The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
— Pascal
Ade Havilland Canada Twin Otter set down on the ice at the North Pole a few days ago. The ice cracked and the plane began to sink slowly into the slush of the Arctic Ocean. Everyone clambered out onto safer ice: two crewmen and seven tourists.
Their package tour had popped in upon a waste of once mystical inaccessibility, the place that Peary's dog sled struggled to in 1909. The tourists landed on an abstraction and almost fell through the top of the world. They sat for a few hours like a family stuck on a freeway with engine trouble, and then another plane came and drove them back.
A trip to the North Pole may put the question most purely: Why all of that expensive motion? Why do we travel? To penetrate mysteries? The earth does not withhold many secrets any more. Everyone who did not, for one reason or another, travel to China last year is sure to go this year. A tour bus runs down nearly every street in the global village. When does travel degenerate into snobbism or a stunt? Lars-Eric Lindblad, impresario of the edifyingly exotic, takes the vacationing bartender where Darwin most remotely went.
The metaphysics of travel has changed. Television turns us all into what the author Paul Fussell calls "stationary tourists," electronic cosmopolites. The webbing of satellites around the planet, the "remote feeds" from almost anywhere, give us the illusion that we are world travelers, or at least that we are all caught in the planetary claustrum and interconnection. National Geographic specials take us farther, more vividly, than we would have the courage or knowledge to go if we were traveling in body, not just in mind. The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in ragtop native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.
We sometimes sense that we have reached a moment of critical mass when travel is somehow no longer necessary. The terrestrial explorations have been done. Do we really need to wander through one another's cultures, smelling the cooking? Could we just hook up to each other by videophone, perhaps with a sensory attachment, and simply dial Bali or Maui or Angkor Wat? Must the body go there when the mind can almost make it by other means?
If we do bestir ourselves, we ride out to big airports and climb onto big planes that are as amiably de-cultured as Muzak, as white sound. The jumbo jet is the airborne equivalent of the interstate highway—fast and convenient, but a sort of whispering vacuum. One might as well be stuffed into a cartridge and shot through a pneumatic tube, like interoffice mail.
We travel to be in some sense transformed. Travel is process, a transit, a sheer going there as much as an arriving. Travel equals transformation over time. It is everything experienced from start to finish. What happens to travel when it consists of getting onto a big plane and eating a tray dinner and having a drink and watching a movie? And then getting off the plane at an airport much like the one we left and riding to a big hotel and finding a room where the toilet seat wears a preposterous paper sash FOR YOUR SANITARY PROTECTION? Our amazement at the world simply curdles into irony.