My usual question, unanswered by these — by most — travel books, is: How did y ou get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet, because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what's the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, 'From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra. .'
Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step (now past the cuckoo clock, now down Fulton to the Fellsway) brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway labourers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as rivetting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.
The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane's tilted fuselage. The joke-opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody. How does it go? 'Below us lay the tropical green, the flooded valley, the patchwork quilt of farms, and as we penetrated the cloud I could see dirt roads threading their way into the hills and cars so small they looked like toys. We circled the airport and, as we came in low for the landing, I saw the stately palms, the harvest, the rooftops of the shabby houses, the square fields stitched together with crude fences, the people like ants, the colourful. .'
I have never found this sort of guesswork very convincing. When I am landing in a plane my heart is in my mouth; I wonder — doesn't everyone? — if we are going to crash. My life flashes before me, a brief selection of sordid and pathetic trivialities. Then a voice tells me to stay in my seat until the plane comes to a complete stop; and when we land the loudspeakers break into an orchestral version of Moon River. I suppose if I had the nerve to look around I might see a travel writer scribbling, 'Below us lay the tropical green — '
Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? Perhaps there is nothing to say. There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time-zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright — from the moment he departs, his mind is focussed on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above it empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, 'What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.'
But apologies are not necessary. An aeroplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston — but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport. If the passenger conceives of this species of transfer as travel and offers the public his book, the first foreigner the reader meets is either a clothes-grubbing customs man or a moustached demon at the immigration desk. Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that aeroplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armour.
This is obvious. What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as the trains run from Medford, Massachusetts; to end my book where travel books begin.
I had nothing better to do. I was at a stage I had grown to recognize in my writing life. I had just finished a novel, two years of indoor activity. Looking for something else to write, I found that instead of hitting nails on the head I was only striking a series of glancing blows. I hated cold weather. I wanted some sunshine. I had no job — what was the problem? I studied maps and there appeared to be a continuous track from my house in Medford to the Great Plateau of Patagonia in southern Argentina. There, in the town of Esquel, one ran out of railways. There was no line to Tierra del Fuego, but between Medford and Esquel rather a lot of them.
In this vagrant mood I boarded that first train, the one people took to work. They got off — their train-trip was already over. I stayed on: mine was just beginning.
And at South Station, my skin crinkling into crepe from the dull cold, some friends appeared. Vapour billowed from beneath the train; they were like people materializing from mist, their breath trailing in clouds. We drank champagne out of paper cups and hopped to keep warm. My family burst into view, pumping hands. In his excitement, my father forgot my name; but my brothers were calm, one ironical, the other squinting at a trim young man on the platform and saying, 'A dash of lavender, Paul — watch out, he's getting on!' I boarded, too, and waved goodbye to my well-wishers. As the Lake Shore Limited pulled out of Platform 151 felt as if I was still in a provisional state, as if everyone was going to get off soon, and that only I was riding the train to the end of the line.
It was a nice conceit, but I kept it to myself. If a stranger asked me where I was going, I said Chicago. It was partly superstition — it seemed unlucky, so early in the trip, to give my precise destination. It was also to avoid startling the questioner with a ridiculous place name
(Tapachula, Managua, Bogotá), or arousing his curiosity and setting off an interrogation. Anyway, this was still home, still familiar: the bent backs of city brownstones, the preposterous solemnity of the Boston University spires, and across the frozen Charles River the white steeples of Harvard, each one in its frailty like a failed attempt at an ivory tower. The air was cold and clear, and it carried the cry of the train whistle through Back Bay. American train whistles have a bitter-sweet change in pitch, and the most insignificant train plays this lonesome note perfectly to the dreamers along the tracks. It is what is known in music as a Diminished Third: Hoo-wee! Hoo-wee!
There was some traffic on the salted roads, but no pedestrians. It was too cold to walk anywhere. The outskirts of Boston looked evacuated: no people, every door and window tightly shut, and the dirt-flecked snow piled beside the empty streets and covering the parked cars. We passed a television station bricked up to look like a country mansion, a solid duck pond, an armoury with grey fake battlements that was about as convincingly military as the kind you see stamped on the back of a cornflakes box to be assembled with scissors and glue. I knew the names of these suburbs, I had been here many times, but because I was headed so far away I saw every point we passed as important. It was as if I was leaving home for the first time, and for good.