Written by Nick Michael
In Dec. 1988, Philip Holsinger mounted a bike and began pedaling the 400-mile trek from Washington, D.C., to Portsmouth, Ohio.
A few days prior, Holsinger had cashed his airline ticket home, mailed his Christmas presents to his family in Portsmouth and pocketed the remainder for food on the road across Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, one of the snowiest inhabited regions in the continental U.S. Determined to depend on the hospitality of strangers for lodging, Holsinger carried a pack containing only a journal, a Bible, emergency money and an extra sweater. He stayed in a hotel only one night.
His hosts were bewildered but inspired by the icy vagrant.
“Every single day on that trip at least one person — I have it recorded in my journal — at least one person, but some days many people, would say to me, ‘I wish once in my life, just once, I would have done something like this. I would have just gotten on a bicycle and just ridden,'” Holsinger said.
Thus quips the nomad’s creed: Just ride.
Holsinger’s resume requires an atlas for digestion. He has served as a literature teacher in Maine, an AP photojournalist in Portsmouth, an editor-in-chief for Searcy’s Daily Citizen and an analyst for a faith-based, Washington-brass, three-fork breakfast club called the Family. In the past year, he has collected visas from 11 countries on four continents. His jaw is perpetually grizzled and his journal within reach. Holsinger, for better or worse, is a professional wanderer.
“If I have to give you some simple answers, I’m living nomadically because why wouldn’t I?” Holsinger said. “Why would I own a house or pay rent when I’m not there? The way that I’ve been traveling just hasn’t made any sense economically. I mean I literally go from plane to plane.”
Holsinger brims with big ideas and scrapped plans. In late 1999, he turned down an invitation to celebrate the millennium in Petra, where he meant to make a layover en route to Mongolia. A Saharan shepherding tribe known as the Taureg have invited Holsinger for an extended visit.
In 2004 an Australian hired Holsinger to develop a photojournalism department for a Burmese newspaper under an enemy-of-the-press militarist regime. On a whim, Holsinger could not bring himself to board the plane to Rangoon, which suffered the infamous tsunami the day Holsinger would have landed.
His rootlessness has proved confusing on multiple occasions. Once after a small-town church service in Harrison, Ark., an elderly woman slipped Holsinger a $20 bill after he self-deprecatingly introduced himself as “homeless.”
“She walked around kind of confused why the nice homeless man wouldn’t even take her money,” Holsinger said. “I usually clarify and say homeless but not destitute.”
Still, sometimes it is the wanderers who pay a price.
“I’ve been a runner my whole life. It’s been a part of my spiritual problem: uncommitted,” Holsinger said. “I’m always searching and looking, and it’s very difficult for me to be really intimate and committed to people.”
And neither is Holsinger committed to newspapers. Despite garnering a small trophy case of AP awards, Holsinger found his editor’s desk unfulfilling at The Daily Citizen and boarded a plane.
“I wanted to go somewhere where no one would find me.” Holsinger said. “So I literally walked away from my job and said I would not publish or do anything again and went to Haiti.”
While Holsinger befriended a Haitian family of upper-crust Communist socialites, his relationship with his family back home suffered. His wife had already left him in 2003, but the sporadic visits with his now 13-year-old daughter became impossible. During his stay in Haiti, Holsinger began realigning priorities between photo shoots. He migrated home and began rebuffing his relationship with his daughter.
“I think my nature is truly changing,” Holsinger said. “And what’s funny is what has been a negative thing, and maybe negatively driven, I think God’s used that now to make a gift out of it.”
Holsinger, who was baptized in the early morning after a deadline at the Citizen, believes his intersection with Searcy and Harding University has been pivotal. Bruce McClarty, Mike Wood and Jim Carr are only a few of the Harding faculty whom Holsinger cites as influences.
“If it wasn’t Searcy, it was going to be somewhere else. I’m not this believer that there was some sort of fate in Searcy and in Harding. But this was the place,” Holsinger said. “And I believe God orchestrated to get me here and let the bottom drop out and it stuck.”
Holsinger’s next project involves him and his daughter covering the slums of Portsmouth as a father-daughter photojournalist team.
“One of the things I’m desiring to do this spring is, I’ve gone out looking: Haiti, Nicaragua, places,” Holsinger said. “I want to kind of look in my own backyard.”
Still, Holsinger defends his lifestyle as inescapable.
“That people think I’m a destitute homeless guy is really a compliment because I really think like everything about my life in some ways embodies the Scripture, ‘I will use the weak things of the world to confound the wise,'” Holsinger said. “I mean I don’t have a degree from Harvard or you know Missouri. I mean, I’m not a master photographer. I’m not that good a writer. Like I’m really, really talented at wandering.”
