Skip air travel, try flights of fancy

In ‘Deep South,’ Paul Theroux summons a peculiar mode of transport, as in one never before featured in any of his best-selling travel books: his automobile.

Medford native and lifelong globetrotter Paul Theroux has three simple rules of travel: leave home, go alone, and stay on the ground.

Over his 50-year career Theroux has persistently followed these directives, whether on foot, in a kayak, or aboard a train. In “Deep South,” his 2015 travelogue covering a neglected part of America, he remains true to his principles but summons a peculiar mode of transport, as in one never before featured in any of his best-selling travel books: his automobile.

Theroux’s reason for staying grounded in this way as he departs his Cape Cod home is a simple one. While car travel in the U.S. is a liberating doddle compared to other parts of the world, air travel has become uniformly grim.

“All air travel today,” Theroux writes, “involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior.” He goes on to say that “the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control.”

It would be comforting to believe that Theroux is using his considerable literary talent to overstate his case. But we all know from experience, as well as from recent high-profile incidents involving hassled passengers aboard commercial flights, that he is right. Airlines — abetted by airport authorities — now have license to treat the flying public like any other piece of cargo.

Yet, passenger demand will almost double over the next 20 years, according to a report issued by the International Air Transport Association, rising from 3.8 billion air travelers in 2016 to 7.2 billion in 2035.

So why are we on schedule to fly in record numbers, even though passenger dissatisfaction is rising dramatically?

According to the 2016 Airline Quality Rating report, customer complaints climbed 38 percent from 2014 to 2015 and there’s no reason to believe the skies are becoming any more hospitable.

Theroux has an opinion here as well. In his estimation, we are prepared to suffer “the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel.”

As a fellow Medfordite and not-quite-so-bestselling novelist and author, I find Theroux’s remarks spot on. Two or three times a year, I fly from Dublin to Boston. My chosen airline and the nonstop route regularly combine for an uneventful journey — just what you want when you’re in the air these days. Still, on every flight I feel as though I’ve agreed to a six- hour- long humming , hemmed-in amusement ride, with the occasional refreshment.

So maybe this summer we should all take a stand and refuse to fly. Instead, hop on a bus or a train and explore some homegrown exotica.

Or better yet, take flight with a good book — Theroux’s “Deep South” is an excellent place to start — and travel wherever you please.