Google Street View: travel from a distance
The other day, anxious in my desk chair, I became a virtual traveler, staring at photos of public spaces abandoned in the wake of the coronavirus global pandemic: a soccer game in Germany, played in front of thousands of empty seats; the Piazza San Marco in Venice, vacant save for a few confused pigeons; the huge empty courtyard at the Great Mosque of Mecca, usually filled to the brim with worshippers circumnavigating the Ka’bah.
These are places built for humans, but there were no humans. It was like peering into what a future might look like after we are gone, a disaster movie without the movie part.
Our country is slowly wrapping its head around this disaster in slow motion. It is clear that life cannot go on as normal, at least for the foreseeable future. We are entering a wartime of solitude. All must do their part.
We are all learning a new vocabulary of inoculation: selfquarantine, shedding period, flattening the curve, inflection point. We are learning the exact dimensions of close contact.
We are shaking elbows; we are singing “Happy Birthday” twice while washing our hands; we are working remotely; we are awkwardly conducting our classes online; we are (for reasons I still don’t understand) buying ridiculous amounts of toilet paper.
We are also canceling our travel plans, at rates not seen since 9/11; hence the photos of empty places. Our family was supposed to travel to Charleston, South Carolina, in mid-March for a short break, but we made the wise decision not to go. Like many U.S. families with young children, we are hunkering down in a voluntary quarantine cocoon, with a pantry full of beans, a shelf full of Roald Dahl, the Hungry Hungry Hippos board game and a whole bunch of uncertainty.
Over the past year, as the climate crisis has consumed my head and most of my writing projects, I’ve been traveling less and less to I’ve been forced to wrestle with the question of whether flying for pleasure can really be ethically justified anymore. As you can imagine, this is deep existential territory for a travel writer.
After much fretting, weighing the culpability of the fossil fuel industry versus that of the individual, I’ve ended up at a tenuous philosophical balance point where I will minimize my air travel, choosing my trips carefully, but I won’t categorically say no to all travel. I will try to plan more trips locally, and I will look for alternate ways to find the magic.
Such a mindset, it turns out, is also useful in the time of pandemics and self-quarantines. Right after we canceled our trip to South Carolina, Max, my 3year-old, and I attempted to recreate the trip virtually, using one of my favorite tools in the world: Google Street View.
On my computer screen, we pretended to land at the Charleston airport. I provided the narration. We rented our car, which smelled like Twizzlers and a damp pack of cigarettes. On our
Qway out of the airport, Max spotted a TSA agent dangerously reading and walking by the side of the road.
We grabbed some fresh grouper at Crosby’s Fish & Shrimp
Co., to be grilled later. Max threw stones into the water. After a bit of wandering, we stumbled across a crazy dance party on the beach.
We gazed at Morris Island Lighthouse from the shores of
Rat Island. Then we got sidetracked looking at people’s weirdly long walkways to their personal piers and wondered: How long was too long?
In short, I was traveling, discovering. I’ve been fascinated with the beguiling world of Google Street View for a decade now. I often turn to it as a research tool when I’m writing a novel, but more often than not I simply use it to practice being a curious human.
What an unbelievable resource! An endless fountain for little details. You can traipse down almost any street in the world, unbothered by snow, rain or gloom of night, completely safe, eating your Cheetos, and if you grow weary of your traipsing, you can teleport to a completely new place on a new continent.
Try it with your own block. Street View has an uncanny way of making the familiar unfamiliar. How many times have I gone and viewed my childhood home from various angles? Or my old school?
There is something tantalizing about being there but not being there, about being everywhere and nowhere at once. The geospatial distance leaves us wanting more. I’m enamored of the glitchiness of these human landscapes, the way people’s legs are sometimes separated from their bodies and everyone’s faces are blurred out, as if they no longer exist. This is our world, but it is not our world.
In 2015, London-based publisher Visual Editions approached me to make a digital book for its series “Editions at Play.” The idea was to make a “book” that could be read only on a smartphone.
I composed “Entrances and Exits,” a short story told through Google Street View, about a lovesick man who possesses a key that could open any door in the world. The story, like Street View itself, has no end.
But I will also be the first to tell you that Google Street View is no replacement for the real thing. Traveling in the real world is about contact: body contact, surface contact, contact with new foods, new waters, new smells, new light, new languages.
Strange that at this moment in time, surrounded by the invisible threat of infection, we are supposed to be denying all contact, to retreat, to barricade our bodies from the world.
So what to do when we cannot travel ourselves, when we cannot lay our hands upon the there, how can we virtually re-create that sense of wonder and discovery?
Recently, with the advent of virtual reality headsets that don’t make you throw up everywhere, there has been an explosion in VR travel apps. Google Earth VR has its own version, while others claim to take you to the Grand Canyon or swim with sharks. Not to diminish the educational value of some of these experiences, but strapping a contraption to your head still seems like a form of retreat, not a form of contact.
In the meantime, maybe the answer is simply to read more books, still the most beautifully curated art form and an activity that is perfectly suited for small group quarantines. I just read C.S. Lewis’ “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” to my 6-year-old son, Holt. Reading such books aloud and sharing in the story-contact seems important at a time like this.
“The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” is a bonkers sea expedition in the tradition of the Old Norse sagas, following the good ship Dawn Treader as it navigates magical archipelagoes filled with slave traders and dragons and merpeople on the way to the edge of the world. Holt and I had many discussions about whether there was an edge to our own world.
It was a journey I will remember more vividly than most of the real trips I’ve ever taken.