Wanderlust. The urge to pack up all of one’s possessions and hit the road is something that serves as a tonic against the banality of our day to day lives where we sit in traffic on a scorching freeway only to punch a clock and shut our brains off for eight hours. Oh, how we want to put the accumulated detritus of our daily lives into some dusty storage unit and hit the road in whatever questionable deathtrap comes up first during an insomnia fueled Craigslist search. There are a few people, mostly young and restless or maybe old and crazy, who actually lack the impulse control that keeps most of us in our apartments. They sacrifice normalcy in search of a new way of life. They join a new tribe and speak a new language. They trade security and safety for roadside repairs in the snow and pre-dawn surf sessions.

James Barkman is one of these new wanderers. With his stringy blonde hair tucked under a beanie and hands covered in grease and oil from his rusty VW bus or the dirt bike he tows behind it, he wanders around the country looking for new adventures and documents them with his camera. He’s young, young enough to cast off the roots that we start to grow in our mid to late twenties while they’re still easy to break but he’s got a kind of wisdom, beyond his years, that stoney surfer wisdom that we’d casually associate with Patrick Swayze’s character from (the one true) Point Break. The thing that separates young James from most of our fantasies is that he has managed, through talent and luck and force of will, to turn his wanderlust into a profession. He lugs around his faithful camera and steals moments that most of us will never have, only to turn around and share them. He’s like a hesher Robin Hood and we’re thankful for that.

Now, without further delay, we’d like to share James’ story as captured by our friends at Praemio.