This past Sunday morning was, for me, a time of high frustration. I had awoken at five a.m. in order to drive a friend two hours to a half-marathon in North Conway, New Hampshire. We foolishly braved a horrendous snowstorm and made it within 20 minutes of our destination, only to learn that the event had been canceled. On our way home my friend remarked that, at the very least, our rugged adventure on mostly local roads had allowed us to mentally place Dartmouth in the context of the broader state of New Hampshire. I began to contemplate how the convenience of modern transportation has fundamentally warped our notion of what it means to travel.
In the four to five hours that I spent driving back and forth through towns on Sunday, I could have flown to California. For many of us, "travel" is associated with relatively quick plane rides from place to place. We enter an airport, drop out of the world for a few hours, and when we exit the airport again we are almost magically in a new environment. We make no spatial connection between the place of departure and the place of arrival. Maps at best serve as abstractions they may help to give a visual conception of location to travelers, but they do not meaningfully communicate the extent of the distance that has been crossed.
Of course, national and global travel has not always functioned in this disconnected manner. Before the advent of air transportation and the construction of trans-national highway systems the act of getting to a destination was a true journey. Travelers would be forced to pass through various local settlements and changing natural environments while en route. Whether the trip was a quick jaunt across a state or a voyage around the world, those involved would find their conception of the spatial scale of the globe to be forever altered. This is no longer true even for people who travel long distances by land. I drive to Dartmouth from my home in New Jersey, but I would not call my movement along the static scenery of an inter-state highway a journey in any meaningful sense.
The modern conception of travel ensures that we often have a very narrow and incomplete understanding of the places that we visit. The travel writer Paul Theroux has noted that this phenomenon is responsible for the Western perception of Africa as a "Dark Continent." Travelers who go to Africa as part of work for NGOs will often have a very specific experience, and do not develop the wider picture that travel throughout the continent would generate. I myself have lived in New Hampshire for over a year, but did not spend any significant time outside the boundaries of Hanover until a few days ago.
This altered perspective on travel has additional consequences. When, for instance, students fly to underdeveloped countries to volunteer, they are able to isolate that experience into a unique mental compartment. It is almost as if this different environment is a world unto itself entirely detached from the world that the volunteers have come from. Once the expedition is over, the students can return home and rejoin their old lives while quickly forgetting about the environment they just left. Modern transportation technology ensures that we do not form logical connections between the spaces that we consider our homes and the spaces that we briefly visit.
Our shift in perspective has led the act of travel to be imbued with a voyeuristic aura. The emotional resonance of experiencing new cultures and natural vistas will inevitably be dampened when we mentally distance ourselves from the places we temporarily occupy. The essential richness of many parts of the human experience disappears when we do not internalize such aspects within our own reality.
All of this is not to say that we should forego aircraft and highways in favor of boats and horses. Improvements in technology have greatly cheapened the cost of travel and have opened up a wealth of opportunities to experience different cultures and explore unique natural environments. However, we should be cognizant of the fact that when we simply jump from place to place we are missing out on a crucial context that can make travel infinitely more fulfilling.
