‘The Men That Don’t Fit In’ by Robert Service

Longtime reader Anders left us a cultural reference in a recent comment.

the post about your sense of self reminds me of a great short story by Robert Service about those men that traveled to Yukon/Alaska (I lived there for 15 years). “The Men Who Don’t Fit In”. Also describes many I’ve met in Latam. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I wear that badge with pride!

Below is the full poem, “The Men Who Don’t Fit In” by Robert Service.

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.

They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.

I’ve read it dozens of times since. It is me. Or, it was me. Not anymore. I’m trying to sit still.

I say I’m from St. Louis, but after the 1980s I never lived there for five continuous years. I did a year each in Arizona, California and Colorado. Then Peru and Colombia. Even in South America, I couldn’t stay put, moving between three cities. In that time I saw friends and family from back home acquire big assets full of stuff, while most of what I had would fit in a suitcase.

And I just did it again. Up and left St. Louis for Philadelphia.

I tried all kinds of businesses and side hustles, never taking my main thing seriously until I no longer had the first mover’s advantage. Even now, I dream of doing something else. I don’t mind the early stages of a new idea, but I get bored when the work gets into the hard weeds. I’ve left a lot of things half done. To pursue the new.

I’m 45 years old. My body isn’t what it used to be. I’m afraid to play pickup basketball. I’m still recovering from a soccer game I played with 13-year-olds eight days ago. I’m coming to grips with the fact that I may not be able to fight my way out of any jam. That scares me.

I don’t fit in among my oldest friends and family. Once you’ve lived in so many places, and read so many books, it’s hard to relate to people who have spent their whole lives in one area code. I’m always an outcast. I differ with Anders on one point, where he said he wouldn’t want it any other way. I would love to be normal. I would love to fit in.

Many comments on that post (Dazza, Rafa, Sean, TexMex) recommended I take flight again. Sitting still in Gringolandia doesn’t suit me.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe five years in my home country have me down.

There is a place when I did fit in … with the expat gang of goofs. Because nobody has much in common, everybody fits in.

And when you walk away from the expat reunion, into the Latam wild, you’re the foreigner. You’re not expected to fit in. You’re expected to be strange. Something about that was comforting.

Robert Service was one of us. According to Wikipedia, at 21 he moved from his native Scotland “to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy. He drifted around western North America, ‘wandering from California to British Columbia,’ taking and quitting a series of jobs: ‘Starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver.’ This sometimes required him to leech off his parents’ Scottish neighbors and friends who had previously emigrated to Canada.”

Service tried his hand at writing and made money selling poetry. His books shared the adventures of the Yukon, like Jack London for adults. He then worked as a a journalist and found his way into Paris when it was a literary haven. He served as a British ambulance driver in World War I. He spent time in the Soviet Union, back to Canana and California, before dying in France.

Kindred spirit indeed.