The Wanderer

[Nomad]

This guy is my hero. He lived in every sense of the word. He lost his life but I doubt he had many regrets. *Tips my hat to the wanderer.* Go in peace.



Loss of a great wanderer

Tamara Jones, Washington Post

July 16, 2005 VIGIL0716













LONDON -- Minh Matsushita was a man forever in motion, an adventure always in progress. His passport was a pocket-size accordion of pages bearing faded stamps and mysterious visas.

Even as his boyhood friends from the Bronx borough of New York City settled down, got married, pursued careers and started families, the 37-year-old Matsushita just kept reinventing himself. He might be a beach bum in San Diego one year and a tech geek in Manhattan the next. You could find him snorkeling in Australia, or hiking across minefields in Cambodia.

Dude, what are you doing? friends remember asking time and again, when he would alight between trips on someone's back porch to drink through the night and tell his tales. Matsushita always smiled, shrugged and gave the cavalier answer his buddies came to think of as his personal motto:

"No worries, man."

For the past 18 months, Matsushita had been living out the dream of the perpetual wanderer, exploring remote corners of the world.

He worked as a tour guide for an Australia-based agency called Intrepid Travel. Leading tourists on treks through the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia, he also found for the first time in his life something more than adventure.

He fell in love.

Rosie Cowan was a young Englishwoman and fellow tour guide with the same restless spirit and derring-do that Matsushita embraced, someone whose idea of a good time might include locking herself into a diving cage to swim among great white sharks off South Africa.

When their respective contracts with Intrepid came to a close, Cowan and Matsushita decided to stop living out of rucksacks, for a while at least. She moved to London. A month ago, he followed. They found an apartment and reentered the real world. Matsushita quickly landed a job as a recruiter for an Internet company.

An ordinary morning

And then on a bright summer morning a week ago, he dressed in a blue pinstripe suit and set off on what should have been the most ordinary journey of an extraordinary life: taking the subway to work.

No one has seen him since.

Thursday, the London coroner officially declared Matsushita dead, the lone American among 54 people presumed killed when a series of four bombs exploded July 7 across the capital.

A week after the attack, fewer than half of the victims have been identified, a delay police blame on the painstaking task of collecting and processing evidence from the wreckage of buried subway cars, where they have found no bodies intact. There are only pieces that must be photographed, then placed in body bags, then photographed again before being brought to the surface for closer examination and identification.

Family, friends wait

Waiting breeds reckless hope and useless anger. It convinces the friends of a missing hairdresser and the roommates of a lost Polish accountant that their loved ones survived and are wandering the streets of London somewhere with amnesia. It pushes the anguished mother of a young Nigerian oil executive to rail against terrorists near the bus stop where her son likely died. For a while, it made David Golovner think, wildly, that he could pack a miner's hat in his suitcase and join the search for his best friend, Minh Matsushita, beneath the streets of London.

For the past six days, Golovner, 36, hunkered with Matsushita's parents and two siblings in a borrowed London house, waiting not for a miracle, not even some undefined sense of closure. They waited instead for a death certificate. They wait now for a body to take back home.

They resigned themselves to Matsushita's loss soon after arriving in London on Saturday morning. Why else would police come to swab the mouth of his mother, Muoi, for DNA, to collect his hairbrush, his toothbrush, his razors, any ordinary thing they could find in his apartment that might yield Matsushita's fingerprints or genetic material? Why else rouse his dentist back in New York on a Sunday night to send records?