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PARTING SHOT

The Uneasy Globetrotter: A Few Reservations About Travel
By Chris Tucker |

once dated a woman who frequently announced her desire to see the entire world, every country, before settling down. I don’t know whether she ever made it to the garden spots of Paraguay, Greenland, or Morocco, but years later, even after trips of my own to Ireland, the Bahamas, South Africa, and a dozen major American cities, I remain as baffled as ever by her ambition. And having met numerous others who are never happier than when traveling-anywhere-I have concluded (hat a sizable chunk of mankind shares that lady’s strange passion.

As for me, the day they passed around the Old Wanderlust, I must have gotten the last swig from the bottle. Don’t get me wrong: I suppose I’m lightly-to-medium traveled, and most of the trips have been pleasant, a few quite enjoyable. But with rare exceptions, of which more in a moment, I think of travel as I do a dream. Once the trip is over, good or bad, the memory doesn’t linger long, and the experience seems to have little to do with everyday life.

Perhaps I make a virtue of necessity. Until I was in my thirties, I did little traveling beyond the usual family vacations as a child-short hops to Galveston or Hot Springs, with an occasional longer haul to Colorado. In my twenties a string of jobs offering more knowledge than money limited my globetrotting possibilities. Twice I have lived uncomfortably close to railroad tracks, but contrary to the old song, I guess the sound of the outward bound did not make me a slave to wanderin’ ways.

So, at the risk of sounding dull and provincial, I did not grow up a citizen of the world. After a career change from teaching to journalism, I broadened my horizons a bit, often traveling long distances at great expense (luckily, not my own) to interview people. These jaunts took me to Washington to bird-dog politicians and to New York to profile actors and playwrights, but the schedules usually left little time for sightseeing. Only after three trips to New York did I visit that tourist icon, the Empire State Building. But there were moments of revelation. On one lightning visit to New York, I was on my way in a taxi to question a famous playwright, hastily skimming the last pages of his most famous play. We stopped at a red light and I looked up to find myself eyeball to eyeball with Andy Warhol, who was handing out copies of his Interview magazine on the street. So far as I could tell, nobody passing by gave him a second look. This was my first inkling that cities, like people, really can have radically different natures. (Before, I had dismissed such ideas as being like art-snob talk, in which we hear gushings about the “free-floating linearity” of a sculpture made of melted Baby Ruths.) Maybe there was something to it after all. A city with too much going on to notice Andy Warhol-or with the good sense to ignore him-was a different sort of place indeed.

If I give just two, not three cheers for travel, my reservations are not due to the usual hassles of delayed flights, rude cabbies, or Montezuma’s revenge. Well, there was the time I was flying out of Denver to Aspen, there to visit the summer think-tank of his Rocky Mountain Highness. John Denver. I was given the very last boarding pass on the connecting flight. Once aboard. I found every seat taken, so I was dumped back onto the runway for a six-hour wait until the next flight. Airline officials, confronted by a screaming lunatic, speculated that a woman with a lap child (may her lungs collapse) must have given Junior my seat.

No, I find travel to be a mixed blessing for other reasons. For one, pleasure travel can induce an odd sense of contextlessness-a word that must have a German equivalent often uttered in Woody Allen movies. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the sociologist Erving Goffman argues that we take our sense of identity from other people who know us in the contexts of work and love and play. Traveling on business, we take some of that familiar context with us; I ask questions, take notes for something I will write back in the known world. When we travel purely for pleasure, we are thrust outside that web of relationships that knits up our world. And the more exotic me destination, the more likely we will be reduced to a mere camera eye, a sponge for soaking up pleasure, or, worst of all-the tourist, the quintessential ugly American.

My worst moment as a tourist came on a trip to South Africa, a year or so before the first state of emergency was declared. Our hosts assumed we would want to write about the Zulus, once the fiercest warriors on the continent. So we were taken to a mock “village” in Zululand, a creation that could have been part of Six Flags Over Africa. As we approached the village, a little girl raced ahead of us to alert her elders. It was showtime. Then followed the ritualistic Dance For the Gawking Tourist and some mutter-ings from a medicine man. We were even allowed to take pictures of the sacred objects of the “tribe.” Tips welcome, of course. Next show at four o’clock.

Surely this was travel at its worst. I felt foolish and exploited, and keenly aware that I was exploiting them as well. Oddly, I got a similar feeling a few months ago in New Orleans. Walking down Bourbon Street, I was accosted by a barker in front of a strip joint. “Hey, c’mon in, folks. Orgy’s just about t’start,” he said with dead eyes. It was drizzling. The street smelled of stale beer and trash. A few nights like this could make one reconsider the arguments of Jerry Fal-well or check the classifieds for a hair shirt.

Still, while I know travel has its drawbacks, I go, and hope to go again. I have loved Galveston, my first vacation spot, through its long decline and recent spurts of gentrification. And I recall standing in awe at the Cape of Good Hope, watching an orange sun drop over the ocean’s edge, and looking southward-no land between us and Antarctica.

Then there is New York. Without disputing any of the horror stories, I find it an inspiring, infinitely interesting city. I couldnever live there but I love to visit, and alwaysreturn wishing to be better, more creativethan I am. I remember the first time I walkedinto the Museum of Modern Art and mademy way to the room that houses Monet’shuge Miter Lilies, that shimmering, hypnotic paean to simple water, light, and color. Then I understood one of the lastingpleasures of travel: the discovery thatsomething we have only read about or seenin films actually exists and, in a sense,belongs to anyone who beholds it. A city thatis home to even one such splendor is worthall the problems of getting there.

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