusive salmon and trout. People my age are scaling Mount Everest, taking up sky-diving. I am rusticating in mountainless Kansas. The walk to the mailbox passes for the great event of my day. Mowing the yard is my idea of a challenge, I who once dreamed of triumphs in the face of danger, of leaping into the crocodile pit with a bellow of delight.

The daughter of a friend called about the same time. She was on her way from her home in Belgium to check out Croatia’s single men. She railed against injustice, spoke Icelandic to her dog (“Fido, Nye!”) and had a plan to solve the problem of the world’s homeless involving the conversion of shipping containers to dwellings. How long has it been since I’ve aspired to change the world? I had just said goodbye to my own two daughters, who were on their way by car to Alaska. Emblems of youth, their lives stretch boundlessly open before them. Everything is possible. The aperture of my own life is closing – more depth of field, but faster speed, less time. At the end of the tunnel I see a stop sign instead of light. As I watched their car – my car, actually, which they’d usurped – slowly pull away down the gravel drive, I felt like one of those geese with its foot nailed to the ground which the French force feed to make foie gras.

I happened to be reading Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky,” while brooding on these themes. It’s about three Americans who flee their demons in the parched hinterlands of North Africa. On their wanderings they meet a character who tells them a story: Three girls from the mountains want more than anything else to drink tea in the Sahara. They dance for ugly men, save their money and dream. At last, they have enough to buy a tea pot and transportation by camel caravan to the desert. There, they set out walking in the sun, seeking the highest dune.

At last, they find a spot from which they can see the entire desert. But before they take their tea, they lie down and fall asleep. Weeks later, they’re discovered in that attitude, their glasses filled with sand. Is that it? Do our grand dreams terminate in glasses filled with sand?

The story struck me as tragic and ironic at first. But maybe not. In a sense, the girls fulfilled their dream. They may have died happily. Surely, they shouldn’t have stayed at home, hoarding their days and saving up for extended care. Isn’t it the pursuit rather than the attainment of the goal that counts?

This evening, the wind in an ancient elm tree makes a sound like luffing sails. With a little stretch, I can imagine a clipper ship anchored in the ravine just beyond the hill ready to set out in a final quest for the Western Isles. Is it too late?

Alas, I can’t summon up the wanderlust. The terrible truth is that I’m happy where I am, in horizontal Kansas. At any rate, there’s no time for brooding. The weeds have run amok. The chickens, the dogs and my daughter’s rabbits – domiciled with us while she chases her destiny in the far North – must all be fed. Responsibilities crowd around me, drowning out the voice of discontent.

Moreover, death squads, fiddlesticks. The out-of-doors teems with blood sucking ticks, virus-bearing mosquitoes, venomous spiders and vipers, rabid possums and ‘coons. My neighbor reports seeing a mountain lion in the field next to mine. Adventure and danger are just beyond the back door. The conquest of the hammock awaits me, Matterhorns of slumber for the Nap Advocate to climb. I’m just as likely to find or lose myself in the hammock as in Patagonia or Nepal.