Arriving Without Traveling

Changing Perceptions of Travel and The Many Reasons We Seek Adventure

Photo by Tomas Williams on Unsplash

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot, everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it…exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, walking travels both terrains.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

In today’s world, when we think about traveling most of us tend to conjure up images of planes, trains, automobiles, overstuffed luggage, neck pillows, and long uncomfortable layovers sitting in bad airport lighting as we catch a red-eye flight. Traveling is often synonymous with the mundane, inducing heavy sighs and anxiety, and something we do as a dull intermediary period between here and there. We travel to work. We travel to the grandparents’ house for the weekend. Or we travel for a business trip or an annual vacation. Confined in little metal boxes, from a bird’s eye view, we eerily resemble packages being shuffled across the globe.

In Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, she makes an interesting observation that modern transportation technology has given rise to something unique in our time: the ability for us to arrive without traveling. With planes, trains, and automobiles, we have the extraordinary capacity to obliterate space and skip everything between points A and B. “Destination weddings” have become popular in recent years and entire transportation industries promise to deliver us as efficiently as possible to wherever we need to go on the planet. We may say the unconscious motto of the day is, “It’s all about the destination, not the journey.” However, depending on when you cast your dart on a period of history or a world map, traveling could mean something different.

If we peer into the history of modern transportation for a moment and think of how trains transformed life in the 19^th century, we see how our perceptions of the world have been radically altered in just the last couple of centuries. In his work, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch states, “The train was experienced as a projectile, and traveling on it as being shot through the landscape—thus losing control of one’s senses…the traveler who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveler and became, as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a parcel.” The celebrated general and president, Ulysses S. Grant feverishly writing in his memoirs, reflected on his first trip on a train when he was headed to West Point. Full steam ahead at 18 miles per hour, the trip seemed to him as though it was “annihilating space.” This mode of transportation ushered in a revolutionary way of perceiving (or perhaps not perceiving) the world.

Though today we’ve kept the all-encompassing term “traveler” to refer to anyone who travels by any kind of means, whether it be via trains, planes, or cars, there is something distinct between this form of traveler and the type of traveler we might think more of as an adventurer or wanderer. Modern methods of mechanized traveling typically exclude us, the traveler, from three things: distance, time, and place. In other words, our bodies and minds do not feel or experience the true distance, time, and places that would normally have impacted us in rather dramatic and meaningful ways had we traveled in the way we evolved to locomote—at a pace of three miles an hour by walking. For most of us today, walking often feels cumbersome and antithetical to keeping up with our demanding and fast-paced modern lives. And perhaps we can be forgiven for not wanting to mimic the burdensome mode of slogging our oxen and horses in the manner of Oregon Trail travelers.