Boomers will travel, OK?

At a high school reunion this summer — I won’t mention which number but it’s just less than how many Super Bowls there have been — two or three couples were comparing experiences they’d each had coming around a particular corner in Kathmandu and suddenly seeing some stunning view or other that had created an unforgettable moment for them.

That’s Kathmandu, as in Nepal, as in the Himalayas, as in the deepest depths of Asia, squeezed between China and India, a very long distance from where my former classmates and I were raised and went to school in the decidedly middle-class suburbs of Montreal.

When I was a kid “Kathmandu” and “Shangri-La,” the hidden Himalayan paradise of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, were about equally fantastical. Shangri-La was entirely mythical, of course. People lived to be 250. Frank Capra made a movie about it in 1937 with Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt, later a serene maternal presence on TV’s Father Knows Best. But Kathmandu was mythic and just about as unattainable. People did go there, of course. Edmund Hillary had climbed Nepal’s and the world’s highest peak around the time most of us were born. We had all seen spectacular pictures of the Himalayas in National Geographic. But it wasn’t a place an ordinary person could actually visit.

And now it is. A number of my former classmates are professionals and have done well for themselves but, so far as I know, none is super-wealthy. Yet at least a few have been to Kathmandu. And many of the rest of us could have been if we had wanted to.

In the midst of a crisis, it’s easy to believe the post-crisis world will be completely different. Just after 9/11, Graydon Carter, then-editor of Vanity Fair, went so far as to proclaim “the end of irony.” It’s possible he meant this ironically. But no one took it that way. Which may have proved his point. People were solemn and very unironic for at least a few weeks. Even David Letterman, smartest alec of all, ran some

THE MAJOR POST 9/11 CHANGE FOR MOST PEOPLE HAS BEEN HAVING TO GET TO THE AIRPORT

EARLIER TO MAKE A FLIGHT. serious shows. But look at late-night TV now. If you don’t want to stay up, The New York Times provides overnight reports. Irony clearly survived, even flourished. The major post 9/11 change for most people has been having to get to the airport earlier to make a flight.

Much instant analysis of COVID-19 implicates globalization, whose substantial curtailment some people are now predicting. Much business analysis has focused on how henceforth no firm will depend on a single foreign supplier for components but will build extensive redundancy into its supply chain. Emphasis has been on “foreign” but of course the real problem is “single”: Single domestic suppliers can run into difficulties, too, not just because of disease, though that’s not impossible, but as a result of rail or road blockades, strikes, regulatory difficulties or just the routine business problems suppliers run into from time to time.

I hope, post-COVID, we’ll be wise enough to leave it to businesses how to manage their supply chains. Yes, they will have a new appreciation of diversification but just how much they diversify also depends on how expensive it is. There is an optimal level of redundancy and it’s probably less than “complete and total.”

As for the trans-global movement of people, boomers have now blazed a travel trail to Kathmandu and all the other farthest corners of the world. There are even cruises to Antarctica, have you but cash enough and time. Even millennial ascetics have followed that trail. Gap years nowadays are taken in Thailand, Africa, New Zealand. (For Canadians New Zealand is not necessarily exotic but it is extremely distant.)

That’s all going to change, people say. My guess is yes, but only for a while. The European Union yesterday discouraged non-essential travel to its member-states, returning the favour of the Americans’ ban on flights from Europe. Even our own federal government, after weeks of superior snickering about Donald Trump’s ignorant and ineffective travel bans, is now closing the border to non-Americans. For flattening the curve of a virus going, er, viral, temporary travel restrictions may well be useful. But for the long haul and in normal times better that populations not be isolated. Ask the descendants of North American peoples almost wiped out by smallpox 500 years ago.

It’s early days yet. This past weekend was a little like how the Phony War of late 1939, early 1940 must have been for Brits: We know something unpleasant is coming but no one can say how bad it will be. Given that the next eight weeks are a mystery, it’s especially silly to try to say what comes afterward.

But my guess is the age of mass travel has not been a oneoff. You can take the boomer out of Kathmandu, for a while. But you can’t take Kathmandu out of the boomer — or anyone else, from whatever generation, who has been infected with wanderlust thanks to higher incomes and cheap, abundant air transport.