Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and Points Beyond - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 109

Whatever romance may have existed up there in the clouds, once upon a time, it's long gone now. These
days, the experience is relentlessly drab. Still, there's no puzzle as to why people continue to fly. Airplanes
equal convenience. They get us places faster—orders of magnitude faster.
I wouldn't want to deny people the option of flight. At the same time, I think it's fair to acknowledge
that progress comes with trade-offs. Yes, we've gained convenience. But along the way we've deprived
ourselves of some extremely wonderful things. The starry skies of an Atlantic Ocean crossing. The bleak
beauty of an old Russian train chugging its way through Siberia. The jaunty freedom of a road trip with a
carful of friends.
And there's no going back. Along with the ability to cross an ocean or a continent in six hours comes
a societal expectation that you'll do so. Your two weeks of summer vacation time are predicated on the
assumption that you'll fly to Italy for your honeymoon—not take a full week to float there, look around for
an hour, and then take another week to float back.
As a result, when people think about travel these days they think purely of destinations. They barely give
a nod to the actual . . . traveling. The problem with this isn't just that we lose out on the pleasures of trains,
ships, bicycles, and all those other terrific modes of rationally paced, ground-level transport. I think we also
dim our experience of the destinations themselves. We've forgotten the benefit of surface travel: It forces
you to feel, deep in your bones, the distance you've covered; and it gradually eases you into a new context
that exists not just outside your body, but also inside your head. (It eliminates travel sicknesses, too: Re-
becca and I never once got ill as we moved slowly and steadily between clusters of regional bacteria.)
Teleporting from airport to airport doesn't allow for the same kind of spiritual transformation you un-
dergo whenever you make an overland trip. When you take a seven-day vacation bookended by flights, I
would in fact argue that your soul never completely leaves home. You've experienced it, I'm sure: Your
airplane has landed in Quito, but your heart and mind are still stuck back in Boston. The sudden, radic-
al change in your surroundings sparks a glitch in your processor. You know you're physically standing in
Ecuador, yet the sensation is more like watching a really immersive television documentary about Ecuador.
And then, at last, when you begin to feel whole again, your feet firmly planted in the foreign soil (no longer
some hollow seedcase that's been dropped, weightless, into an alien world), it's time to teleport straight
back to the comfortable familiarity of home.
I acknowledge that for most of us, it's no longer feasible to take an ocean liner to South America on our
summer holiday. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a better, richer experience if we did. So my ad-
vice to you is this: The next time you want to travel—I mean really travel, not just take a vacation—please
consider getting wherever you want to go without taking a plane.
I promise you will look at that globe on the shelf in your study in a whole new light. You will run your
finger along the curve of the sphere and think: I know what this distance feels like. What this ocean looks
like. What it means to trace the surface of this earth.
THE train leaves Chicago after dark. We're asleep as it makes middle-of-the-night stops in South Bend,
Sandusky, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. We wake up in West Virginia, just a few hours outside D.C.
In these final moments, I feel less triumphant than lost. I did it—I circled the earth. But now the journey
is done. And what will I do without the imperative of motion? Where am I going if I am not going any-
where?
Our arrival in Washington is an anticlimax. No cheering crowds at the station to herald our accomplish-
ment. No confetti in our hair. We're two more commuters getting off the train. I want people to notice the
wear on our backpacks, the swagger in our walk, the steely glint in our eyes, and have them wonder where