On Sept. 19, I walked onto a machine which would carry me a third of the distance around the globe in a day. My boots were still covered in the dust of a three mile, 6,000 foot climb up Idaho’s tallest mountain four days earlier. That journey had also taken a day.
In the first hour of the flight, I leaned back in my seat, trying to carefully see out the window past the old woman beside me. “Do you want to switch seats? I have flown this stretch so often I know the view by heart, there isn’t much to see,” she politely offered. I declined; there was too much smoke in the lower altitudes to make out the peaks of the Lost River Range. I chatted with my neighbour for a few minutes. She was enthusiastic about my teaching job and encouraged me to write. Her children had also been encouraged to follow their passions, she was flying to Minnesota to visit her musician son and watch him perform. She told me that she did not want to retire, and that she loved her job. Instead of retiring, she had demoted herself. She had been the manager of a shoe store. Now she was back to simply helping customers, which she loved most.
The world outside slipped by with imperceptible speed. The tiny portholes of the airplane carefully screened out interaction with the thin and chilling tempo outside. Looking at my boots, I found myself wishing this journey impossible.
Twenty hours later, after four hours sitting in what signs claimed to be Minneapolis, another four hours with Rembrandt light streaming through the windows of Amsterdam’s generic airport, I stepped out onto the windswept tarmac of Hamburg. Twenty five hours of sitting. I had been propelled across incomprehensible distance by combusting kerosene, a distillation of several thousand year old sunlight. The distance also seemed somehow an abstraction. Try as I might, I could not really link the time I had travelled and the miles I had covered.
I have read that the proper speed to take in ones surroundings is a walking pace. Hiking up Mt. Borah, I could vouch for this. The stones under my feet had been seen, smelled, felt. Their sharp irregularities had reminded me how old my boots were getting, and of Loon Lake, Imogene, Mt. Cramer, Cascade Head, and Der Watzmann where the scuffs had been etched, where the spring had been trod out of the soles. The motion had been personal. The pines had slowly grown more twisted, more stunted. The sun had risen, strengthened, warmed, heated, slipped back down the other side of the sky and sunk away toward home before us. Even after the peak of the mountain, once again stepping into the car to take us home, the distance was tangible. We wound through river valleys, followed the contours etched by weather and tectonics and the seasons. The scarp from an earthquake in 1984 made a long line at the edge of the Lost River Valley. The cotton woods in their first flush of autumn yellow flanked the Salmon River out of Challis. Opening the windows, the cool smell of pine needles and pitch was sharp in the car past Kirkum, with just the faintest hint of sulphur from the hotsprings across the river.
All summer I had lived without even a car. I had worked driving a pizza truck, but cycled my way up the Boise Bench to daily get to work. I was by no means the fastest driver there. In fact, not having a car, I became nervous whenever I drove on the freeway. The speed began to frighten me. The constant rush wore me down. I always drove with the windows open so as to maintain contact with the world. To be in the free air, pushing myself along on the bike I had built was a much more satisfactory way to navigate the city. I enjoyed seeing the tomato plants along my route daily droop with the weight of the coming harvest, and smiled at their caretakers when they were out. The July sun had darkened my arms and hands. I was in the city, and I inhabited it when on my bike. I said thank you to construction flaggers as I pedalled past, and they said you’re welcome. I nodded to the Somalian children who I always saw riding around the neighbourhood of the pizza place. The young Albertsons night clerk at Vista and Overland stopped carding me, and probably knew my name since I stopped to pick up a beer so often on the way home from work.
Then these airports and airplanes. Two hundred people in a gadget which shears spacetime as neatly as a time machine. No interaction with the outside world except that tiny porthole which allows one to see so far that almost nothing is visible. The distance travelled cannot be held in the mind, only in the hand, represented on map which is one twentyfivemillionth the actual space. We all sit, and are as disconnected from each other as from the earth over which we hurtle. I don’t recall the shoesaleswoman’s name. She doesn’t care what the landscape outside looks like. She has seen it before, but she can’t notice or care about its subtle changes. I don’t remember what she looks like. I remember I ate vegetarian curry since I didn’t trust the airplane chicken. I remember saying “bon appetite” to the Spaniards next to me on the flight over the Atlantic. Those were the only words exchanged. I remember being constantly stressed while on the plane, constantly on the verge of panic while travelling. I could not afford to be late anywhere, couldn’t leave my belongings for a moment. These are not quite memories I will treasure for the rest of my life.
Once, travel was a journey. Goethe took weeks to travel to Italy from Germany, and the famous man walked for good portions. My great grandparents came on ships that crossed the Atlantic in ten days, not ten hours. They could have smelled the clear sea breeze, watched gulls, fog, and endless horizons stretching out to enforce the distance in the mind. They would have been bored by the distance, and rightfully so. There would have been dances, and walks on deck, and letters written. Fellow passengers to meet, the children could have played about the ship rather than being the wailing curse of the plane. The passengers would have known how far removed they were from their starting point. There would be no such thing as jet lag. There weren’t even time zones before the advent of rail travel. Now travel is confusion, an abstraction of a measurable thing.
Perhaps it is too much to ask, but I wish travel could slow down again. We should demote ourselves like my momentary friend on the plane. We think we have to get to our destinations quickly because time is money. Time is not money. Time is life. And life disconnected from anything but the abstractions of a world framed and insulated by windows is a poverty stricken one.
I know I will not be able to walk home. I know I won’t be able to take a ship. But I will walk to the tops of mountains from my front door. I will take the slow trains here in Europe. The ones which stop at every station. And I will open my windows and put my face into the wind and learn the names of its smells.
And my boots will be dusty again.
