Tripping
Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about travel. It is the same fleshly desire with which a repentant smoker thinks about smoking, and for the same reason: I have not gotten to do a lot of it. There is a profound desire to hop in the car and amble a bit, or better yet board a plane and feel that roar of a couple thousand pounds of American (or Canadian-made, for some commuter flights) thrust behind you and watch topography melt into the ground. With no place to go and get lost in, though, it is moot.
More keenly, like a memory of an old flame or a second, more drawn-out cigarette, is the longing for the emotional exchange of placing yourself in someone else's home town and imagining it as they know it. You will never get it exactly right, of course; but there is a quiet contentment in knowing that this is someone else's home and everyday, and they are enjoying it as intimately as you do your home and your everyday. We are reminded of this by the subtle inconvenience — a negative-sounding word for inefficient pleasure, because it is new — in travel which was someone else's preference; a slower car, a longer road, a noisier street, a rainier sky, a more potent cocktail, a heavier meal. If you are lucky, you capture yourself enjoying the inconvenience in some way, not necessarily the local's, and your world grows by a few miles. Even unenjoyment makes you a better chap (see all of Twain's Innocents Abroad). Travel is never, at first, about you.
Good travel, anyway. The democratization of travel has come at the cost of its commodification, as something whose unique difficulties we can purchase away. In a sense, travel has gotten only more expensive because of it — accessibility came in the form of taste, not in price, which now includes all the surcharges and upcharges tourist hordes bring with them. But we seem to love it all the same, this always agreeable me-centered travel: it is a sentiment preached on social media this year in particular. In many ads for weekend trips and adventures, administrations of pleasure are as swift as it would be with the help of a trained anesthesiologist; you arrive, you forget. Google, sensing my mounting travelust, has sent me a lot of these isolation-based adventure ads: opportunities to escape, to recharge and to relax in idyllic locations where I would not have to interact with anyone, ever. For me, these miss the mark: they have confused the desire to escape 2020 with the desire to nap. The locations are in fact second fiddle to the act of relaxation, a stage for your own playtime. Personally, napping makes a better nepenthe, anyway.
The rise of the Prozac getaways is not a relic of the COVID era, though gone are the pretenses of mingling with local culture that used to accompany them. Americans have been travelling for years to places that shifted their internal organs to accommodate our preference, a bit like snakes preparing for a large meal, and as a result we not only emerge poorer in pocket from these vacations but poorer, I wager, in spirit. Cruise ships, something the late David Foster Wallace lampooned with lacerating wit, are particularly guilty of this fraud, the illusion of travel; but no drowning hotel chain is going to pitch you on the haunting cold of their city or the thought-provoking contrast between you, the visitor and the permanently installed homeless.
And it is our loss. Travels where you are not inconvenienced at least once are not travelling; they are tripping, journey-based drugs. Broadly speaking, the ideal voyage makes you want to go home. If your young child turns to you upon arrival, as they often do in these vacation commercials, and says "I wish we could stay here forever," you have failed.
If we changed our preference for travel, where we went and how we went, we might reverse this dismal trend. Happily, there are many such organizations conspiring to keep travel interesting (I belong to one such one, the Bay Area Travel Writers) and fight the urge to reduce it merely to an expensive form of entertainment. But like many things — the American small town, actual cuisines, the arts — it is at the mercy of the consumer, an unhappy democracy of which we are all part. Perhaps there was something to be said for an older aristocracy, not of class, but of taste...
