From Deep South (Paul Theroux) p18-20
Becoming a Traveler Again
Driving south, I became a traveler again in ways I’d forgotten. Because of the effortless release from my home to the road, the sense of being sprung, I rediscovered the joy in travel that I knew in the days before the halts, the checks, the affronts at airports — the invasions and violations of privacy that beset every air traveler. The discouragement and indignity of this querying casts a pall over the whole experience of travel —and this is before any forward progress can be made. All air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior.
Once, you slipped away unseen, showed your ticket, boarded the plane, your luggage and peace of mind intact; you set off undisturbed. Earlier in my traveling life, this was my happy lot.
There is so much disturbance in travel itself, it is intolerable that it begins so quickly, even before you leave. These days the airport experience is not only a disagreeable foretaste of all the insults to come on the trip, but also an annoying way of reminding the prospective traveler that he or she is an alien at home, and not just a stranger but someone perhaps to be feared, a possible danger, a troublemaker if not a terrorist —the hooha, shoes off, belt off, no jacket, denuded and simplified and subjected to screening while tapping your feet, eager to get away; all this while still in a mode of predeparture, scrutinized, needing to pass inspection before you can even think of the trip ahead.
An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives that one’s usual response is the sort of suppressed rage that was the travelers emotion in Soviet-era Eastern Europe with its bullying policemen. Travel was once a liberation; now it is the opposite — air travel, that is. Younger travelers have no idea what has been lost.
The sense that you’re agreeing to this intrusion, that you’re collaborating (“It’s for my own good”), is worse than demeaning; it combines all the excuses and evasions that helped to create the oppressive dictatorships and tyrannies of the past. The stripping, at all airports, of the traveler’s dignity, forcing the traveler to submit, is the antithesis of what one seeks in travel. Yes, we live in dangerous times, but if that means surrendering all our rights to privacy, then it is hardly worth the misery of leaving home.
There is a remedy, but it is for the lucky few, those who live in a vast country like ours who have the option of avoiding all airports: those who stick to the open road. Even the lowest jalopy is better than a first-class seat on a plane, because to get to that seat you are forced to submit to the indignities of official scrutiny and a body search. But no one has the right to question your slipping into a car and driving away at high speed. There is no prologue, only the bliss of a sudden exit.
The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that’s how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonballs.
There is a better way, a truer way, the old way — the proud highway, the rolling road.
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