Trouble and Travel

...The likely thing too is that most of the visitor-invaders will set out with the golden expectations that the travel industry encourages, paying no more attention to Time's timely warning that all travel in foreign countries "is a matter of cumulative exposure to the unknown and unpredictable" than picnic-bound children do to parental reminders about the threat of bumble bee stings and poison ivy...

...Speaking relatively, then, probably more things go wrong for tourists than for explorers or travelers, in spite of the assistance of travel bureaus, tour guides, the sophistications of communication and transportation, and the general availability of basic creature comforts...

...In Thoreau As World Ttaveler it takes John Aldrich Christie twenty pages to list the travel literature that Thoreau read with obviously fascinated attention and referred to in his Journal and other writings...

...If in September of 1519 you had set out with Magellan in search of a westward route to the Spice Islands, you would have expected to rough it . If in early 1833 you had traveled with Emerson from Malta to London, you probably would not have been demoralized by a twenty-four-hour storm-tossed crossing of the English Channel . But now when all factors involved (including one's own pampered utopian impulses) combine to induce expectations of comfortable troublefree touring, an air controllers' strike at Heathrow or a missed connection at O'Hare can be psychologically as devastating as the mutiny Magellan THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1985 had to contend with at Port San Julian . Indeed, the modern expectation of liberated trouble-free travel has such a built-in potential for frustration that tourism for many people is the repeated experience of the great theme of literary modernism: the discovery of illusion . This means that the would-be tourist had better learn to read the travel sections of the popular magazines and Sunday papers with an By implication those who are free travel, those who aren't stay home-except that the reverse is sometimes just as true . ironic eye, otherwise he is likely to believe that a sortie over Spain in a hot air balloon or a photographic safari in the wilds of Botswana will be as safe and comfortable as a jog in the park . Such expectations prepare for the disillusionment that led Mark Twain to write in his notebook after seeing the Taj Mahal : "God will be a disappointment to most of us ." And of all things that go wrong when one travels, disillusionment is one of the most painful . Ironic travelers have usually learned early not only that it is pointless to expect that nothing will go wrong but that things must go wrong if travel is to be interesting . The good trip is the one that makes a good story, and good stories depend on the right kind of troubles, which make possible memorable reversals of expectation and serendipitous events . This is as true of "Love Boat" as of Gulliver's Travels If Darwin's five-year tour on the Beagle had turned out to be the story he expected, the tour would have been long ago forgotten . But if ironic travelers know that what they go for is often less than or different from what they come home with, they also know that what they get when things go wrong is not necessarily any better than what they might have gotten if everything had gone according to plan . What goes wrong eliminates, for better or worse, one possible future while it actualizes another...

...Such a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1985 man had better do his traveling in Concord...

...Nevertheless, all travel, including the elaborately planned and technologically controlled travel of astronauts, can be defined as a movement between a familiar and a less familiar place in the process of which things normally go wrong...

...Besides, anti-tourists may be making the same tactical mistake that the philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn believes many aspiring scientists make, when in their passion for the dramatic innovations that bring Nobel prizes they forget that the important innovators now "work within a welldefined and deeply ingrained tradition ." Transpose this paradox into travel language and it suggests that there may be a better chance for things to go interestingly and memorably wrong if one stays on the beaten paths . Tourists, travelers, and explorers have one thing in common : direction . No matter how much goes wrong or what changes of itinerary become necessary, all three expect to return to the point from which they started . Thus their peregrinations have what Aristotle expected to see in good drama: a beginning, a middle, and an end...

...Most who enter on any profession are doomed men," he wrote in his Journal...

...Thoreau the stationary world traveler had it right when he wrote in his Journal: "Only that travelling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better...

...Travel doesn't so much free us from home as make us freer at home . "Travelling is a fool's paradise," Emerson wrote in "Self-Reliance," but in order to know this he had to travel widely and with considerable gusto, as he would continue to do after he wrote it, travel being for him, as for most of us, an act of self-definition . Whether we explore, travel, or tour, we submit ourselves to the vicissitudes of the world in order to define home in more' expansive terms, just as we submit ourselves to wilderness in order to define civilization in more expansive terms . But if we stay home out of fear that things will go wrong, home becomes increasingly more confining . And this means that things have gone very wrong indeed . El 2 1...

...But there is another category of traveler (if I may return to the more familiar sense of the term) and this is the wanderer...

...They have to be distinguished, no doubt, from the youngsters who are simply taking an inexpensive Grand Tour, but most of them, we suspected, were the lost children of the world who neither had nor any longer wanted direction, for whom things had gone wrong for so long that living with wrongness had become a way of life...

...Nothing can go wrong since all eventualities are equally acceptable-short of that unlikely one that would redirect him back home to his aged Penelope . Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, too, is a wanderer, and so are Byron, Shelley, D.H . Lawrence, Hemingway, and F . Scott Fitzgerald . There is something about romantic personalities, creatures of process and becoming as they are, that inclines them to keep on going once they leave their point of origin . We have seen bedraggled late twentieth century versions of them everywhere in Europe: strumming their guitars for small change in the Paris metro tunnels or spaced out on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence or on the Spanish Steps in Rome...

...But this is purely academic information to a tourist confined, as we once were, to a couchette with five other people in an Italian railroad car without water and flushable toilets . Such a person will take little comfort from the thought that things must often have been worse for Darwin on the Beagle, or that the most miserable Italian train offers a king's luxury compared with the primitive transportation available to Goethe in his late eighteenth century tour of Italy...

...For such people the future looks bleak indeed . In 1984 they had to find a way to live with five and a half million American invaders, a figure that is expected to increase in 1985 since the British pound, French franc, West German mark, and Italian lira continue to lose ground against the American dollar...

...he wrote while visiting New York . Things went wrong for him in cities . Besides, for a traveler he had a disastrous attachment to freedom : "I must not lose any of my freedom by being a farmer and landholder...

...The likely thing, of course, is that most of these millions will think of themselves as welldisposed visitors, not invaders: What foreigner with something to sell or rent could be anything but ecstatically happy at the prospect of more American dollars...

...Eliot's remark in "East Coker" that "Old men ought to be explorers," but he is not really an explorer . An explorer aims to return to the human community with useful information, and this is not what Ulysses has in mind . I I 'lie has any use for us it is thanks to the poet who enshrines him as a model of geriatric derring-do . He needs no itinerary, no travel agent, no reservations ; everything he owns, we must assume, will go under the seat in front of him...

...Fussell speaks of those anti-tourists who attempt to prove themselves travelers, or even explorers, by making a point of keeping off the beaten track and avoiding standard points of interest . For them St . Peter's, the Eiffel Tower, Disneyland, Westminster Abbey, the Grand Canyon, the Berlin Wall, Ponte Vecchio, and the Great Pyramid at Gizeh are places not to see, or to be carefully censored out of one's conversation afterwards if they cannot be avoided . Anti-tourists wouldn't be caught dead in a tour group unless, perhaps, it was headed for penguinwatching at the Antarctic ice barrier or whale-watching in the Sea of Cortes...

...By implication those who are free travel, those who aren't stay homeexcept that the reverse is sometimes just as true...

...Despite the fact that "by want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and so steadily," he came to know North America, Asia, and Africa in great detail while avoiding the inconveniences that even the most fortunate travelers must expect...

...There are reasons to believe that Thoreau would have been an unhappy traveler even if he had not wanted pecuniary wealth . Unlike his traveling friends, Emerson and Hawthorne, he did not like cities . "Who can see these cities and say there is any life in them...

...John P. Sisk It is common knowledge that certain vocal minorities in Europe would prefer that Americans go home and stay home...

...ready to receive it and that nothing would go wrong when it arrived . Then there is the method demonstrated by Des Esseintes, the decadent central figure of J .K...

...It is probably better for the traveler not to anticipate states of liberation so that when they happen they can be appreciated, like unanticipated favorable changes in currency exchange...

...Imagine him, like Emerson on his first trip abroad, cramped into a small cabin with four seasick strangers for six storm-tossed weeks followed by two weeks of quarantine in the harbor at Malta...

...This latter Ulysses, like many war veterans, has found home a bore and determines to set out with congenial companions "To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/ Of all the western stars, until I die ." He probably would agree with T.S...

...A familiar ad for a sevenday Caribbean cruise exploits this assumption : In a world of bougainvillea blossoms, tropical drinks, and sugar-white beaches you will feel "Gloriously, unselfconsciously free...

...So we change travel agencies, update our check lists in the light of past oversights, consult the stars before setting departure dates, increase our portfolio of credit cards, avoid unreliable airlines and flights that are destined to deposit us after dark in John P Sisk is Arnold Professor of the Humanities at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...This may be an extreme of sentimentalism, but insofar as travel is a state of mind (and it is at least that) here is a foolproof way to keep things from going wrong . And there is Thoreau's superficially similar system . In an age when his contemporaries were going off in all directions, Thoreau, one of whose overriding concerns was to keep himself from being invaded, was able to say with some complacency: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord ." He had indeed...

...The sober fact is that once you have made hotel reservations, bought airline tickets and the necessary new clothes, farmed out the dog, arranged to have the mail collected and the premises looked after, you are no longer free to stay home...

...2 0 TROUBLE AND TRAVEL strange airports, commit our Michelins to memory, take crash courses in French, German, Italian, or Spanish . Even so, as my wife and I discovered long ago, things keep going wrong . Those traveler-invaders who find intolerable the contretemps that are to be expected in any passage from a familiar to an unfamiliar place may be happy to learn that there are systems that reduce, if not entirely eliminate, the number of things that can go wrong . In his excellent book Life in the English Country House, Mark Girouard describes the system of the medieval traveling household . As they moved from castle to castle, the Lord and his Lady simply took their home environment with them-not only their scores, even hundreds of retainers, but "plate, jewels, tapestries, table-cloths, clothing, hangings, coffers, musical instruments, carpenter's tools, mass-books, massvessels, vestments, linen, pots and pans, cooking-pits, and beds by the dozen ." Like Ringling Brothers on the move, such a traveling household even had its advance agents whose job it was to make sure that its destination was Fighting those summer urges...

...For this kind of traveler the worst thing that can go wrong is not to be able to get the book you want when you want it...

...Paul Fussell in "The Stationary Tourist" (Harper's, April 1979) makes a useful distinction between exploration (the Renaissance), travel (the bourgeois age), and tourism (the proletarian present) . In this progression things are less likely to go wrong as you approach the tourist present...

...The classic wanderer is Ulysses, not the hero of Homer's epic but the figure we meet in Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno and later in Tennyson's dramatic monologue Ulysses...

...For that matter, imagine a man of "such dangerous frankness," as Emerson said of him, confined for eight or ten hours in a 747, or stalled for ten minutes between stations in a London underground train...

...Though most of us know this as a fact of past experience, we keep anticipating the trouble-free trip, probably for the same reason we keep buying tickets in state lotteries or drinking martinis before dinner: The alternative is unthinkable...

...Unfortunately, the very nature of such off-beat excursions makes them overprotective and therefore reduces the margin for adventure and reminiscence...

...But at least Thoreau was by temperament kept from making the mistake so many travelers make when they assume that "travel" and "freedom" are synonyms...

...Huysmans's late nineteenth century French novel, Against the Grain . Suddenly possessed by a desire to go to England, he has himself and his luggage transported to the neighborhood of a Paris railroad station with sufficient time to visit a bistro and a restaurant, in both of which the presence of Englishspeaking people evokes sensations of London he has acquired from the novels of Dickens . Aware then that in the actual journey he will only "lose those imperishable sensations" as reality fails once more to measure up to anticipation, he does not board the train for Dieppe but returns with his luggage to his home in Fortenay, "feeling the physical stimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his home after a long and dangerous voyage...