We’re not doing much traveling these days ...
But we’ll always have crowded Broadway shows, cold beers on tropical beaches and kind strangers
When the dog days of the pandemic bite, you can always dream of traveling to distant places.
No antigen test within 72 hours required. None of the costs of government-enforced quarantine in the purgatory otherwise known as the airport hotel. No risk of falling ill far from home and being unable to return. No fear of being shamed for that unwise Instagram post of your little trip to Wisconsin.
But of what travel will you dream? Past or future? Memory or aspiration?
Perhaps cold beers on tropical beaches. Crowded Broadway shows. Infinity pools. Rickety border crossings. Mayan ruins. An Austrian cafe. People unlike yourself. Kind, welcoming folks, willing to embrace an outsider.
I hear tell of those who take to Google Maps on rough nights in the basement, turning themselves into human drones, homing in on strange and wonderful outposts like the Shetland island of Unst, known for its cliffs and grasslands, or the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, where I would so much like to go, or Table Mountain of South Africa.
Fair enough. But that is not visiting an actual place so much as attending a digital facsimile thereof. As such, it is no different from what we do every day as we interact with digital facsimiles of people.
I prefer to live with my travel memories.
I’ve been lucky, although I’ve never traveled in luxury, and I’m of a certain age. I’ve prioritized travel in my life.
I can close my eyes and see the skeletons that inhabit the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) Cave in
Belize, a place my body would not allow me to access again, pandemic or none. I can see the terracotta army of Xian (still the greatest single sight my eyes ever beheld anywhere, anytime); the X-rated mating quetzals (birds) of Costa Rica; the portly racing pigs at the Wisconsin State Fair.
I can taste a cold Jamaican Red Stripe imbibed on Negril’s skinny beach in Jamaica; a warm meatand-potato pie wrapped in newspaper in Blackpool, England; the arepas de queso of Cartagena, Colombia (what a fabulous place to visit!); a real baguette with butter, anywhere in France.
I can feel the rush of Alaskan cold; the thrill of a blackjack in Las Vegas; the press of a Maltese crowd at a locals’ street party on New Year’s Eve; the underbelly of a Ecuadorian seal that somehow forgot I was there.
I can smell a philly in Philly; a burning thin crust for a buck in Manhattan; fries and cheese curds in Ontario; barbecue in Lubbock, Texas.
And I can hear a dog barking at a Guatemalan border; a monkey howling in Panama; the symphonic clamor of the pachinko machines of Shinjuku, Tokyo; the screech of Mexico City’s subway trains.
You likely have your own list. You can see it as things to miss, but it’s more helpful to think of them as memories that get you through.
Outside of glossy magazines and influence feeds, though, our travel recollections aren’t just a list of places or even of particular experiences. We recall them through the people with whom we went and those we met when we arrived.
For some of us, these complex memories involve that which is no longer available to us: someone
who has since died; a lover who has left; a smiling child who had the audacity to turn into a brooding teenager aspiring only toward independent travel. And they might involve changes in yourself, like the arrival of new physical challenges, or financial problems, or a more mature mental state that just doesn’t allow for the adventurous risks of youth.
Travels of the past are locked in their time.
We remember the ice cream our grandparent bought for us precisely because it was all we
needed in that moment. Often, we look back on our travels and regret not appreciating the beauty of what we were experiencing, oblivious as we were to the possibility that we might never pass there again.
Maybe that won’t happen so much anymore.
Of course, you might well be dreaming right now not of where you have been, but of where you hope to go. The travel industry is well aware of this, of course, and endlessly adaptable to how you are feeling now. So is the media, accounting for all of those experiential stories about glamorous destinations to plan for in the future (maybe just not right now, and we don’t quite know when, but we will be ready to welcome you back).
Right now, there even is a TV ad for a cruise line that focuses on an attractive couple and manages to show no other people at all. Not a single one. It is as if the pair are floating in some kind of duonirvana bubble, aided by invisible angels and lost in each other’s eyes.
Cruise companies know you’re worried about safety, and the industry is rebranding itself so as not to seem like a big, unsafe, free-for-all bacchanal. It now is selling itself as a protective mobile backdrop for you and your mate.
I don’t need a wild party, but watching that commercial the other night was still very depressing.
Travel for leisure, travel for yourself, really is all about the people you meet as you go. Right?
The question is not so much, “Which places do you remember?” as, “Whom do you remember finding there?”
And who will be there to meet you when you go back.