Travel notes

We are now about two months into the lockdown. Time to note what we are missing. Mine is travel. Journeys to visit family and friends. The possibility of going further.

Travelling is essential to me.  It involves going on an internal, expanding journey that is both time-consuming and often painful. Risks must be taken. Somehow, you come back changed, renewed and with an altered perspective on life, which helps with living.

In reality, I have been locked down economically and/or physically for years, so the journeys I can make are mostly through reading, listening to the radio or looking at the tv or on-line. There isn’t the smell or the touch of it, the taste, or the stretch of emotions I have from the real thing, but it is better than nothing.

Another reality creeps in.  That of the environmental impact of travel.

In my youth I read the warnings of Rachel Carson in The Silent Spring, later James Lovelock and more recently Greta Thunberg.  Climate change is real.

Since the world has been in lockdown, skies have cleared, non-human life has flourished. So, I see images of planes parked in airports, unable to fly and cruise liners anchored up, with mixed emotions.

My nose is currently in the Virago Book of Women Travellers. In it women travellers from the 1700s onwards tell of their journeys. Journeys which didn’t involve planes, though some needed trains. As women they took risks that perhaps men didn’t have to.  Personally, I think we take different risks. We also experience different things.  Think of the places men can’t go or do or share. There are some.

Landings

The man at the ticket desk says my seat is an aisle seat.  Disappointing.  Would have been wonderful to watch the earth go by beneath me.  I’m excited though.  To be able once more to fly away and leave my life in England behind for a while.

Looks like this is it.  Two mature women hugging their seats, looking slightly nervous, wearing hand knitted Fair Isle sweaters and neat white blouses, are occupying the middle and window seat. Oh well, it could be worse…at least they shouldn’t have tantrum fits and it will be easy to get out to the loo.

“It’s our first-time flying and we are a little scared”, says the woman perched on the window seat.  She still has her coat on.  She has grey hair, a face that looks pink and friendly, and steely grey eyes. She sounds like she has a slight Scottish accent.

I say something to reassure them and their shoulders drop a little. I start to tell them about what they can expect about the flight, and what a view it could be in daylight across America.

“You know if you want to, you can swap your place with me.  I think the only way I’ll get through it, is to not look down” says the lady in the window seat.

The plane takes off effortlessly, and there are no bumps from turbulence. There are no clouds and the vision is perfect as we chase the light all the way. I remember the route I took, when I drove across it the other way, in another life. It took weeks to drive the distance it is taking us in about five hours.

Flying across it doesn’t give me a sense of the vastness of it, its wildness or the differences, as it did then. We fly first over Canada, brown rocky terrain and the inland sea of Hudson Bay. I identify the patchwork fields of the Midwest, with eyes of translucent water.  Then the spine of the Rockies and feeling the low fall of the plane as it descends into LA.

When the announcement comes that we are to put on seatbelts and adjust to the upright position, the lady in my seat opens her eyes, sits herself up and brings out a silver hip flask. Her grey eyes twinkle.

“For the landing”, she says.  “Do you want one?”.

On the road

It had been a difficult day, steering against the wind on what had seemed like an endless road, through cropland, with unending sky cut diagonally in half, black and blue.  I found a Best Western for the night in Chamberlain, South Dakota.  It was 1985.  I don’t suppose it has changed much since then.  Those places never do.  People just pass through; stay for the night and then move on.

I was about three-fifths of my way and 10 days into my journey across America.  I had worked out a route that didn’t include big towns and cities – mainly because I wanted to experience small town America – going from just south of San Francisco to New York.  I arranged stops in Boulder, Colorado and in Minnesota, to visit friends and in New York, where I would board a plane home.  I got the car checked, had insurance, had enough money and a list of emergency telephone numbers. No Wi-Fi. No mobile phones. I still have the Rand McNally road atlas I used to plot my way from day to day.

California seemed worlds away in that motel room, as did the future worlds.  I showered and changed into the least dirty clothes I had and then watched TV, while writing up my notebook.  Unlike the first night of my journey, I didn’t feel scared or daunted.

I had developed a routine by then.  I camped in State campsites, pitching my tent near families or older couples, and got covered with their blanket of security.  I always camped before dark.  I generally cooked supper at the campsite, but bought breakfast, filling up at supermarkets, cafes and gas stations and I stopped about every two hours for water breaks and to stretch my legs.  Coffee and cake in the afternoon became a thing to do.  That seemed to have taken me safely through.  People were genuinely in awe of the California number plates on the car, which helped, but I think I did it by stealth really, surprising them and then rapidly moving on.

I had clocked up some sights; the Mojave desert with it’s Joshua Trees as seen in the movies, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada covered with white propellors turning in the wind, a green Death Valley full of red boulders, the road over the Rockies with gravel sliproads for the trucks, the Hoover dam which seemed to attract swarms of coaches full of people with big cameras and sunhats, the high deserts of Arizona bursting with spring flowers and cacti in bloom, the Grand Canyon forested to the rim and snaked through by the green Colorado river thousands of feet below, and the ruins of the Anasasi, their dwellings built into the rock and so shielded from the cold of winter and heat of summer.

When I’d finished my notebook I turned the TV off and listened to the noises.  When I had last stopped in a motel I couldn’t sleep.  It was a little like the one in Psycho.  This one wasn’t.  Not too recent but clean plastic surfaces and cotton sheets.  The faint noise of a TV, but nothing too close.

Today had started quite well. I had broken camp at a reservoir site, bought breakfast then drove on and visited the Wind Caves I’d been told about.   The pink latticed rock formations reminded of the desert roses I’d seen from Saudi Arabia.  I hadn’t liked the experience of total blackness when the ranger turned out the lights.  I had felt suddenly immobile and desperate. Was death like this?

It was after the cave visit that the wind and rain came. The road became the thing to concentrate on.  The heads of Mount Rushmore took me by surprise, leering out of the mist. I drove on, the wind and rain building up, and got onto the Interstate highway. The Badlands rolled away, followed by huge fields patched by squares of catchment water.  I began to see signs offering missile crews coffee at 5 cents a cup.  There had been a rainbow.

I turned out the light. Minnesota tomorrow.