May
20, 2020
Today’s
image – Americans love to travel. Sometimes
I think, we see our mobility as another constitutional right, the right to go where
we damn well please. It’s become part of the American existential, no doubt, ingrained
by our immigrant ancestors, embedded in our psyche before five like the other
pieces of our implicit upbringing. It is
an intractable attitude now and probably a driver for our restlessness and
discontent with the shelter in place directives. We just can’t be still that long unless we become
impaired, and then woe be the ones who have to live with us as we grouse and
complain.
The
travel industry and adventure authors like Jack London and Elizabeth Gilbert have
fanned that sojourner flame. Maybe it’s not the motion of travel but an insatiable
curiosity. We want to experience
ourselves in other geographies – what they can tickle out of us, what new moxie
they demand we bring. Then some have
found their seasonal peregrination paths, vestiges of our bird brain parts.
That didn’t come out right.
Maybe
some of us want to use it to hone our consciousness like sipping a different
atmosphere or bathing in a new watershed. Even absorbing variation in the light
spectrum by changing latitudes, these things might just have subtle effects on our
alchemies, feeling therapeutic in intangible ways. Maybe our passion for gathering
new global experiences has another driver – part of a planetary imperative to
widen our identities and socially evolve toward a more planetary-minded
species. That’s a big pipe dream but think about it. Our favorite innovations make
it possible for us to populate almost any habitat. The big problem with these
adaptive piecemeal enterprises is that they have myopia. And one of the agreed benefits of travel is
to see how others make a life on the planet. TaDa! Our epistemology broads with
a perspective that transcends the old school thinking like exploitation and
colonialism. I have a dream!
Regardless
of the reasons we yearn to take that annual vacation – especially come June,
July, and August, without a doubt, this irksome virus will put kinks in our
travel MOs. We must pay attention when we all we want to do to flow and relax
into our reunions with missed family and friends. As I talked with an old partner this morning
about making plans to visit the far flung family, the conversation turned that
stone over several times. If he flies, how will he meet those that pick him up
at the airport? Just climb into their car? Can they meet him with a spray
bottle of disinfectant and hose him down before he get in? Can he duck into a bathroom at the baggage
claim to wipe down and change his clothes?
Geesh! This new normal is exhausting!
For
the last six months, I’ve been planning a massive western US car touring and
camping trip loop for July, dropping in on friends and family along the circuit. I wonder how I’ll tweak my regular excursion
plans. Can I make my vehicle a safe bio-bubble and avoid becoming that COVID Mary? I read that with state and national
parks reopening, and with most visitors ditching their masks and social
distancing, it could be dicey to visit them.
Check! Then, there is another speculation that the virus will recede and
give us a break (as do other coronaviruses) during the summer. For the resort towns and their visitors, I
hope this is the case. We will need it
to revive ourselves for the second pandemic forecasted for November.
But
we are the heroes we have been waiting for, right? And if we want summer vacations to be part of
the new normal, we’d better figure them out too. Humans are here, after all, because
tiny rodent-like mammals climbed out of their self-isolating burrows and made a
new life on the bones of the megafauna after the meteor strike sixty-six million
years ago. Clearly we have a tradition
to uphold.
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