Travel
"As a child, I always loved travel; my favorite moments in life were rising from the pancake-flatness of Chicago onto the Skyway, a 1950s expressway that seemed to ascend into heaven,"
It’s been exactly ten years since I wrote about the sin of Travel. I know this because my husband and I just celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary, and I recall writing about our honeymoon—if one can use that term for a trip that includes one’s thirteen-year-old daughter—on which we drove from Maryland to California and back with brief stops in New Mexico, Wyoming, and, memorably, Las Vegas, where we spent half an hour trying to extricate daughter Hortense from her seatbelt, which she had somehow wrapped around her body multiple times before the mechanism jammed and started strangling her. We frantically tried unlocking and untangling it, in vain, until my husband remembered that he had a large knife in the trunk that we had used while camping. He took out the knife and hacked the seatbelt off Hortense while she shrieked. Countless people on the street witnessed this without even looking up, and that has always been my impression of Las Vegas.
Now, ten years later, we are taking another vacation. This one also includes Hortense, who is 23 now, as well as my husband’s entire family, who are gathering to celebrate his parents’ 80th birthdays. Because the family is so spread out, Ireland has been chosen as our destination, and we are meeting on its west coast in the town of Doolin, which is supposed to be either a hotbed of traditional music or of rampant tourism, depending on who you ask.
Obviously, it is a far different world today from the one in which we meandered ten years ago. For one thing, nowadays, everyone in Las Vegas would have a number to dial so they could report Suspicious Activity, and while I doubt the frenzied hacking at a screaming young girl with by a man with a long knife would attract any more attention there today than it did ten years ago, it’s nice to know that now it would be easier to call it in.
And nowadays, a considerable amount of Security takes place when one travels, as my husband and I found out four years ago when we missed a connecting flight and were nearly arrested for being annoyed at TWA, whose fault it was. But of course, the rest of the world has been worried about Security for years. England, for example, where I lived for a while in the ‘80s, was for many years the site of bombings by the IRA, and one was always on the watch then for suspicious packages. Now, England has become a target for a new generation of bombers, due, it would appear, to their affiliation with us in our crazy war.
But Ireland, on the other hand, is apparently quite peaceful. As dire intelligence pronouncements echo the pre-9/11 reports stating that Al Qaeda intends to attack the U.S. any day now, Ireland is evidently a safe, green, and rather expensive travel destination. The Emerald Isle’s long history of violence is legible only in travel books and in various tourist sites—for example, “The Michael Collins Experience” in West Cork, a multimedia presentation that examines the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War.
In the midst of constant dire warnings and prognostications, it seems a bit weird to get on a plane for the sole purpose of tooling around a countryside that was once ripped asunder by Troubles, amusing oneself as if nothing in life were more pressing than finding a congenial pub.
But that’s the plan, and I’m looking forward to it. As a child, I always loved travel; my favorite moments in life were rising from the pancake-flatness of Chicago onto the Skyway, a 1950s expressway that seemed to ascend into heaven, then returning home again to find that everything looked strange and new. For those of us who enjoy this sensation of defamiliarization—and not everybody does—travel is a drug whose intoxication can last for weeks after we return to our lives and view them differently.
As with all vices, there is something sinful about this. Travel is incredibly decadent in its pure entertainment value (which is why people so often try guiltily to link it with professional conferences), and this is all the more true when there people all over the world are “traveling” because of war and other forms of turmoil. The disjunction between the agony of some and the holidaying of others is played upon mercilessly by The Onion in its parodic but spot-on article about George Bush, who has taken more days off than any other president: “Bush: Vacation Ruined by “Stupid Dead Soldier.’”
And of course, Ireland has seen more than its share of strife-driven dislocation. My husband’s family has chosen Ireland for our destination because they have Irish ancestry on both sides. I’m not sure who these ancestors were or what drove them here, but scores of Irish people immigrated to the U.S. during the nineteenth century because of poverty and famine. Whatever my husband’s ancestors’ reasons were, it can’t have been easy getting on a ship and leaving everything they knew behind, showing up in a strange place where everyone treated Irish people with the contempt with which Americans treat other immigrants today.
Now, we are hopping on a plane and reversing the journey, and will be motoring merrily around the countryside where people once fought and/or starved. Some day, no doubt, people will drive around Iraq, perhaps visiting an enormous interactive exhibit that was once a U.S. military base or the Baghdad museum that was looted in 2003 after the war, now completely restored. Some day, we will be so removed from our present tragedies that there will be a “9/11 Experience” in lower Manhattan. It seems impossible now, but given the nature of travel, it is inevitable.
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