In Cambridge, Massachusetts, there’s a travel agency with a sign on the door that reads “Please go away. Often.” More than just a catchy motto, this seems to me a rare piece of honest-to-God truth in advertising. A snarky suggestion that perhaps it would be best if you just left. It’s a slogan I wholeheartedly support. Any of us can overstay our welcome in our own country, like a too-drunk groomsman at a wedding.
A scant 25 percent of U.S. citizens have a passport. That means that most Americans haven’t seen the world’s great monuments firsthand or known the blissful anonymity of strolling exotic city streets. Most people have no idea what hummus is supposed to taste like or felt the ego-busting helplessness of not being able to read a single sign in a Chinese bus station. They haven’t left the country.
There are, of course, many reasons for this. Not everyone can afford to travel, and those who can don’t always have the time. In general, employees in the United States are granted less vacation time than citizens of almost any other Western country. Many Americans simply opt to travel domestically out of necessity. To say nothing of the fact that America truly is a diverse travel destination in its own right. But there is, I suspect, something more dangerous at work here.
The 75 percent of Americans who don’t travel abroad have any number of other excuses why. Some are scared to travel. One of the great American prejudices to reblossom in the last decade is the belief that many people in the world would love to kill us. It’s rubbish, of course. There are all of about four places where you’re likely to get your head blown off, and it’s not as though you’re going to accidentally wander into any of them. Nobody unwittingly plans a honeymoon to Tora Bora or finds their flight to Cincinnati suddenly rerouted through Sierra Leone. If there’s one common chord that any career traveler can strike, it’s this: people are pretty lovely. From Tacoma to Timbuktu. In fact, the more exotic, impoverished, and generally unseemly the location, the more hospitable the residents tend to be. And our commonalities are many. Beyond customs and norms and wildly variant beliefs, we all generally laugh, cry, and make our way along the dusty road of life in pretty much the same way.
To those who eschew travel because of how “horrible” it is to fly, I reserve my greatest ire. Bunch of babies. When did we get so collectively myopic about the miracle of aviation? Has flying become a little less plush over the last couple decades? Sure. So what? You’re still getting slingshot over the globe at half the speed of sound. People pine for a “golden age” of aviation when planes had spacious legroom, drapes on the windows, and a size-zero stewardess slicing up a pot roast in the galley. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but those old Pan Am Clippers from vintage posters we romanticize used to fall out of the sky quite a bit. It’s all too common to overhear someone complaining about how “long” the flight is from New York to Los Angeles. Had any of us been born just a few hundred years earlier, a trip to California would have consisted of a six-month ride in a bumpyass covered wagon. Business class could be defined as not being scalped by Indians or dying from dysentery.
It was only 105 years ago, on a windy stretch of beach in North Carolina, that Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the first powered aircraft: the fragile-looking Wright Flyer I. The plane, which flew for a meager twelve seconds, fundamentally changed the world. It’s impossible to know the extent to which the brothers envisioned the evolution of their invention, but I can only assume they never dreamed of Richard Branson. Among many other things, the advent of flight and the eventual age of the jumbo jet have turned the world into a much smaller place. With the unveiling of Boeing’s long-haul 777, any two cities on earth can now hypothetically be connected by a single flight. That we’ve taken this interconnectedness for granted is nothing short of a sin. So stop complaining, drink your Bloody Mary, and enjoy the free DirecTV.
We are in dire need of a public relations campaign for travel. I’m not talking about splashy commercials for Carnival Cruises or full-page magazine ads for Sandals resorts; we’ve got plenty of those, thank you very much. Nearly the entire vacation industry is hell-bent on the notion that travel is a purely escapist enterprise—that the sole purpose of leaving one’s country is to drink daiquiris and plummet down a waterslide with a big, dumb grin. Why isn’t there a marketing campaign that extols the innate virtues of wandering?
The real hindrance is that we’ve forgotten how to travel—or, more important, we’ve ceased to remember that it’s good for us. In Europe, aristocratic youth were once encouraged to undertake the “Grand Tour,” a rite of passage that involved hopscotching across the continent, experiencing the legacy of the Renaissance and the influences of the Classical world. Hundreds of years later, the cultural tradition endures in much more bohemian packaging. It’s called a “gap year.” Tens of thousands of backpackers take a year off before or after college to expose themselves to foreign cultures. More than an extended vacation, gap years are considered a critical part of any well-rounded student’s résumé. In America, most people would probably guess that a gap year is an annual jeans sale at the mall.
The experience of leaving one’s homeland can be psychologically profound. Travel illuminates a strange dichotomy of scale. When we stand in the shadows of empire, before solemn, ancient temples, we feel the enormity of human history wash over us and are humbled by its magnitude. But, paradoxically, the world is also revealed to us as strangely small and universal. It is impossible to watch that old familiar moon rise up over Hong Kong Harbor and not be struck dumb by the idea that the same soft light is shining down on Burbank, California. To think that when we look west over the misty cliffs of Moher in Ireland, someone on a beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is looking back. In an instant, we can observe the world expand and contract in one seemingly contradictory motion.
To that dangerously expanding group of xenophobic Americans who seems content cleaving only to the familiar embrace of the United States, I contend that you will, on some level, forever feel unfulfilled. Seeing the world is a prerequisite to understanding one’s place in it. After all, nearly every corner of this country is rife with invitations that beckon us back to foreign shores. Look around. We’re illuminated by the torchlight of a giant Roman goddess in New York Harbor. Our currency is adorned with arcane pyramids, and half the days of the week are named after Viking gods. We are derivative, the star-spangled orphans of a hundred civilizations before us. And, like all orphans, we should yearn to understand from whence we came.
Don’t get me wrong. I may be an ex-pat by profession, but I’m also a proud American. Admiring the Constitution without treading on the ancestral English homeland of our founding fathers, however, seems folly. How can some of my countrymen be so afraid of the outside world when our very democracy was born on the faraway streets of Athens, and considering our great diaspora from the vast savannahs of Africa?
Finally, yes, travel is a hell of a lot of fun. The Club Med ads are right. There’s little in our domestic routines that compares to swimming in Caribbean waters. Not to mention racing motorcycles through the back alleys of Vietnam, dining on a rooftop in Marrakech, or waking up under the canopy of the Amazon. By staying home, we’re missing a grand opportunity afforded to us by those glimmering silver birds in the sky. The “golden age” of travel is right now. Jetting is no longer just for the jet set; it’s for everyone. The truth is that travel changes us, irrevocably, and mostly for the better. It can nourish the best parts of ourselves like nothing else. Travel broadens our perspective, adds texture to our lives, and makes us more interesting at cocktail parties.