Travel: The Reality

Let’s think for a moment what the actual act of travel entails.

You voluntarily yank yourself out of your comfort zone, cram a tiny percentage of your stuff – stuff you really like and have spent years quite deliberately accumulating, by the way – into a bag, head out of your cozy home where everything is just the way you like it, and fight through traffic to get to the dystopian hellscape that is the modern airport.

Like, you go to the AIRPORT. On PURPOSE.

Right from the get-go, this is just all kinds of wrong.

There, you will fight through packs of strangers who are similarly stressed and tense and nervous about being late, just as you are. Then you will be subjected to a humiliating series of pointless ‘security’ inspections of varying degrees of theatricality, herded through an array of corridors and chutes – which are alarmingly reminiscent of those you find in cattle slaughtering facilities.

Next, you are met by overworked flight attendants whose impatience and loathing is barely disguised by practiced, glassy smiles who herd you into jamming yourself into a tiny seat fit for a child or a dollhouse inside a ridiculous metal tube that should in no way be trusted with your life while hurtling through the sky at 600 miles per hour.

Finally, you’re off the ground. Hooray! That’s where you’ll spend the next several hours breathing stale, germ-laden air while your body has every bit of moisture sucked out of it – along with every bit of your patience and goodwill toward your fellow humans.

Your only diversion that you don’t provide yourself, aside from the passive-aggressive struggle over the armrest with the massively overweight gentleman next to you (or alternatively, praying to all the gods that ever existed and never existed that the screeching infant in your row will fall into a food coma) will be that you are offered bad, overpriced food that, despite being bland, flavorless cardboard, is far too meager.

But don’t worry, you’ll also get thimblefuls of water or warm, overpriced beer to wash it down with.

You can look forward to having all your routines completely shredded, which for some people that means your bowels will be stopped up altogether – or possibly opened up like a horrific firehose reminiscent of Jackson Pollock if he had gone through a Brown Period.

Now you get to navigate the cattle-slaughtering chutes and further inspections and humiliations of another airport. Notice as you await your turn to be digitally prodded and poked – fingers crossed in hopes that your bag made it to the same destination as you – that although wifi exists at this airport, you are inexplicably unable to connect for some reason. ‘WiFi available’ is only theoretical, or perhaps it only says that to mock you and doesn’t actually exist at all.

Either way, forget about communicating with the outside world. You are airport people now.

Eventually, you step up to the counter and smile desperately through your fatigue at stony-faced customs and immigration officers, hoping to display a benign, inoffensive demeanor that will mean you’ll be able to pass through hassle-free. But far from putting on a cool and casual show of a sophisticated traveler at ease, you actually appear to them as a greasy, exhausted, jittery freak, completely wrung out, smelling terrible and with worse breath. The immigration guy shuffles you through quickly, yes, but just to get rid of the foul, sub-human abomination before him.

All the while, you’re wondering where the nearest toilet is and what the fuck ever happened to water fountains.

Finally, exhausted, you shove through the mob of bovine gawpers who gaze slack-jawed at the baggage going round and round yet insist on standing right next to the belt even though theirs hasn’t arrived. [Sidebar: I suspect that every airport has groups of locals that come out just to watch the bags go around. They aren’t traveling anywhere; this is just their entertainment, so of course they want to get up close to watch. ‘Get in the car kids, we gonna go watch the suitcasey merry-go-round! Hooray!’]

You are eventually able to make a lunge for your baggage – if it turns up at all, that is – and lug it out to the street in a strange city where you may or may not know the language and you almost certainly don’t know your way around at all, there to be accosted by alleged cab drivers and hucksters of every stripe.

You manage to grab what you hope is a legit taxi in which you won’t be mugged and dumped on a side street without your passport, bags or money, or you climb on a bus, just crossing your fingers that you’ll be able to figure out where you’re going. And of course, assuming you do actually get there, just hope that your Airbnb host will be waiting to let you in, or that you’ll be able to figure out some way to get in touch with them because no wifi/no cell.

And, you know what?

I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Like anything else, the more places you go, the better you get at traveling. You learn shortcuts and tricks and methods to minimize the inevitable emotional abrasion and wearing down of your soul as you navigate the hard edges of modern travel. You chat with other travelers, you make jokes with the various workers at various counters, cafes and shops, you hide behind your headphones as needed, you read.

You figure it out.

And once you do get settled in your room or apartment and take a moment to breathe, maybe grab a shower — definitely grab a beer — that first time you head out into a brand-new city or town, wander among the crowds, smell the odors of unfamiliar food, hear the sounds of music and laughter and conversation in another language, see all the faces and the shops and the buildings and the streets — well, it’s just the best.

Worth every damn minute.

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