I am a travel addict – one who has yet to enter his twelve-step program. I don’t want to quit. For sheer excitement, as well as the rejuvenation of numbed and jaded senses, nothing I’ve discovered compares to dropping from the sky into a place I’ve never been before, on the far side of the world.
And yet, after 30 trips abroad, I am well-acquainted with both the highs and the lows of international travel in the modern era – with the promise and the price.
For those who dream of seeing foreign lands, these are the best and the worst of times. A few weeks, the span of a modern vacation, is now sufficient to visit six of the seven continents (and with more than 56,000 visitors1 in its pre-pandemic summer season of 2018-19, perhaps it is time to add Antarctica to that list). We travel at speeds our ancestors scarcely dreamed of. We can depart from Iowa for Iceland or India tomorrow and arrive the next day, or at worst the day after.
Frozen canal in St. Petersburg, Russia, sometime after midnight.
Yet the price we pay for all this speed is, oddly, time. We have precious little of it anymore to reflect upon the people we have met or the things that we have seen on our warp-speed journeys, let alone the changes that have taken place within ourselves. When we speak of “jet lag,” this is surely part of what we mean, along with the derangement of our daily routine and nightly rest: this swift, brutal parting from experience. Fatigue, bewilderment, melancholy: these are among the legacies of the jumbo jet, that improbable, beautiful invention that has shrunk our globe.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the jet culture and the hippy psychedelic drug culture emerged at roughly the same historical moment, half a century ago. Each led over the brink to sensory overload – to experience and thought detached from order, from chronology, from sense. The likening of a psychedelic drug experience to a “trip” endures, 50 years after Donovan sang of a jetliner flown by Captain High. That same year, 1966, The Byrds recorded “Eight Miles High” – an apparent simultaneous reference to both new forms of flight.
II
My own life in 1966 was tethered firmly to the earth (though I sometimes dreamed at night of flying about my bedroom, while flapping my arms like wings). My childhood was lived in Willa Cather country, on flat Midwestern land under an endless sky. My father was an engineer whose career path led us from one level state to another: from Oklahoma to Ohio and finally to Michigan, where the only things approaching hills were those long, strange piles of rubble the receding glaciers had left behind at the point of their farthest advance, like petrified waves, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Yet the larger world called. In Ann Arbor, on summer nights, I could hear through my open bedroom window the hum of traffic on the interstate loop a mile away.
To me, it was the singing of Sirens. The people in those cars and trucks and buses were going places. I imagined the day I would get behind the wheel myself and drive away, to wherever I wanted to go. California, Canada, Alaska, Mexico.
I was desperate to see.
In hindsight, I was very lucky in my family – in its twin blessings of stability and love in turbulent times, and our relative prosperity. But we didn’t travel very much. My father was a workaholic who seldom took all his paid vacation days, and my mother, who hated traveling, did not complain. Vacations, when they did come, consisted of obligatory visits to aging grandparents living in other states. The famous national parks, the great American cities, even the ocean beaches were by me unseen, at least until I was well into my teens. If I ever saw a mountain or an ocean in real life before my 16th birthday, I don’t remember them.
I did, however, occasionally see the Great Lakes, which only whetted my appetite for what I regarded then as the real thing – the bona fide and salty sea. Some friends from my Michigan years had a family cabin on the Georgian Bay off Lake Huron in Ontario, to which I journeyed with them a couple of times; it was my earliest and, for many more years, only experience of international travel.
Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia. Photo by Gene Dalton.
There was nothing life-changing about those trips, though they were fun. The border crossings were uneventful (you didn’t even need a passport in those innocent days) and the plumb-straight highways, the unfurled sky, the stands of evergreen trees looked pretty much like home – which wasn’t, after all, so very far away. Wasaga Beach isn’t even impressively north compared to Michigan; it is about on a level with Saginaw. We think of Canada as lying above the United States, but things are not so clear cut around the Great Lakes, where the borders pogo up and down. The denizens of Wasaga Beach spoke an English with little perceptible difference from my own. The sand that we walked on for miles was deep and cool on my bare feet, and I marveled at the quantity of it – the only other sand I had seen in my life to that point was in a backyard box. And the Canadian Kool cigarettes I was too young to be smoking anyway tasted different from the ones I bought surreptitiously out of the cigarette machines back home, with more menthol, but less of a kick.
But as far as culture shock went, that was about it. Had we gone to French-speaking Quebec instead, my first experience of foreign travel would have been a far different one. As it was, I experienced little on those trips of the now-familiar vertigo of travel – of that sense of losing my bearings, of failing to comprehend. (Though there was no doubt plenty I didn’t comprehend).
III
Stranger in some ways was the one true family vacation we did take, the summer after I turned 14. One August day in 1972 we piled our hard-shelled suitcases into our white Ford Fairlane station wagon and set out for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where we boarded a big ship that took us across most of Lake Superior – a journey of several hours – to Isle Royale National Park, near Thunder Bay in Canada. I stood at the stern, watching the propeller blades churn up deep, dark water and wondering what I was in for.
Isle Royale was, and is, a national park whose only year-round denizens are its wildlife, which includes a moose herd and the wolves that prey upon it, or used to prey upon it, culling out the sick and the old. The wolf population, due to severe inbreeding, was said to be down to one wolf recently. The moose have carried the day. This is not good for the moose herd or the island, and there is talk of reintroducing mainland wolves to get the moose numbers down.
When I was there, however, there were still wolves aplenty, and a healthy moose herd, too. For one whole, glorious week I hiked trails spongy with pine needles and tooled around the calm harbor alone in a little motorboat – an indulgence that tells me, in retrospect, how willing my parents were to bend the rules and make this unique vacation memorable for all of us, as it certainly was for me. I remember I sprained my ankle while climbing over some rocks on the shore, and took off my shoe and sock and thrust the injured appendage into the frigid water of Lake Superior for several minutes. When I withdrew my foot it was numb, but the swelling was gone, and it didn’t bother me again. For that matter, it never has since.
On another occasion I was walking alone no more than half a mile from our comfortable lodge when I rounded a turn and found myself face to face with a moose. He was taller than me and must have outweighed me by about a thousand pounds. For a moment we stared at one another, me and the moose – and then he turned and ambled off the trail and into the woods, at a pace so void of urgency it was almost insulting.
The Grotto in France, where Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary.
He was, that moose, by far the most exotic thing that I had ever seen.
One other childhood trip stands out, because of the unusual (for me) mode of transportation: a train! I was very young, and we were journeying from the Midwestern flatlands to Massachusetts to see my paternal grandparents. We must have crossed the Allegheny Mountains on that trip, but I don’t remember seeing them. Perhaps it happened at night.
My mother always recalled that journey as a tribulation. I recall mainly the great size of the trains, compared to me, and the strong odor of the diesel engines, which I loved. (In those halcyon days I also loved the smell of gasoline.) My sharpest memory is of standing on the edge of a platform in an underground train station, watching the headlamp of an approaching train grow larger and larger in the tunnel, until suddenly the train burst into the station at breakneck speed, creating a sudden vortex of sound and movement that threatened to suck me right in. I felt powerless beside it. I truly believed that I was in great danger at that moment, although the fact that no adult swooped in to yank me away to a safer distance is doubtless evidence that I was safe enough. In any event, I fought off the vortex that day successfully.
I have since succumbed.