Freeway Pilgrims and Other Sojourners: On Travel

A friend said recently that travel wasn’t fun anymore.

While this may not be ground-breaking, and while she specified air travel in particular, the idea that travel is supposed to be fun is perhaps more significant. People used to go on pilgrimages and take long sea journeys as part of a sacred duty or their life’s work. They gathered their households onto their backs and set out on foot for better food, more land, better opportunities, better lives. It wasn’t for fun. Beautiful island locations why not try these out and understand where you can do a photoshoot. It was necessity, curiosity, and that stupid Manifest Destiny, but not just “fun,” as we understand it now. It’s only now that we have so much where we are that going elsewhere to look at something else is supposed to be part of the lark. And yet, fun is the expectation.

The only problem with the idea of “travel as fun” is that when people are involved, fun can be difficult.

Oh, don’t think that’s just the misanthropic/anthropophobic curmudgeon point of view. People in their normal habitats – eating, shopping, going to school – are fine. People in the act of traveling outside of their normal haunts – in and around airports, or on crowded interstate freeways, in train or at BART stations – those people are usually not fine. Impatient, rushing, pushy, increasingly belligerent people; loud, drunk, boundary-ignorant and vexing, these people’s public faces are something we sometimes wish they left at home. Is it because the toys of our culture allow us solo entertainment that we’ve lost the ability to get along in groups? Courtesy is not a lost art – truly, it’s not. In a thousand different ways, people show kindness to strangers, even in airports. It only seems like the vast majority prefers to act as boorish in public as possible.

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

Travel does not always bring out our shiniest side. Even with the familiarity of the routines of security theater and suitcase maneuvering, we still have moments of bewilderment, as the unexpected takes over. Even things one expects one can count on, like the temperaments of friends, can come into question. People who are one way at home can, in a hotel room, emerge as beings wholly other than previously experienced. Friends who traveled with their grown children this past year have indicated that it wasn’t quite what they expected, and after travels with her adolescent son, another friend said the words “never again” quite firmly (and so did we). Couples we’ve known, traveling together, have decided to end their journeys solo after discovering that hardship and inconvenience does not bring out the best in every partner.

“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

Travel – this curious, ephemeral thing – is a gift. We are weaned on the idea of life being a journey, a locomotion from Birth to Death, with sightseeing along the way. That’s both part of this expansionist American culture – we’ve been chasing that Manifest Destiny forever, despite officially calling it a distasteful ideology – and part of a car-culture road-tripping West Coast heritage. Roads even wind through our language — someone “takes a turn for the worse.” We have “a rough road ahead,” or a “rocky road” might be dessert or a hard luck story. Robert Frost’s “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – ” – Virginia Slims “You’ve come a long way, Baby” – we’ve been, as a people, on the move for a long, long time, before chuck wagons and wagon trains. Perhaps it is a part of an American’s Puritan roots; if you believe that you are “but a pilgrim and a stranger;” just someone passing through, that there is a degree of impermanence to the place where you are, and the state of your existence, this changes the way you think. Things matter both more and less that you’d perhaps previously believed, if we’re all on our way elsewhere.

In grasping for that permanent impermanence, we are both energized and freed. If we are all on a journey, then we can take a deep breath when someone jumps a line and gets on the plane sooner than us. The progress isn’t where we are in line on the freeway, but the destination, yes? Getting there one car-length ahead will only anger those people we cut in front of, possibly damage our own bumpers, and cause further delays. And is it really our right to make things less fun for anyone else? Probably, no.

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

If we are merely traveling, and our destination is our life’s purpose, then making sure that we all get there in one piece should be an objective. With that worldview, picking up someone else’s luggage and helping them get it into the overhead compartment shouldn’t be out of the question. It is freeing to realize that, rather than each choice locking us into a permanent road, the choices we make as we travel are merely crossroads – and U-turns are still available, as is backtracking. If we miss a plane or a turn, we can try again. Travel does not exist in the realm of “only” and black and white.

While traveling, we may get sick from the water, we may not understand the language, but as long as we’re not home, we still have a chance to see things we haven’t seen. We should never fear being lost, because the journey back will always give us new insights, as we travel. Certainly, we’ve come away with better stories – remember that time we saw the spotted piglets on that one dirt road when we were lost that one time? – that we would have had staying on the paved roads of familiarity.

As every Hobbit knows, not all who wander are lost.

…A reflection on travel as fun, as we near the end of this summer of Here and There and home again, a summer of knowing where we’re going, of celebrating where we’ve been; of acknowledging that this is not where we plan to stop for long; an exploration of the journey as equally imperative as the destination.

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in…” – D. H. Lawrence