Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.
It occurred to me the other day while watching a TV program about the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic wilderness that I’d never actually been in the wilderness—now that, then, was true wilderness, as Franklin and those poor bastards found out soon enough—but that I’d been near it a few times: in Crete, in Canada, in Tunisia, in northern Scotland, and in Iceland. I then went to on to reflect, in my egotistical fashion, how that short list of far-flung places might imply that I was quite the seasoned globetrotter. Well, true enough: I once traveled far and wide, or so it would have been said until about the late 1980s when your average bond trader or computer programmer started out-traveling Marco Polo. Disasters like 9/11 and the 2005 Great Asian Tsunami stalled the frenzy for awhile, but it revived, and rare is the German or Swiss middle-management twit who doesn’t use up part of his annual six weeks’ paid vacation sunning himself on the beaches of Thailand or Brazil while the wage slaves of America, with their two weeks’ off a year, are cultivating their hemorrhoids and slowly taking on the gray hue of their cubicles. Still, who cares? I’ve been going here and there all my life: Florida, France, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Texas…If I’ve been stuck in one place (Texas) for awhile it’s only because of the requirements of current circumstances. Otherwise I’d be off tomorrow. Or maybe the day after.
My first trip was at age 2, aboard a Pan Am Boeing Stratocruiser from Idlewild in New York to Hamilton in Bermuda to visit Mum’s pal boozy Reg and his family–as I mentioned previously. (Odd! Dad wasn’t there.) Of course I remember nothing, but according to my mother the plane ran into an electric storm, setting me off on a full-blown tantrum. The same thing happened on the way back, but in reverse—tantrum, electric storm—and this led her to seriously doubt that I‘d ever be a good traveler. Then came the Atlantic crossing aboard the Queen Elizabeth during which I was enchanted and well-behaved, and she was reassured. Of course, that was the last gasp of the ocean-liner age, an era of unmitigated luxury compared to the airborne steerage that has replaced it and rendered the journey itself, which should equal one’s final destination in variety and excitement, just another mauvais quart d’heure—or dix heures.
