“And there was this one character my granddad would always tell me about. This one guy he had developed so clearly. It was just a bedtime story, but he believed in it with such passion, such intensity. Almost made me believe he was real.”

“What was the story?”

Louis sat on the hard wooden bench, waiting for the train to take him to home from this station for the last time. After being fired from his job which he had invested eight years of his life straight out of college, he wasn’t looking forward for the train’s arrival. Louis ended up talking to a man from Illinois on a business trip. Louis had succeeded in strumming up some small talk to pass the time, and they had gotten on the subject of relatives. When the man began to talk about his grandfather, it reminded Louis of his own, and that character.

“It wasn’t really one story, it was this man. He never had a name. He could travel through time, and always seemed to end up right in the middle of big events in history, sometimes even the future. But no one ever wrote about him. The one thing he asked in return for his services was that they never speak of him.”

“His services?”

“He saved people. Plain and simple. Whether it be a single child or a whole civilization, he did everything in his power to ensure their safety. He was incredible. He-“

“I’m sorry, this is my train.” The man got up and shook Louis’ hand and thanked him for the company, then left.



“He was my hero.”

“Your hero? But he wasn’t real.” The waitress said, enthralled in Louis’ story. Two months after the train station, Louis found himself in a diner, about to finish his three hour road trip to his sister’s house for her third drug intervention. He had once again achieved small talk with his waitress who was working to get herself through college, and when he had brought up his granddad’s stories, she was immediately hooked.

“Are you kidding?” He scoffed, “To an eight year old with a father I never saw and a mother who could care less, my granddad’s stories about the traveling man were all I had.” The waitress made a sad face. “This man could go wherever, whenever, and his only mission was to help. He was selfless and did all he could.”

“Well I think he sounds awesome too, sounds like that tv show about the doctor guy, you know what I’m talking about?”

Louis was uninterested in what his story sounded like, he believed in what it was. “Sure, but the great thing about this guy was…”

“Uh-oh, my boss is coming over, I gotta get to these other tables, I’m really sorry, it was nice talking to you!”



“…you never really knew if he was just a story.”

“What do you mean?” The elderly lady sitting next to him asked. Two years after that intervention at his sister’s house, he now sat in the park that his wife of six months would be taking their newborn child, had she not miscarried in the middle of her first trimester two days ago. The woman that now sat next to him asked what he was thinking about to make him so sad. He told her the reason for his grief, but said he was thinking about something else. About a traveling man his granddad used to tell him about. “You think the man was real?”

“I’ve never really made up my mind about it. I asked my granddad once how he knew about this man, and he said that he fought alongside him in World War 2. He said that the man looked far too old to be just a soldier. He had the face of an experienced old soul who had already seen far too much battle. The man looked to be in his late fifties, but talked like a young man. He told my granddad of his travels, of how he was born with the ability to travel through time, but he aged along with the rest of us. According to their general, the mysterious man was killed in battle. My granddad said he never knew if he believed the man. In turn, I never knew if my granddad ever even met such a man, or if it was all just part of the story.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t think about it too much. The worst thing you could do is loose your grip on reality. Stories are meant to be stories, nothing more.” Louis looked at the woman as she spoke. Frustrated, he got up and left.




“I can remember particular story so clearly.” Louis told the man stuck with him. Louis would have said the man was ‘stuck’ with him in the sense that they were both trapped in a malfunctioning elevator. The man would have said ‘stuck’ in the sense that one is forced to listen to someone talk for two hours with literally no way to get out of it.

“Really.” He closed his eyes as he sighed heavily.

“Yeah, ok so in the late 16th-century, Queen Elizabeth established The Roanoke Colony in present-day North Carolina.”

“Wow.”

“That’s not the story, that’s true.”

“Please, continue.”

“Ok, so three years after England’s last shipment of supplies to the colony, all the people just disappear.” The man opened his eyes.

“Is this still true?”

“Yes.” The uninterested man hated that he was mildly interested. “Now they have the nickname ‘The Lost Colony’ because no one ever found out what happened to them. Well the traveling man found himself in the Roanoke Colony in about 1586. You have to know, the man didn’t want to intervene if at all possible. History should carry on as it does. Only drastic measures drew him to change time. He was maybe in his twenties at this time and decided to stay in the colony for a while. There were very little people—about a hundred I think—and he even began to become interested in one of the 17 women on the island.” The man sighed, everything has to have a love story, he thought. “So he stayed there for 4 years, but he realized that the Colonists were in a drought. Turns out 1587 to 1589 had the worst growing seasons in 800 years, and they could not be resupplied because of England’s war with Spain. By the time the English came, the people were on the verge of extinction, with malnourishment widespread, two-thirds of the population dead, and some acts of cannibalism being reported.”

“Your granddad told you this when you were a kid?”

“It’s not like I knew what cannibalism was.”

“Still.”

“Anyway, the English resupplied the island, but the people were too sickly and too scarce to bring back the colony’s initial population. The Roanoke were brought onto ships to be brought back to England, but a massive storm was coming, and the sailors refused to sail. The traveling man knew he had to intervene, but he waited to see the results. The storm came and lasted much longer than expected. The islanders demanded they try and sail through the storm before it killed them all. The sailors told them they were out of their minds, but the colonists stormed the ship and attempted to sail away. With only a few men knowing their way around a ship, it sunk within half an hour, along with all the supplies. The storm passed, and the remaining colonists, along with the man’s love, died. The traveling man, now on the brink of starvation, decided it was time to act. He went back to 1586, and warned the people of the drought and the storm. They were already seeing the effects of the poor growing season, and believed his prophecy of what was to come. Over the next year, the people began searching for another suitable place to call home. They found an island which is today known as Hatteras Island, and the man helped them to transfer their provisions on Roanoke Island to their new home, which produced three times as many crops as Roanoke. In August of 1590, the man and his love traveled to Roanoke Island to meet the English supply ship and inform them of their new location. As they saw the ships approaching, the man looked at his love. She put a hand on his cheek, looked into his eyes, already aging much quicker than their surrounding body. She said, “I do not know how you came here. I do not know who or what you are. I do not even know your name. But for four years, I have not cared. I only know that you will continue to do what is right.” She kissed him, and she knew it was his time to go. When she pulled her lips away from his, he said, “Call me Croatoan.” His love opened her eyes and he was gone. She looked out at the ships, and for some reason, she decided not to meet those ships. My grandees tells me that when the English arrived, there was no one there to meet them. Only the word Croatoan carved onto a tree, and ‘Cro’ carved into another, as if she couldn’t bear to remember him for even that long. When the storm came, and the Islanders saw how they surely would have died, they praised the man they called Croatoan, and hailed him a God.”

The man sitting across Louis in the elevator looked at him for a while. “Your granddad made up all that?”

Louis looked down. “I really don’t know. I asked about that story the most, and each time he repeated it, and the older I got, he would add more details. That makes me think it’s just a story. But something holds me back. Something makes me visualize that man, sitting on the beach with his love. I see him so clearly, and for a moment, I know with all of my heart that he’s real.”

The man had changed his mind about Louis. He saw a confused, inspired, and depressed man who was clinging onto this one sliver of greatness from his childhood bedtime stories. He didn’t know if he was impressed or found the man pathetic. “Why don’t you ask your granddad now?”

“He died when I was thirteen. I never got the chance. I never got all the stories. His last words to me though, about a week before he died, were ‘they never found his body!’. And he gave me this big smile and patted me on the shoulder. It’s just little things like that pull me back.”


“He’ll see you now.” Louis looked up from his lap to the secretary addressing him. He found himself at his third and final job interview in his entire life, and walked through the big wooden doors into the boss’s offices with a sense of desperation. Landing this job meant getting his life back on track. With his wife in the hospital for surgery and his two kids going off to college in a month, he wasn’t in a financially ideal state at the moment. He walked into a very cliché scene. The boss was turned around in his swivel chair, and asked Louis to take a seat. He swiveled around in his chair as Louis sat. He was very striking, with a look that Louis hadn’t really seen before. It wasn’t determination, or even confidence. It was…knowing. It was the certainty of everything he did. Louis could tell just by the way he smiled. It wasn’t intimidating either, it was inspiring. He knew what to do, how to do it, and why. Louis smiled back, and felt a little better.

“Mr. Louis, I want you to tell me a story that makes you…jump off the page, so to speak. I want you to wow me, to awe me. I’ve seen your resumé and I don’t want you to read off it, I want you to just talk to me.” The man sat back, expectantly. He waited for Louis to respond.

“Well, when I was a kid, my granddad used to tell me this story. Not a story, really. He told me about this man. The Great Traveling Man. And he could go wherever, whenever, and his only mission was to help. He was selfless and did all he could.”

“And who was this man?”

Louis thought about how to respond. “I guess that’s the thing. You never really knew.” Louis proceeded to tell the boss about the time the man found himself on the British South American Airways Avro Lancastrian airliner named Star Dust. He had befriended the pilot, Reginald Cook, a year ealier, who had gone on to become his best man at the time traveler’s one and only wedding. When the man discovered the plane crashed due to weather related incidents, he was determined to save the pilot, and traveled back to the day of the crash. Once in the air with the men, however, he realized his mistake. He would alter the destinies of the six passengers and five crew members in the process of saving his one friend. He knew he couldn’t go through with it, but wanted to be there in his friend’s final moments. When the plane started to go down, the pilot told the man to send a Morse code transmission telling his daughters he loves them. With only seconds to send the transmission, the man had no time to send the message. He instead sent ‘STENDEC’ to the Santiago Airport. No one but Reginald’s wife and daughter’s would understand the message. It was something his youngest daughter, Stephanie, had made up at the age of ten. Using the first few letters from her name, her sister’s name; Enya, and their mother’s name; Delilah, and ‘C’ for Cook, her father could quickly send a message home just for his family, and they would know his thoughts were with them. The traveling man looked at his friend one last time, closed his eyes, and opened them on board the SS Wartah. When Louis finished telling his story, the boss stood.

“We’d be honored to have you here.” Louis had a blank look on his face for his moment. He felt as if he was going to throw up. He regained his bearings, and stood up quickly. He shook the man’s hand.

“Thank you so much, you have no idea what this means to me.” The boss walked him to the door and assured him everything would be okay.

“That story must really mean something to you.”

“It does. Well, it did. I think that might be the last time I tell it. I can’t hang on to some fairy tale for inspiration every time I need it.”

“My advice? Don’t let it go. Never let it go. Fiction or not, we all need something to hold on to. Something fantastic and grand that’s always out of our grasp but never discourages us from reaching. Don’t idolize it, don’t rely on it, and don’t try to chase it. Just keep it. Keep it in a corner of your mind, as a subtle reminder that there are always things to strive toward. These may have just been stories from your grandfather. Or maybe there was a man in the war who just lied because you had a gullible granddad. Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a man out there who can travel across time, and is only concerned with helping those in need. It’s up to you, Mr. Louis. But don’t ever dare yourself to stop telling the story. Because that’s what matters. Your still telling the story, you still have hope. In the end, that’s the only certainty in this story of The Traveling Man: that, whether or not he exists, it’s hope that keeps him alive.”

Louis said nothing. The man opened the door and walked out. He slowed his pace as he got an inkling of an idea. He had the faintest whisper of what could be something astronomical and ludicrous. He turned around and the man was standing in the doorway. “I just realized I never got your name.”

The man chuckled. “I was hoping you’d ask, Louis. And that’s what matters.” And he closed the door.