The Rusty Traveler

Extracting ourselves from our Princeton home for a (university) spring break vacation was like trying to escape from a vat of molasses. My brain went through the same sorts of coughs and hiccups that my minimally-driven pickup truck had exhibited when I last took it out on the freeway after months of puddle jumps around town.

Though it's hard to fathom the artist's original intent, the sculpture in this photo, seen later that day along a parkway in Mexico City, tracks closely the thought processes that went into selecting clothes and other necessary items for the trip, while time, represented by the taxi, raced by. By intent or coincidence, the sculpture also provides a good visualization of the decision-making process in calcified bureaucracies, as well as the layout of roads in Mexico City.

A less rusty traveler would have already arrived at the airport when we were just pulling out of the driveway, and would have remembered not only to turn down the house thermostat, which we managed,

but also to turn down the water heater that quietly consumes natural gas in the basement, heating water for no one when everyone is gone.

It's the least one can do before being catapulted by machines, first down Route 1, then down the runway, up and away and down to Mexico City, knowing all the while that periodic travel is surely good for personal sanity but just as surely collectively insane. They say that a capacity to hold two mutually incompatible truths in mind at the same time is a sign of intelligence. If so, then we are surely the most intelligent humans ever, knowingly living a present so incompatible with the future.

There was a time--before I read Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Darkening Sea" or seeing the graph of atmospheric CO2 rocketing upwards--when one could feel the pure, unpolluted awe for the wonder of our machine age, as I did when a Boeing 767 took us up and over the Andes from Buenos Aires, then elegantly expanded its wings to ease us down into Santiago. Travel is a beautiful thing; the future is precious. Precious little is being done to make one truth cohabitate well with the other. I return now with a harvest of photos and memories, and yet know that the planet, too, remembers all the trips I've ever made.

Bringing the present into harmony with the future, bringing personal interest into harmony with collective well-being--what sort of traveling machine can take us to that destination? That's the trip most worth taking.