Category Archives: Travel

The Indignities of Travel

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Seasons, Travel

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I am finally home after a long vacation, 4,500 miles through the Great American West. I’ve been on the road, sleeping in hotels so long that I keep checking under my door in the morning for a receipt and checkout time, wondering why the bed is not made up when I come home in the afternoon. Some things are taken care of for you when you travel, you pay for that, probably too much. That’s what credit cards are for, and vacations, like Christmas, are periods of rationalizing debt. I am happy to spend money to do the things I did on vacation: but I’ll bet I could be just as happy on half the expense. Though travel can take you to places that are wonderful and unique, it is rarely an unalloyed pleasure.

I grow tired of eating in restaurants. It’s always a crap shoot, especially for someone who is carefully attentive to his own home-cooked meals. Only in the best of restaurants do I experience meals better than my own home cooking, and reading menu prices for foods I know will be indifferently prepared from frozen ingredients makes me shiver. Everything, from a nice chicken entree to almost any sandwich, comes with melted cheese on it. Everything comes with fries, from a cheeseburger to a gyro sandwich. That lack of culinary imagination, of effort, is emblematic of eating in most restaurants.

Yes, I still use the word ‘restaurant,’ even though it appears to be passé. Today, a place where one buys prepared meals is likely to be called A Dining Establishment, or An Eating Company, or, most pestiferous to me, An Eatery. A what? Who coined that awkward bit of pompousness? It is used a lot, and given Americans’ penchant for gorging, I wonder if we will soon see An All You Can Eatery?

 Servers struggle with the language. Some are perfectly charming and helpful, but they almost universally share the inability to accept that English ‘you’ is both singular and plural. A table with more than one person seated must be referred to as ‘y’all,’ ‘youse,’ or ‘you guys’—it depends on the latitude—when ‘you’ would be perfectly grammatically acceptable. In St. Louis we fret over the misuse of the word ‘working,’ as in, ‘Are you still working on your dinner, or should I remove your plate?’ I have had some cuts of meat that took work to cut, but usually I do not work at my meals. Even more pernicious though, is the habit of grabbing things. I say, ‘May I have a straw with my soft drink?’ and the server says, ‘Sure, I’ll grab you one.’ ‘Is there any horseradish?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll grab that.’ ‘May I have the check?’ ‘Let me grab it.’ Everyone’s grabbing everything. When I ask the busboy if he has seen my waitress, he promises to grab her. Youse better not.

I tend to be a stickler for correct language and spelling, what is referred to these days as being a ‘grammar Nazi,’ usually by the same people who blamed their teachers when they did poorly in school. As one gets ever deeper into tourism territory, the misspellings increase, even on otherwise professional-looking signs. That’s where my tolerance breaks down; I accept that everyone does not have impeccable spelling ability, but if you paint signs for a living, that’s kind of your job. Buy a dictionary, for Pete’s sake.

Finally, there are the places that are not all they’re cracked up to be. I visited Deadwood, South Dakota, the town where Wild Bill Hickok was sheriff, and had his famous liaison with Calamity Jane, and was finally shot to death. The town was running downhill until several years ago when they approved limited stakes gambling. It is now a seedy little Las Vegas, with gaming in every hotel and restaurant, and busloads of doddering seniors shoving their walkers towards slot machines. I paid for a tour of the town’s historic sites, and sat on a bus while the guide told us that Wild Bill Hickok was never sheriff, only spent a few weeks here, and never had anything to do with Calamity Jane, a drunken, crude woman who looked nothing like Doris Day; Hickok’s murder was the only true part of the story. The guide beamed as he told us all this, though he played at being distraught at having to break it to us. When the bus stopped in the cemetery, giving us all a chance to photograph their graves, I remained in my seat.

The high-point of my trip was Yellowstone National Park. Let me say first that Yellowstone is a marvel, with natural and geographical wonders to be found nowhere else. But . . . it is huge. The park is larger than several states, with parts of in three states. I arrived at the east entrance to the park, from Cody, Wyoming, and got to the west Entrance in Montana days later. We had to eat the dogs on the way. Seriously, ninety-nine percent of what you do in Yellowstone is drive. Old Faithful is fifty miles from the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Yellowstone Lake is fifty miles from Artist Point. Gibbon Falls is fifty miles from the Roosevelt Arch. These are the kind of drives that make standing in line at Disney World sound fun. Add in another five percent of your time spent seeking a parking place, and that leaves only a few minutes every few hours to look at one of the dozens of attractions. And another thing—do not be fooled by the legends of bison, elk, and bears picturesquely wandering about. You will see little wildlife, if any, and that mostly ravens, which are a kind of obese crow whose diet consists wholly of smoking roadkill. I know, someone reading this will cry out, ‘I saw lots of wildlife!’ It’s not that it never happens; but heading to Yellowstone with the expectation of seeing bears is just setting yourself up for heartbreak.

I do not regret visiting Yellowstone, any more than I regret the whole trip, which set me back financially for the next several months, and left me bone tired and ready to get back to work for some richly deserved relaxation. The aforementioned natural wonders are things that will stay with me for life, as will the legendary streets of Deadwood and other things I saw. I have been home for several days, back to work most of a week, and I’m starting to think about my next trip.

 

 

Bridges

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Bridges, Mindfulness, Travel

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I was on vacation last week. I took three short trips, one to fish for a few days, one to tour the Abraham Lincoln sites in Springfield, Illinois, and one to visit a relative who is recovering from a recent car crash. Each trip was about a two-hour drive away, so I covered some ground, mostly on highways—I-44, I-55, I-70. Driving along highways is one thing. Most of us do that all the time. Even going to the grocery store or our gym we’re likely to put in a few miles on a highway.

But on each of these trips I crossed at least one bridge. I live in St. Louis, Missouri, so inevitably I am often crossing bridges over the Mississippi River. When you live beside one of the world’s great rivers all your life you tend to lose a sense of its renown, its lore. To me it’s just the big river I see all the time. I also crossed over the Missouri—another major stream—and the Meramec, a local river, mostly known for its disastrous flooding every few years.

I can drive highways all the time without anything more than a sense of time and miles passing. But whenever I cross a bridge I get a rush of feeling, a sudden sense that I am going somewhere. I’m not sure why it is, except perhaps that I am not well-traveled for my age and experience. Most people I know have been many more places: more cities, more states, more countries. My travels have been slight in comparison, and each place I go fills me with a mix of dread and anticipation.

I first felt this way many years ago when I crossed a bridge over some minor river in Tennessee. I was probably headed to a family funeral, I really don’t remember; but I do remember crossing this bridge. At the time I was very smitten with Big Band music, and a tape was playing (yes, a tape) of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, some such quintessentially American musician, and the rush of feeling in that moment, having crossed from Missouri to Tennessee, one state to another, took the form of how huge is America, all these states, all these regions, and the wonderful music flowed into the moment and filled the space with sound.

But the feeling is not usually that well defined. It’s usually just a sense of crossing from one region to another. The people on this side of the river live one way, the people on that side are different. I will see new things on the other side. I will learn about those things and one day I will return, cross this bridge going the other way and tell my native tribe what I have seen.

Or something like that. I really don’t know how to describe the feeling. I mentioned it once to a traveling companion and she offered little response, just an ‘I see,’ or a ‘hmm.’ I considered trying further explanation, but I turned back inward instead, knowing this was likely not a feeling that could be shared. And yet here I am sharing it on a larger scale. Go figure.

A bridge is an easy symbol, and almost always of good things. A bridge into the future. Building a bridge between people. Bridging the gap. But the good things don’t always come without some danger. One of my favorite children’s stories is The Three Billy Goats Gruff, about the perils of crossing a bridge when there are monsters lurking beneath. But oh, that grass over there is so green, so lush, that it is worth the risk. Thank goodness we have Big Billy Goat Gruff to defeat the troll and lead the way.

I hope that my future holds many bridges to cross, both literally and figuratively. And I guess the point I am trying to make is that for me, all bridges are literal and figurative at the same time, and to tell the truth, I kind of like it that way.

Driving

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Driving, Fall, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Travel, Weather, Winter

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I recently returned from a Florida vacation. Nice time, even though Tropical Storm Debby threatened the Gulf Coast for the first few day we were there. We drove down and drove back, a total of over 24 hours driving–including a few wrong turns and detours.

Driving in summer is an interesting activity. I like to have windows down and wind blowing through the vehicle. My wife despises windows down and wind blowing through the vehicle. I’ll admit it can be tiring after a while, but it still makes me feel, even at my age, like a kid setting off on some kind of adventure. Every bridge I cross feels like crossing into something, I don’t know what. I put on my sunglasses, face into the sun, and head south, or west.

I had a conversation (online) the other day with another blogger (Invisible Horse) about how one can experience nature, or the seasons, when one is surrounded by very little that is natural. Our lives are lived in air-conditioned homes, climate-controlled workplaces, heated and cooled theaters and stores and malls. We step outside only to hurry to something else inside. Sure, we can go on occasional vacations to the beach or to the mountains, but what we need is an awareness of nature in our day to day existence.

So I was thinking about driving, and how one of our most unnatural occupations can help us be in nature. This is not as outlandish as it sounds. Back in February, 1947, nature write Edwin Way Teale set out on a roadtrip from the Florida everglades, ending up some 17,000 miles later in Maine at the summer solstice. He wrote a book about this trip, North with the Spring, which was so well received that he went on to write a quartet of books, including Autumn Across America, Wandering through Winter, and Journey into Summer, each based on similar driving tours.

There are two interesting things to note about this: one is the fact that not so long ago a man writing about his experiences in nature could be a hugely popular bestselling author. The other is that Teale set out to experience nature while he drove, but his book was more about the places he stopped and explored along the way than about driving in and of itself. Today we’re always rushing somewhere: it’s not likely we will stop and climb out of the car because we see daffodils in bloom by the roadway. Most of us watch the signs that say Scenic Overlook zoom by unheeded. We blast through miles and miles of forest and prairie until a highway sign alerts us to the next upcoming convenience–more often than not a McDonald’s ‘restaurant.’

Of course driving in the different seasons offers us differing experiences: driving in winter can be treacherous, even though often it is associated with going someplace special for a holiday (over the river and through the woods); driving in summer typically calls for air-conditioning and special equipment, like windshield visors and steering wheel covers to keep down the heat, but it too is frequently necessitated by the need to get to special places–baseball games, swimming pools, picnics and barbecues. But these holidays and summer activities are all human conventions, so if driving to them is seasonally related, it is not strictly nature related.

One of the very few nature-related driving activities I know of is the autumn color tour, where we pile into our cars on a mid- to late-autumn weekend afternoon and head out to tree-lined backroads, just looking at the trees. This is nice, though with our urban environment and sprawling suburbs, we have to drive farther and farther to find the trees. It would be nice if there were other times of year that we got into the car just to go and see what nature was doing. But in the end, this is not what I’m talking about.

In driving, we do and we do not experience the world. A few years my family went to British Columbia to visit relatives. When people hear about this trip they are surprised that we didn’t fly. But I tell them driving is the only way. We traversed and climbed 5,000 miles through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and into the Canadian Rockies. We saw a lifetime’s worth of breathtaking vistas at the height of green summertime. But I have to admit we were in a hurry. We didn’t stop often. We didn’t feel the mountain air, smell the forest breezes: and this was a vacation.

It’s even worse on our day to day commutes. We find ourselves stuck in traffic, impatient, stressed, clutching at the phone to try and reach someone who cares that we might be late. We may be out in the world, this may be the only time today we will experience something aside from the inside of our home or the inside of our workplace, but are we experiencing anything but the inside of our car?

I must admit, I’m stuck on this one. I don’t know what to recommend. It’s facile to say, ‘stop once in a while and look at things along the way,’ or ‘roll down the windows and feel the wind in your hair.’ The first is dangerous, the second is unpleasant for a few reasons–one of them being that we don’t want wind to mess up our hair. Maybe it’s time to solicit suggestions: how can we make driving, which most of us do too much of, more of an activity for being in the seasons?

Why No Pictures?

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Birdwatching, Fall, Photography, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Travel, Winter

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I know that I am not a very good photographer, so I don’t own a camera and I don’t take many pictures. This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the beauties of nature, or the sights of interesting places, or that I don’t want to remember good times with friends and family. It just means that I am not good at recording these things in photographic images. I have noticed that this doesn’t stop some people.

When people I know visit lovely places like Paris or Hawaii, they often come home with their vacation photos, including snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, of palm trees swaying beside blue waters. These photographs do not compare favorably with professionally done images of the same things, and I wonder both why they bothered and why they think they would interest me. As a tradition, taking travel photographs is a hand me down from a time long ago when photography was new, cameras were rare, and most people had not seen images of the Eiffel Tower or the landscape of Maui. Nowadays it’s mostly just tiresome: people think they are supposed to take photos of their travels. I know a few people who are excellent photographers, who bring some verve and artistic sensitivity to the images they choose to share. But they are all too rare.

In working on this blog, I am often seeking images to use. Here’s a picture of spring; here’s a picture of winter. But what’s the point? People with cameras can’t seem to avoid recording images of the seasons, especially of seasonal change: the first forsythia to bloom in spring, a maple tree glowing with bright copper leaves, snow piled on anything. I mean, these images are beautiful and all that; but do I really need another photo of any of them? I also wonder if the mere act of snapping a photo is too facile a way of recording that image: if by taking the photo, we actually put it out of mind. Are we taking the time to think about the changes our cameras record?

There is a cliche you often encounter in movies and books (it was even lampooned in a funny scene in the movie Crocodile Dundee), that superstitious native peoples do not like to have their photographs taken, because they believe that it robs their souls. It seems a fitting metaphor for how I feel about taking a snapshot of something rather than spending a little more time experiencing it. Often when someone I know comes home from a vacation somewhere nice, they will ask, Do you want to see my pictures? Usually, my answer is no, but I would like to hear a good story. That always gets them thinking. Some people are a lot better than others at telling stories, but anyone who has truly experienced a new place should be able to tell me something interesting about it–unless they were too busy snapping pictures.

Once I was reading a book about birdwatching. It had hundreds of colorful and precise images of birds, to be used in identifying them. The introduction to the book contained tips on how to be a better birdwatcher. It advised that when you see a new and unknown species, you should not immediately pull out the book and try to find it on a page. You should instead spend as long a time as you can watching the bird. After all, the activity is called birdwatching, not bookwatching. And the longer you watch the bird, the better you will know it: does it have a crest on its head? A pointed or rounded beak? Long tail feathers? Are there unusual colors on its tail, head, throat or the tips of its wings? Only after you’ve observed the creature for a while, or after it has flown, should you open the book and seek a picture that matches what you were watching. But remember the key point: it’s about the experience, not about correctly naming it.

So I guess I’ll include an image in my blog when it is truly helpful or instructive, when it really helps to explain something. But if it’s just there so I can say I used a picture, then why bother? You haven’t seen enough pictures of daffodils? Of gathering storm clouds? Of rain?