Выбрать главу

Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather. — GTES

Frontiers

A mushroom-and-dunghill relationship exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. — OPE

In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss: like a small policeman directing traffic. — POH A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God. — OPE

Looking across the river, I realized I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there — music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actuaclass="underline" people do things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope, the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America. — OPE

A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality. — DSS

Air Travel

There is not much to say about airplane 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 airplane passenger is a time traveler. 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 focused 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 is 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." — OPE

Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor. — OPE

Airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked. — GTES

Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist's, even to the chairs. — FAF

A train journey is travel; everything else — planes especially — is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands. — GRB

The Return Journey

In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. And it is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. — RIR

Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That

was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back. — DSS

One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed. — HIO

2. The Navel of the World

ON EASTER ISLAND, OR RAPA NUI, WHERE I WAS camping and paddling my kayak, traveling for my Happy Isles of Oceania book, an islander said to me, "This is the pito."I said, "Really?" The term is a cognate of the Hawaiian word (piko) for navel. The Easter Islander went on,"Te Pito te Henua,"and explained: Navel of the World. ¶ Perhaps just the delusion you would entertain on a smallish windswept rock in the middle of a cold ocean, two thousand miles from the nearest land. But it seems that the name may have been derived from the birth of a child by a woman who had just arrived on the first canoe, guided by the way-finder Hotu-Matua, the original ancestor and discoverer of Rapa Nui. The ritual cutting of the baby's navel may have been the earliest human ritual performed on the island. The date of this is disputed, but it would have been somewhere around the year 500—amazing when you consider the canoe-building and navigational skills required for such a voyage. W. J. Thomson, in his exhaustive ethnographic study of the island, Te Pito te Henua, claims that this was the name that Hotu-Matua gave to the island on encountering it. Seen from a distance, the singular volcanic formation, the dead cone of Rana Raraku, a lump of bare rock in an empty sea, certainly looks like a petrified bellybutton.

In Delphi, Greece, wandering for The Pillars of Hercules, I was shown a rock and told by a guide in a solemn voice that it was the Omphalos, the Navel of the World. This got me thinking about the belief that one's village or town is the center of the world. I am from Boston, and from childhood heard Boston referred to locally as "the Hub" — usually by headline writers of the Boston Globe. The Hub is actually the short form of "the Hub of the Universe." This hyperbole derives from Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, writing about a Bostonian who says, "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system."

It seems to me a harmless conceit. Here is a list of other earthly navels:

China: The Chinese called (and still call) their country Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, meaning the center of the world.

Arizona: Baboquivari Peak, near Sasabe in Pima County. The Tohono O'odham people regard this mountain as the Navel of the World, the place where, after the great flood subsided, humans emerged to populate the earth.

Cuzco, Peru: In Creation myth the word "Qosqo," in Quechua, means "the Navel of the World," and Cuzco was regarded as such by the Inca.

Jerusalem: The Al Aqsa Mosque ("the Furthermost") is dome-shaped to reflect the belief that it marks the Navel of the World.