On travel

We are home from our peregrinations north and east.
Home from the land of ice and snow, with its backdrop of whites, browns, greys,
against which the colors of Christmas stand out,
from hours at the table,
hours in our seats,
hours in conversation;

back to browns, greens, yellows, blues
moderate temperatures,
life according to the watch,
telephone calls,
bills and responses awaited.

I read a review of a book in the New York Times Review of Books which my sister was generous enough to pass on (I cleared her life of some color. The issues I finished were used to stuff boots, since no one at my next destination was interested in reading them) about a book by Tony Hiss called “In Motion: The Experience of Travel” reviewed by the pleasantly named William Dalrymple. I wouldn’t mind being a Dalrymple. I would drink more tea.
(Mr. Dalrymple is the reviewer of books about Eastern Spirituality. I haven’t read enough of his reviews, but could he be the male version of Elizabeth Gilbert?)
This book about travel sounds interesting on the surface, but apparently has enough “woolly” definitions to frustrate Mr. Dalrymple, despite his years of research. (Deep Travel is “a kind of sensory exhilaration … [that] awakens … a latent, childlike sense of wonder at the world around us.”)


The review touched a nerve, as I read it on our own travels of 3500+ miles. My family and I do not travel for the pleasures of being on the road, but to reach a destination. I know the metaphor is “enjoy the journey” but sometimes the enjoyment comes in sticking your head in the sand, or in my case in a book, for the hours it takes to get to where you want to be. (A spiritual analogy?: sometimes you have to keep plugging away at prayer, one prayer in front of the other without spiritual consolation…)

It is necessary to have an out of body experience of sorts when you are trapped in a moving vehicle for 12 or so hours for several days. The children have movies. I read (more about the very good books I read on this trip later.) And I do emerge every once in awhile from my wonderland to read a story or two or play the alphabet game or talk a little to my husband, the daydreaming driver.


The night before we reached home we decided to add a couple hours to the trip to stay with my parents instead of staying in a strange hotel for a variety of reasons: to avoid the stress, expense and dishonesty of staying in a hotel (A room for two adults, six kids, and a dog?) and to enjoy a couple home-cooked meals (bean soup, farm fresh eggs, good coffee). Why not extend the time in the car for such pleasantries at the destination?

But I did wonder what vistas might we have missed along the Shenandoah Skyline Drive (even though it’s a route we’ve traveled before)? Did we miss some regional cuisine by bypassing eastern Tennessee? Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t try to enjoy the journey more.


So I latched on to this excerpt from Dalrymple’s review: “Hiss quotes Pico Iyer’s observation that travel allows us “to tap parts” of the self that are “generally obscured by chatter and routine,” and also to realize how subjective our certainties can be. “The first lesson we learn on the road,” Iyer has written, “is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.”

Sometimes we need to be shaken out of our routines in order to heighten perception, curiosity, wonder. But I’d argue that sometimes you need to return to a place of comfort to experience contentment and peace, to nourish good will.
On the other hand, sometimes the mindlessness of a long journey is the kind of hypnotic condition necessary for contemplation. While travel by car has little in common with pedestrian travel, maybe this wondering mindlessness, or daydreaming, is what Dalrymple is getting at when he begins his essay:

“The conviction that traveling in general, and walking in particular, can bring inspiration and even enlightenment is a very ancient one, and it exists in many cultures across the globe. As the old adage, taken up by the wandering scholars of medieval Europe, had it, “Solvitur ambulando” (“It is solved by walking”). In the sixth century B.C., the Indian saint Mahavira is said to have received enlightenment while walking, and the idea is still current. I recently met an itinerant Jain nun who told me: “This wandering life, with no material possessions, unlocks our souls. There is a wonderful sense of lightness, living each day as it comes.” For her, journey and destination became one, thought and action became one.”

So I’m not sure thought and action are one while traveling by car, but the itinerant vacationer, living out of a suitcase, certainly experiences that lightness. Being on vacation, with no schedule, doing what your host or hostess tells you (Eat now, have some tea, walk in the woods), does in some way “unlock the soul.”

“The exhilaration of the open road and the feeling of connectedness to the natural world that it can produce, is, after all, a common human experience. Simply expressed, it has produced some of mankind’s greatest writing. The Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier explores this territory in his youthful masterpiece, “The Way of the World,” where he conveys as well as anyone the raw intoxication of being on the road. “Deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper,” Bouvier writes, makes you “more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.” Thus traveling “outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you — or unmaking you.”

Said exhilaration of the open road is why I don’t usually mind taking my turn at the wheel. While I sympathize with the nostalgia behind the loss of slow travel, like the attitude expressed in “Cars” (one of the several animated specials I heard on the laptop behind my head), there’s also something enlarging about the scope and vistas of interstate travels. The windshield is a frame.