The narrator describes herself, her life, and her philosophy of travel through a series of vignettes. She characterizes her parents as “not fully the settling kind” and describes her childhood as one in which her parents oriented each year around their vacations (4). The narrator, by contrast, considers herself more energized by movement than her parents were and does not look to settle down in a particular place: “[M]y roots have always been shallow” (7). Her first experience of travel was walking to the Oder, a river in Poland that ran close to her childhood home. The river’s own movement informs the narrator’s understanding of her impulse to travel, as she believes that movement is better than rest.

The narrator moves between temporary jobs without the intention of starting a career. She has worked in retail, as a waitress, as a maid, and in various other jobs, holding each long enough to earn the money to move somewhere new. Before beginning this life of travel, the narrator studied psychology in a scientific environment she found sterile and uneventful. She decided not to pursue a career in psychology because she found it difficult not to relate her own life to those of her patients and because she resented the practice of personality profiling.