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Sitting in the salon chair in Raleigh, I can see it: the children with short, wooden rakes, barefoot and bent over the hard-packed fields where salt is harvested from the sea. It is hot, even at dawn in the dry season of Vietnam, and the children, as young as 7 and 8, move through the humid shimmer. Each rakes small piles of salt — muối — into two- to three-foot-tall pyramids of gleaming white crystal. As the sun rises over the South China Sea, along the shore of Phan Rang, Vietnam, the gridded, diked salt fields sparkle like diamonds. In my imagination, at least.

Behind me, a voice nearly catches in the speaker’s throat. “Oh, it was the most beautiful thing,” Mai McLean recalls. “The work, maybe that wasn’t so beautiful. But I miss it. I miss it all.”

Sam & Bill’s Hair Design has been a Raleigh mainstay since it opened as Sam & Bill’s Place in 1969. photograph by Joshua Steadman

Despite the story’s exotic location, I’m in a very familiar place: Sam & Bill’s Hair Design, a landmark local business squeezed between downtown and North Carolina State University. Mai has been cutting my hair for better than two decades, which means I’m one of her more recent customers. She’s been a hairstylist here since 1983. She now cuts the hair of the grandchildren of her clients. She is a Raleigh institution, an avid rambler like myself, and since it only takes six minutes of my allotted half-hour to cut what’s left of my hair, that leaves plenty of time for us to trade traveling stories.

And Mai has some stories. I’m not known for a taciturn personality myself, so we crank it up in her room. We talk about where I’m traveling next and where she’s just been — most recently North Dakota. She only has one state left — Hawaii — and she will have traveled to all 50. In our chats, we ramble the state, the country, the world.

And thanks to Mai, I’ve learned that you don’t have to go far to see the ends of the earth. I’ve seen so many places I’ve never visited through her eyes, watching her face in the salon mirror as she recalls her childhood in Vietnam, the difficult move to the United States, and how destiny has led her to pack four or five lives into her 76 years.

• • •

Mai was born in 1949 — she is unsure of the day and month, as those details weren’t kept in her tiny village of Phan Rang. The middle child of seven, she and her siblings worked fields of peanuts, rice, corn, and salt nearly as soon as they could walk. “No ballet dancing, no summer camp,” she says.

She was 17 years old when she left South Vietnam with a member of the U.S. Air Force. Plucked out of the only world she knew and plopped down on the West Coast, at first. It was 1967, during some of the heaviest fighting of the conflict. It was a hard time. People would look at her, she says, and see their father, or son, or husband, lost in the war. “I was just a girl from a fishing village,” she says. “Innocent. But I understand.”

McLean’s girlhood interest in hair eventually led to her career as a stylist. Her other passions — including travel, reading, farming, and tennis — spark wide-ranging conversations with her clients at Sam & Bill’s. photograph by Joshua Steadman

To Syracuse, New York, and then to Wilmington, North Carolina. Two children, a divorce, and a new start: At a hair salon in Raleigh, where her client list now includes the locally rich and famous, the well-connected, even a few lesser mortals like me. In 1981, she married Ed McLean, assistant coach for NC State’s men’s basketball team, two years before the Wolfpack won the NCAA national championship.

This last little snippet she dropped on me only during my last visit. After 20 years, I didn’t know she’d rubbed shoulders with the likes of Jim Valvano and Pat Riley. She traveled with the Wolfpack for more than a decade.

I was floored. During all those years of swapping travel tales, she’d never mentioned her brush with local celebrity. When I asked her why, she looked out a window for a moment, uncharacteristically quiet.

“When I left Vietnam, I felt like I’d left everything I’d ever known,” she said. “Everyone I’d ever known. I came to the U.S., and all I had was me. All I knew was me. And I think I’m a good enough person to know just for me.”

I couldn’t agree more. She’s now a few thousand miles away from the salt fields of her youth and the small farm of her family. But she still rises before dawn as many as three days a week to glean local fields for the Society of St. Andrew, and she delivers blueberries, sweet potatoes, and corn to the Salvation Army. She has a small farm in Harnett County. For years, she was a primary volunteer at the gardens of the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle.

She’s stayed well-rooted, no matter how far she’s traveled.

In a 30-minute appointment, Mai has time to pay careful attention to nearly every hair that still sprouts from my noggin, and this appointment is no different. She probably could have stopped 10 minutes ago, or even 15. But one of us was in the middle of a story. One of us was on the road. And neither of us wanted to leave.

For our Ramblin’ Man, a trip to Sam & Bill’s Hair Design is as much for the conversation as it is for the cut. photograph by Joshua Steadman

That’s a funny thing about loving to ramble: You’re drawn to others who like to stay on the move.

“I have only one set of eyes that God gave me,” she told me recently. “And I want to see all that He has done while I can. There will be a day that I can’t see so well, but until then, I’m going to go and see everything I can.”

And I’m going to hear about it. Next Wednesday at 3 p.m., in fact. I could use a little trim. And I could always use another Mai story, from one corner of the world or another.