One of the great pleasures of travel is struggle. Those memorable moments when, with varying levels of concern, you realize you are a bit lost. Or you have wearily, after many reconnoiters with yourself, stumbled upon some unexpected sight, tavern, or place to sleep for the night.
This is
the antithesis of the cruise ship. There, besides the potential to get sick
from the buffet, you are cocooned in a situation that might as well be a
stay-cation with a high definition tv. The amenities are all things you could
find closer to home. The experience is a pampering and entertainment - the
travel is auxiliary, if not tertiary. Danger is absent, and so, therefore, is
the point of travel. If the ship never left harbor, there'd be minimal
difference in experience.
All the great travel writers discuss the need for a bit of
imperilment. The thrill, of course, is that you get to test your capabilities
in a way not often afforded the modern person. Commuting on the same road,
going to the same job with differing but similar tasks and problems to solve: you rarely feel the master of your fate in these daily situations. Travel
presents novel challenges: navigating a subway map in a foreign language, using
a topographic map while backpacking. Regardless of relative 'ruggedness' the
sense of accomplishment is what counts. You managed to figure it out, get out
of trouble, find that place you were looking for, win the trust of someone on
the other side of the world.
Traveling alone is, of course, the purest expression of this
flirtation with danger. Lucky are those who accumulate a wealth of such
stories: scrambling over a rock ledge, the relief of finding the inn late at
night in the rain, the pride in navigating your way through new land. These
victories, once essential to our ancestors, are increasingly remote to us. By
finding ourselves immersed in a foreign place - National Park, remote country,
new city - we get to access that validating struggle once more.
For many well-off modern young people, this experience is a
rite of passage. We spend a period of our late teens and early twenties in
these travels and explorations. For most, though (around 70% of us), at some
point, this isolated traveling is changed, as we become parents. We may still
take trips on our own, perhaps, but a new type of travel has emerged: one where
struggle and victory is measured in our ability to keep our children reasonably
safe.
Now the easier, harmless, path seems far more inviting. The
imperilment of travel is increasingly held at bay. We may even contemplate a
cruise, or a trip to Disneyland as the better alternative. The terms of the
trade are enticing: entertainment and fun for the low, low price of travel.
Such a calculus beckons our deal-hungry minds. The cost to us is merely giving
up the struggle travel entails.
And why not? After all, our children cannot, meaningfully,
'travel' the same way an adult can. They cannot, safely, be put into those
situations. Of course they will find similar situations anyway, at home,
depending on how relatively feral they are. They will still need to solve
problems, get out of trouble, and work through hardship, yes - but that
describes an evening of wrestling with pre-algebra, not the type of danger
inherent in travel.
Many seek an in-between answer: going to places. It looks
like travel. After all, it involved a long car ride or flight. You saw things
in person, and you can boast you've been there. It wasn't as cozy as a cruise:
you slept in a tent, or had to deal with odors and screaming children (perhaps
your own) on a plane. Going places is better than going nowhere, but it's not
the same as travel. Discomfort is not the same as danger. The struggles are
reduced to irritations: delayed takeoffs, rude waiters, noisy neighboring
campsites.
Edward Abbey, the great author of the American deserts,
warned us against this type of tourism. "You can't see anything from a
car;" he writes in Desert Solitaire, "you've got to get out of
the contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the
sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to
mark your trail you'll see something, maybe." Barry Lopez, in Arctic
Dreams, makes the same point: "The plane is a great temptation; but to
learn anything of the land, to have any sense of the relevancy of the pertinent
maps, you must walk away from the planes. You must get off into the country and
sleep on the ground, or take an afternoon to take a tussock apart. Travel on
the schedule of muskoxen."
Does this same sense of 'travel' apply to places less harsh
than the tundra or the canyonlands? I think so. So long as there is real
struggle, it is travel. If the landscape doesn't provide it, there must be
another element of the unfamiliar, of putting yourself in a challenging, potentially dangerous, new
situation. Spending time adapting to a culture that runs radically different
from your own, and overcoming your ideas, sense of time, prejudices - that can
do it. The struggle of being surrounded in the ebb and flow of a thousand
voices you do not understand, and the need to make yourself understood - that
can do it. Depending on just how sheltered you were raised, even navigating the
public transit of a different city in your own country can qualify, perhaps, so
long as you do it without help. Asking for directions is smart,
but does cheat one of the validation of figuring it out on your own.
Regardless, then, of the locale - whether the wilderness or
the big city - the struggle still remains: looming and blockading the cautious,
responsible parents from engaging with travel with their children. To overcome
that obstacle is perhaps not even advisable - imperiling children is an
offense, after all.
So, we must as parents, perhaps, settle for going places.
Letting them learn the rhythms and patterns of leaving their homes. Navigating
terminals, rest stops, hotels, campgrounds. 'Going places' becomes another
piece of their expanding universe, filed away with 'school', 'the backyard',
and 'holidays'.
But, if we are fortunate, as they get older, towards their teens and twenties, our children will break free from merely going places, and discover that magic feeling - the swell in the breast, the goosebumps on the scalp - that accompanies finding they can overcome the struggle. That they are now capable of charting their way through the challenge of the unfamiliar, all while far from home. Then they too, someday, will understand what it means to travel with all its danger.
