Motionsickness

For a glorious while, the magazine Motionsickness showed the other side of travel, the "why are we here and whatever were we thinking of" side of travel.

I had a column in the magazine while it lasted--for those deeply interested, what got published is on my regular website. But here's one that didn't have time to see the light of day before the magazine stopped publishing.

Let's hope it comes back some day. It was a fine thing.

Reindeer Games

Consider this: Reindeer and caribou are exactly the same animal. The sole difference between the two is that caribou migrate and reindeer don’t. And why don’t reindeer migrate? Because they started off as lazy caribou. Lap and Sammi, those fabled northern tribes, noticed this while they were out hunting, and so segregated out the stay-at-homes to form the nucleus of a domesticated stock. A few hundred generations later—carefully breeding to make sure no animal went wandering, keeping that far horizon DNA out of the gene pool—and Santa Claus stories aside, what you’ve got is the simple fact that reindeer are nothing more than couch potato caribou.

Now for the ugly truth: we as modern humans have been bred for the couch ourselves. If we have any of the Chatwinesque nomad genes left, they’re buried under fast food wrappers, Monday Night Football, mortgage payments, conversations that include “Haven’t been there, but seen it on TV once,” and worries you’re not getting all the soap scum off your shower tiles.
But if that’s the case, why are there still caribou among us, ready to migrate?

To understand why we move, we have to start with how the very idea of travel is sold to us. We’re hardly out of the cradle before the PR machines take over. And why do they care? Because of the money, of course. What were the Seven Wonders of the World but an early effort to get people out and spend money on boats, meals, guides, donkey rides, cheap souvenirs? The ugly truth is, if all you do is stay home, sooner or later you have to stop buying stuff, because your house is full. Yeah, you can buy a bigger house—and in the past 30 years, average house size has doubled—but still, the most expensive electronic toy you can buy is still cheaper than a month in Rome.

If you go outside, though, the possibilities for spending are endless. The small percentage of people in the world who travel—only 11% of the people in the U.S. even have a passport (some put that number as high as 19%, but that’s still far fewer people than tune in to watch Survivor and hope somebody’s bikini slips)—add up to serious money. In fact, if travel were a country, it would have the fifth highest GNP in the world.

Never forget that your backpack cost more than the average family of four makes in most countries.

We are not products of an innate, genetic wanderlust, as Chatwin argued. We’re the products of omnipresent marketing efforts.

So why do some fall for it when others never go further than to price Barcoloungers?

Maybe that first trigger that sent the select few of us wandering was a Tintin or Huey, Dewey, and Louie comic. Those ducks did go everywhere. Maybe it was Willard Price’s African Adventure books—think Hardy Boys, but with guns and wild animals. For me it was probably the combination of my Aunt Eleanor, who lived all over the world and sent home incredible Christmas presents, and an early reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth.

And then thanks to that early exposure, whatever your reason, the bending of the twig, we are those who have been bred to consume travel, curious about the way light slants through leaves at latitudes far from home. We’re a target audience, as surely as that percentage of people who fall for pizza ads aired at 6 PM.

So how do the marketeers do it? How do they lay the glorious trap? Why has modern travel become less about discovery of the world as a chance to go on a cruise where you never look out the window, to a resort where you never have to leave the grounds or figure out the local currency?

How did we, as a culture, sink this low?

Dean MacCannell, in his brilliant book The Tourist, develops a four-step theory of how travel destinations are created and then sold. Once you know the paradigm, everything makes sense.
First, naming. It’s the bait. Pick a spot, decide to sell it. That simple. Does anybody really care about the Eiffel Tower? Even Gustave Eiffel, the guy who designed it, hated it. But now people go to his tower because they’ve been told to go, because it’s a name on the list, a thing that’s easily defined.

Second, framing and elevation. Set that spot off from all the other spots around it, so there’s no confusion. You can whack up a big fence around it and charge admission—the Disneyland model—or do something more subtle, like carve out a scenic overview on the highway. The entire National Park system is nothing but framing. Define the boundaries, set it off from the profane world outside. Suddenly you know this is a place where you’re supposed to feel differently, as if you had just walked through a church door in the middle of High Mass. You know, in the words of Salman Rushdie, that “what is required of you is attention.”

Third, enshrinement. This is when the framing and elevation hit their peak; it’s the real place where the selling begins, establishing that name brand. In the Middle Ages, churches all over Europe had agents running around stealing bits of saints—a bone, a flap of skin—from each other. You get one in your church, suddenly you’re important, you have name recognition, you can draw in the crowds. Today, you cross-market between the movie, the theme park, and the fast food restaurant.

Stage four, reproduction. Ultimately, this is most important step in the modern world. Maybe once upon a time people sought out differences, but we’re the era of the chain store, a generation that draws familiarity around us like a wrapper from a Hong Kong McDonalds. If anybody bothers to remember our lifetimes at all in the history books, this will go down as the age of reproduction, making endless chains of representation, re-presenting the commonplace with all the subtleties of a sledgehammer to the frontal lobes, until nobody remembers what the original idea was at all, because the original idea is no longer as important as the way you reference it. More people can quote lines from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire than Shakespeare.

Here’s my own favorite reproduction chain: take the Redwood Forest. We have a forest. Nobody ever really gets out and looks at the forest, though, certainly not as a thing in and of itself. The forest has been abstracted into a representation of forest, by the path you follow through it. You’re not getting the whole experience, but it’s close enough, like a greatest hits album. Forget those trees over the hill, let’s stick to the ones by the side of the road.
But then the path itself gets reproduced, abstracted one more level down: specific trees to look at. There’s the tree that the highway goes right through, there’s the tree with the shop. So suddenly, instead of looking at an entire forest, you’re looking at a single tree, and thinking you’re getting the experience.

And of course, we know in the modern world that all paths lead to the gift shop, so at the tree with the store in it, what do you do? Buy more reproductions. Postcards or toothpicks, you’re taking it home with you. Stand-ins for the real thing.

One more trick to the reproduction phase: I have no idea if it’s still there or not, but when I was ten years old and went to Disneyland for the first and only time, there was a gigantic concrete redwood in the middle of Frontierland, just in case this was your one and only chance to find out what a redwood looked like.

Somewhere, I have a postcard of that.

But why are we so susceptible to reproduction? Because, like microwave pizzas, it’s been coded into our worldview. Forget nomadism: historically, being mobile is entirely a new phenomenon. Up until fifty years ago or so, the only people who ever went more than a hundred miles from their homes were men sent off to war. Yes, there were the grand tour fops, but as far as populist travel goes, year zero was when Arthur Frommer published his first edition of Europe on $5 a Day. Up to the day of the jetliner, reproduction was an absolute necessity, because there was no chance at all anyone would go look for themselves.

Now that we can go look for ourselves, the trick hasn’t changed. You have to bring these spots home, where they can be seen, and so marketing is a huge thing, trailing streams of reproduction like dust off Pig Pen’s shoes. But like any effort to sell, it works with some and not with others. I can watch a thousand NBA commercials, and I’ll still feel zero urge to actually suffer through a basketball game. By the same token, most people really don’t want to go anywhere.

And maybe one reason why is this: have you ever seen an honest travel ad? Beaches are always empty, bartenders always smile, and there’s never a kid whose parents broke his legs so he’d be a better beggar.

Advertising and marketing have a deservedly bad reputation—like the Joe Jackson song says, “everything you ever dreamed you could want/but nothing that you need.” It’s the myth of the ever-expanding economy: you have a job making useless things so you can make money to buy useless things that other people make, and somehow we all keep getting richer and ignore the fact that our houses are full of useless plastic objects.

Those stolid reindeer-like genes introduced by a society of big screen TVs and SUVs that have never seen a dirt road are incredibly difficult to overcome. Most people want where brought home to them. Reproduction is purely enough, because they know the image is a lie.

Spend a day watching the Travel Channel. See how few of the shows are actually about travel.
And we shouldn’t be sorry about this: it keeps the places we go less crowded. Be glad the evening news is trying to make sure you go no further from home than the local mall. Be thankful that Chatwin was full of it, that the masses of society aren’t chomping at the bit to get out.

The happier the reindeer are, the more room there is for caribou dreams.