8 Wednesday, October 7, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon Commentary... Adventures of a professional vagabond By Reecy Pontiff Correspondent Right now I should be playing Annie Oakley in the Rocky Mountains, or a bawdy wench in a Renaissance village 4 but instead of planning a future of the past, the pandemic has presently plunked me down in Sisters. I9m a professional vaga- bond who migrates between Jeep tours in Colorado and working on the Renaissance faire circuit in the eternal project that is my vintage Airstream. COVID has clipped my wings. I was born with wander- lust. At 18 I scored a pho- tojournalism gig at a local paper in the D.C. area, but the next year my itchy feet demanded a move to a min- iscule flat in Edinburgh, Scotland for six months with a friend I9d made on the bur- geoning internet. I flew home on September 26, 2001, an eerie time for international travel. After a stint back in Virginia as a bumbling apprentice mechanic, I enrolled in a B.A. program at a university in Australia 4 some kids go to college on the opposite coast; I opted for the opposite hemisphere. In our rural city, I was one of the weirdest weirdos around. I worked for a skydiving company and edited the uni- versity newspaper. 2.5 years later I left with the same two suitcases I9d brought, plus one degree and a short-lived marriage. Upon returning to the States I moved to L.A., where I couch-surfed and found a job scanning head- shots for an extras casting agency. I upgraded to recep- tionist/catch-all at a tiny non- fiction production company whose biggest claim-to-fame was