Travel Beast

An Editorial on the Process of Getting from Here to There

My wife is of the opinion that the travel process, the actual driving or flying or whatever, is in itself an enjoyable process.  She talks about the anticipation and the excitement of the trip beginning with the travel itself.  Unfortunately, I find I disagree somewhat.

For me, aside from a few special moments (like that wonderful rush when the pilot of the airplane jams the throttles full on during liftoff), the actual travel process can only be described as the Travel Beast.  This creature is so loathsome and so huge that it dominates my mental landscape from well before the trip until somewhat after I have been spewed willy-nilly on some foreign shore and can at last relax my vigilance (and my sphincter) again.

Don't get me wrong, I am neither ungrateful nor afraid of the travel process.   God forbid we should have to spend weeks (or months) on board sailing vessels or covered wagons, leaving hearth and family behind, perhaps forever.  I am thankful to the extreme to have seen the pyramids of Egypt and Chiapas (Mexico) in the same lifetime.  And while I am not unaware of the risks associated with the various ways of getting from here to there, I believe them to be comparable or less than the risks we undertake every day without thinking.

Nevertheless, I can not help but think of the entire process as being equivalent to being swallowed by a huge mythical beast with thousands of heads, uncountable miles of intestine, and a serious case of constipation.

Consider the entry process for an airplane flight.  Arrive hours early to be stripped of your belongings (baggage) and reduced to a nervous waiting state in a strange place surrounded by armed and humorless guards.  The least jest at the wrong time can result in an unfortunate confrontation.  I have been almost stopped for carrying (at different times) a large pair of scissors and a staple gun (which turned out to be OK because I had it loaded with short, hence safe, staples).  How is this different from being placed upon the Beast's plate in preparation for ingestion?

Flights, as well as car, bus, and train rides, can only be described as exercises in patience and discomfort.  Down the gullet one goes, masticated and swallowed, compressed into a shapeless lump much smaller than one's normal size and quite different from one's normal shape.  Think of a mouse being swallowed by a boa constrictor.

Who can forget the nightmare of six or ten hours in an airborne steel box, bolt upright, jounced by the passage, and battered psychically by the sound of someone's baby trying to call home without a telephone?  Close your eyes for a moment and remember the sensation of sitting thigh to thigh with strangers, trying desperately to eat your meal without elbowing your neighbor in the breast.

Fortunately a process of memory erasure does occur, our subconscious filtering out a trauma too great to be borne, else we would never return from our travels.  A similar process undoubtedly occurs after childbirth, else the planet would be barren of human life.

But this is only the beginning!  From esophagus to stomach one goes, stuck in waiting rooms in strange places for interminable periods whilst the Travel Beast digests one's willpower, patience, and psychic energy.  This limbo may occur many times, each with different digestive juices.

Ironically, while the Beast is feeding on one's essence, one is reduced to food of questionable provenance and constitution (where food is provided at all).  The careful traveller can sometimes avoid this by bringing along sustenance.

Eventually, of course, one's destination is reached, and with a great flatulence one is deposited in a heap from an unmentionable orifice of the Beast.  For myself, this moment is usually one of great confusion and a sense of unreality (sort of like that induced by allergy and cold medications).

Lucky the traveller who carries all belongings in small parcels that the Beast can devour at the same time!  For if the Beast must separate the parcels during ingestion it is quite possible for them to be pooped out before as well as after the traveller from any of the other orifices.  Sadly this extends the reach of the Travel Beast, sometimes for days, reducing the traveller to the state of a rather smelly vagabond in the meantime.

But finally the influence of the Beast is over and one is upon strange shores!

Perhaps the purpose of the Beast is to enforce a liminal state betwixt here and there, to remind us how truly large is our world despite the miracles Man has wrought over the millenia.  Otherwise we would not only forget the scale of the planet on which we live but we would all live in the same place, rendering the culture of our world into a single undifferentiated mush.

Or perhaps the purpose of the Beast is in fact to do just that, making us all one people, and the discomfort is the pain of the birth of a new world.