[From the Archives] Arriving Without Traveling
Changing Perceptions of Travel and The Many Reasons We Seek Adventure
Greetings fellow wanderers,
Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander has surpassed 500 subscribers, I am grappling with the fact that most new subscribers may not have access to or are familiar with some of my initial writings. With 86 posts in the archive, I want to expose these paywalled posts to newcomers.
That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology, please consider supporting my writing which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack. In addition, the proceeds will go toward publishing and promoting my forthcoming book ‘An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture’. The book is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society.
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Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and supported my work thus far. Cheers! -JSB
“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 then that the unconscious motto of the day is, “It’s all about the destination, not the journey.” However, arriving without traveling wasn’t always an option. Depending on where you cast your dart on any period of history or point on 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 19th 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 as a young man. 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.
Although 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 anymore 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.
However, those who seek adventure tend to report having a different perspective on what travel means and how they experience the world—a view that aligns more with how people once perceived travel before modern transportation. Traditionally, getting from A to B virtually anywhere on the globe required an extraordinary amount of planning, imagination, foresight, traversing, and wonder. Nowadays, this time frame is little more than an irksome layover in one or more airports or a long tedious drive—a purgatory in which we’re anxiously waiting, biding time, to arrive at our destinations. The abolishment of that interlude period of our travels and the high speeds at which we are now accustomed to traveling helps explain why we perceive the world as getting smaller and filled up and why we may have the claustrophobic feeling that “there are too many of us on this planet!”
Today it has become harder to fathom that the Earth is still quite a sprawling place and remains rich in natural and cultural landscapes. In a world ever more demanding of our time, attention, and energy, it makes sense why efficiency is the pulsing heart of technology, business practice, and transportation, but we should still bear in mind, as Einstein reflected, that “logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” To modern-day adventurers who encourage their fellow wanderers to fixate on their travels and not so much on an endpoint, this time frame is most celebrated and captured by the phrase,
“It’s all about the journey, not the destination.”
What tradeoffs have we made for the sake of traveling more efficiently?
Travelers and adventurers throughout time provide us with some important questions and invaluable thoughts to reflect on. What are the initial causes that provoke an individual to snap out of their lethargic state of being and leap into the woods for a few semi-solitary months to backpack a long-distance trail? Why would someone climb on a freight train just to see where it goes? Why is it rare or taboo for a high schooler to graduate early and explore a foreign culture all on their own? Are only a few of us somehow inherently drawn to confront the unknown and take these sorts of risks? More broadly, why do we seek adventure?
There are many plausible reasons for this last question, some of which I discovered from those wandering the Appalachian Trail over a decade ago. Seeking adventure has a lot to do with curiosity, challenging ourselves, and personal growth. Many of those who seek adventure tend to be in a transition of life—recovering from war, trauma, divorce, or the loss of a loved one. Psychologically, seeking adventure has to do with the freshness of beginning something new that brightens our moods, hooked by the pursuit of serendipity. These experiences transform and alter a person’s perceptions of themselves, the world, and others. Some, in the spirit of Thoreau, might do it for feelings of simplicity and renewal because they find themselves disgusted by modernity’s lingering obsession with material acquisition and disillusioned with the status quo in contemporary society.
Others may seek adventure for the sake of optimal experiences and what famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined as reaching a “flow” state in which “people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”[1] Some seek adventure “to rebel against the inevitability of aging” as Taz, a 71-year-old Alabama man we encountered on the Appalachian Trail, smirkingly put it in his aged southern drawl. Others do it to escape from and eschew social responsibilities. Some of us need time to reflect on who we are and how we relate to the world (see Why Travel and Adventure are Existential Concerns).
Adventure can also be done for the sake of doing something vastly different and making an attempt to change one’s life. We can do it to fill a spiritual void with purpose and meaning. And we do it to revolt against those who are fearful and say it cannot be done—to prove that it can be done—as was the case with Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail alone around the world from 1895 to 1898,
“I was aware that no other vessel had sailed in this manner around the globe, but would have been loath to say another could not do it…I was greatly amused, therefore, by the flat assertions of an expert that it could not be done.”[2]
For me, the adventure of backpacking the Appalachian Trail was initially about self-reliance and a personal challenge but it became much more than that. After spending nearly four months living out of a tent with my partner, (now wife) Hilary, I realized that this experience had solidified our relationship significantly. We discovered that an incredible bond had grown between us and it was as if we had stepped into an alternate time dimension where those four months were the equivalent of a decade spent together. Thus, the meaning of adventure is multidimensional and morphs in time for us.
We can therefore see that many reasons provoke an individual to travel and inspire their adventures. But even though most of us do have many reasons and the desire to experience the thrills of an adventurous life, many of us do not think of ourselves as leading such a life. Many of us use the idiom of wanting to “see the world” when we become cognizant of the larger world as adolescents and young adults or want to do so in our later years of retired life, yet how many of us take the initiative to follow through and choreograph those quests? How do we learn to better structure adventure into our lives in a modern context?
I will explore some of the reasons we may fail to be more adventurous in my upcoming book. Suffice it to say, that I believe part of the answer to this is philosophical and relies first on asking ourselves whether or not we truly value travel and adventure. Can we foresee that there is something to be gained from indulging in travel and adventure? Do any of the above-listed reasons why people seek adventures resonate with us? If the answer to this is yes, then the process of incorporating travel and adventure into our lives can begin or be renewed.
Traveling and attempting to have adventures in a modern context is not easy. Time, money, and many of life’s uncertainties inhibit our wanderlust. And when we do find the time and means to explore, our mechanized system of transportation can demoralize us and make us feel as though we are little more than Amazon boxes needing to be whisked quickly across the globe to our destinations—to once again arrive without traveling.
Much of technology and society has changed rapidly in recent centuries, yet what many of those who wander have proven is that the many reasons we seek adventure remain timeless. What’s more, those who wander prove that modern adventures are achievable in a modern context, yet perhaps they are more dependent on how we look at them. As Marcel Proust once wrote,
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
If you enjoyed this article, consider these related articles from Those Who Wander:
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
I am currently offering a special through the end of January that will get you 25% off! Can you spare $3.75 to support my writing?
[1] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 4.
[2] Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (New York: Dover Books, 1956), p. vii.
Love your musings, Justin. Such thoughtful reflections on our “mechanized systems” of travel. This quote up top hit me right away - “Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors - home, car, gym, office, shops - disconnected from each other”. I’d not quite put words to it, but so true!
Great piece Justin. A lot resonated with me here. I can add a corollary to the journey vs destination: the process vs. the goal. We all seem to become very goal oriented, without wanting to enjoy the process. Everyone wants the view from the mountain, few are willing climb it. We are a "hack", "tips and tricks" and shortcut culture.
If anyone ever succeeded in putting a tram to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or to the top of Everest, it wouldn't be a thing any longer. Making it easy dilutes the experience entirely. Conquered, you pulled all its teeth out, the teeth that sink into you, and leave a mark.
I remember reading that Ed Abbey once wrote about the National parks, and the roads and over-crowding that occurred. He desperately wanted to convey that it shouldn't be easy to get there: the journey made the destination all that much more enticing.