Things Are Against Us

by Lucy Ellmann

  Laura thought [the preacher] would never stop talking. She looked through the open windows at butterflies going where they pleased. She watched the grasses blowing in the wind… She looked at her blue hair ribbons. She looked at each of her finger nails and admired how the fingers of her hands would fit together… like the corner of a log house… Her legs ached from dangling still.

  Religion is torture, but hardly anybody in America will admit it! Wilder stuck ostensibly with conventional Christianity, but late in life admitted her joie de vivre really came from a naturalist, even pagan, bent:

  I can still plainly see the grass and the trees and the path winding ahead, flecked with sunshine and shadow and the beautiful gold-hearted daisies scattered all along the way. I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.4

  Throughout the books, memories of such things are meaningful to her and lush, and it’s in these pastoral recollections of the outdoor world that Wilder’s at her most elegiac. But who are these descriptions for? Surely not kids. They assume more feeling for meadows, birds, and flowers than I think most urban children ever had. As a child, I skipped them. Now I like them. Maybe she just wrote these passages for herself, to record and revisit sensations that mattered to her.

  Another crucial element in the books is Laura’s fondness for her father, who can converse with birds on the violin:

  Phoebe-birds called sadly from the woods down by the creek… Softly Pa’s fiddle sang in the starlight… The large, bright stars hung down from the sky. Lower and lower they came, quivering with music… The night was full of music, and Laura was sure that part of it came from the great, bright stars swinging so low above the prairie.

  Yes, her frequent mention of stars can get aggravating – especially now that we can’t see any at all. (I couldn’t even see the recent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Bah.) But on a prairie, stars count for something.

  The whole family likes a joke. When the government forces them to move on at one stage, like Steinbeck’s Joads, leaving the house they’d effortfully built with their own bare hands (all except for the precious store-bought glass windows), Pa claims they’re actually taking away more than they’d brought with them.

  ‘I don’t know what,’ Ma replies.

  ‘Why, there’s the mule!’ Pa says. The horse he’d spent their last few pennies on had unexpectedly given birth to a mule. But they’ve got something else as well, something equally stubborn: the girl in the back of the wagon, taking it all in.

  __________________

  1 The Ghost in the Little House (University of Missouri Press, 1993).

  2 Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder (University of Missouri Press, 1998).

  3 Jack’s death scene later on was all made up. His actual end is unknown – they gave him away. Jack, Jack! Poor racist dog.

  4 From the Missouri Ruralist, 1917 (quoted in Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder).

  THE LOST ART OF STAYING PUT

  Not that long ago, air travel was a badge of distinction. The jet set prided itself on the habit, and Sinatra sang ‘Come Fly With Me’ to encourage them further. Mile-high sex on a plane was de rigueur and considered only slightly less point-scoring than surviving a hijack. People actually used to dress up to take a plane (before getting naked in the lavatories). Pan Am claimed ‘The travail has been taken out of travel’. For some, the excitement still lingers. One blogger, in the rarefied world of airline fandom, flew himself and his wife from Houston to Frankfurt, just to try out United’s new Business Class perks. ‘This flight was also special,’ he enthused, ‘because my wife… would become a United Million Miler. I can think of worse ways to celebrate.’ I can’t.

  You’d think the joy of flying a million miles on a plane would be over by now for most people, especially since the advent of Covid (long plane rides being just about the most perfect way to catch and carry it1). But apparently people still miss flying. During the early days of Covid, some diehard would-be travellers visited Taiwan’s locked-down airport just to experience the sheer thrill of going through Security and wandering the departure lounge: fake checking-in, fake passport control, fake luggage screening, fake duty-free shopping, fake airplane, fake flight attendants. People signed up for this! They didn’t fly anywhere. Incredibly, these fanatics were really missing the whole airport experience.2

  Nostalgia for trains, yes, I can understand that, but airplanes? Modern flying is about as stimulating as filling out tax forms, and Covid makes it crummier yet. A global pandemic could reasonably be an opportunity to reconsider the whole crazy business of zooming about the globe like this, but instead loads of people are itching to jump on board again as soon as it’s allowed, and egging others on to do the same. Less for the pleasure of flying perhaps, or even of vacationing, than that of exciting the customary envy in friends and colleagues by temporarily depositing one’s pallid frame on a foreign beach. In the midst of the pandemic, the Sunday Telegraph urged people to ‘hop around the Pacific… wander with reindeer in Russia… take the kids to Tajikistan… track big cats in Mongolia… connect with nature in Australia… [and] spend the summer hols in Namibia’.3 Uh no, don’t, please don’t.

  Travel is now such a habit, people just can’t imagine life without these regular culture-shocking transplantations. They risk death, disease, penury, language barriers, and bedbugs (who wants BEDBUGS?), not exactly to ‘find themselves’, but to find themselves in a new time zone. Do they think it’s actually time travel? The famous, and not so famous, often die just getting someplace they believe they have to go: Carrie Fisher, Glenn Miller, Helen E. Hokinson, James Dean, Buddy Holly, Bessie Smith, Albert Camus… These sobering examples seem to deter no one. And then there’s Robert Frost, for ever debating that tricky dilemma in the woods:

  I took the one less travelled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  How about taking neither road, bub? Ever thought of that?

  Everybody’s mindlessly weight-watching and whale-watching these days, in individual acts of migration that echo and often accentuate their addiction to individualised transport, the car. But, as the Covid lockdowns have proven, we don’t absolutely have to drive everywhere, we don’t each have to own a car.

  When I first came to Britain in the 70s, not everyone had a car. A significant number of middle-class men never learnt to drive, preferring to be driven around by others. I drove a few of those guys around myself. Mistake. But now people act like owning a car is a wholly justifiable necessity, just something adults do. They object to fatal motorway crashes only when they cause traffic jams. Nobody seems to notice what a terrific waste of time it is to drive yourself about in a tin can. They never question having to spend a tenth of their lives in furious, anxious, high-alert situations, negotiating their own individual, cumbersome, smelly, expensive, lethal death box-on-wheels round everyone else’s individual, cumbersome, smelly, expensive, lethal death box-on-wheels. The parking, the licensing, insuring, and tax-discing, the servicing, washing, polishing, and valeting, the vandalism, car theft, and carjacking, the skids, the crashes, the scratches, the close calls, the roadkill, road rage, the AA, the RACs, fluctuating petrol prices, three-point turns, black ice, bird shit on the windscreen, the embarrassment of not knowing how to check the oil or fix a flat tyre, the scary purchase of the car in the first place, and (worst of all) the snoozefest of having to read a car manual. How do they endure all this zooming and blinking and passing and honking and emergency braking and power steering and satnav, and the buzzing, the buzzing!

  The noise of motorways has by now ruined many a rural idyll. Yet, as Covid has proven, most drivers don’t really need to commute to work at all, nor see every friend or enemy in person all the time. We have Zoom, and Zoom backgrounds, and Zoom cat filters, for that. We have BOOKS too. Books on travel – these could save you a trip. You don’t have to see the seven wonders of the world, you know, nor visit geographically distant family member
s. Even if, oddly, you want to see them, you can in fact survive without each other (which is why you live so far apart in the first place). No need to fly around the globe to attend football matches either – cardboard fans can do that for you now (one could argue the fans were cardboard before, along with their robotic excitement). So, why all this dumb transporting of our vulnerable bodies from place to place, at the expense of our nerves, our sanity, our health, our time, our bank balances, and the environment? New York’s champion and wit Fran Lebowitz, who claims she has a carbon fingerprint, not footprint, only travels for work. For pleasure, she stays at home.

  As far as wanting to go places, I can’t believe people do it for fun. When I’m in airports and I see that there are people going on vacations, I think, how horrible could your life be? Like, how bad is your regular life that you think: you know what would be fun? Let’s get the kids, go to the airport… with these thousands of pieces of luggage, stand in these lines, be yelled at by a bunch of morons, leave late, be squished all together – and this is better than their actual life?4

  *

  Airlines ought to have Jerk of the Year awards, and not just for the passengers but for their own employees. These days, you need a bulletproof vest just to deal with the cabin crew. It’s awful that United’s planes proved attractive to jihadists – 9/11 was the most sorrowful tragedy to hit America since Vietnam and as a result of it, United’s staff must still be under constant strain. But so are the passengers! They’re tired of terrorism too, of having to queue to take their shoes and belts off, of cramming shampoo into 100ml bottles, of forgetting their small change in the Security trays and having their favourite nail scissors confiscated – only to be met essentially by bouncers once they reach the plane, uniformed despots who ban ten-year-olds for wearing ‘inappropriate attire’ (‘form-fitting’ Spandex leggings) and bully a mother of twins for bringing a pushchair aboard.5 Airlines now actively hate on their passengers. If they can’t bump you off the manifest just by yelling at you, next thing you know you’re bodily kicked out of the plane. On a Hawaii to LA flight, Delta recruited airport police to threaten a couple with jail and the confiscation of their children, merely for refusing to give up a seat they’d booked and paid for.

  Airports and airlines seem very exacting about how passengers behave. They make you wander miles of shops, starve you, bore you, intoxicate you, hassle you, despise you, and then pillory you for your resultant ‘air rage’. More and more passengers do threaten to shoot everybody or leave the plane mid-flight. Some complain about sitting next to fat people, or start eating their own mobile phones as a form of protest. In disaster movies, pilots wrestle with the yoke, trying to get full throttle – now they just throttle the yokels.6

  United has a particularly high rate of animal deaths.7 United allegedly killed Simon, one of the largest rabbits in the world. Poor Simon. And it was a United flight attendant who forced a woman to put her ten-month-old puppy in the overhead locker, where it smothered to death during the flight.8 Pups and rabbits go quietly belly-up, Spandex-clad teenyboppers sob and slip back into obscurity, taking their improper contours with them. But the sight, in 2017, of the tactics used against Dr Dao on a United Chicago to Louisville flight, provoked lasting outrage. The airline had apparently overbooked the flight, as they frequently do. A legitimate ticket holder, with patients to see the next day, Dao declined requests to give up his seat. As a result, he was eventually dragged by force, bleeding, half-conscious and half-naked, off of the plane, in front of all the other passengers. He was left with a broken nose, a concussion, and two lost teeth.

  Originally from Vietnam, Dao said the experience was more horrifying than the fall of Saigon. United’s CEO, who defined his staff’s violent approach as ‘re-accommodating’ people,9 and unconvincingly described Dao as ‘disruptive and belligerent’, had to perform some pretty tricky manoeuvres to steer the airline out of its self-inflicted PR nosedive. But even he couldn’t censor all the new slogans:

  United: putting the hospital back into hospitality.

  Fly the unfriendly skies.

  Red eye and black eye flights available.

  Board as a doctor, leave as a patient.

  If we can’t seat you, we beat you.

  Dao’s plight resonated because it encapsulates the now customary destruction of human dignity and the will to live, otherwise known as air travel in the twenty-first century. Next time they ask if there’s a doctor on the plane, will anyone reply?10

  But okay, let’s say you aren’t machine-gunned, beheaded or hacked to pieces with a machete on your way to so-called Security. Let’s say you survive the invasive (radioactive?) full-body scan, as well as the obligatory two-to-three-hour Duty-Free dwalm in the departure area. Let’s go crazy and suppose you make it to your seat on the plane without being publicly shamed or socked in the jaw, either by airline staff or the people sitting near you. Your reward is that you now must fly.

  During the cramped, airless, comfortless journey that follows (for which more and more wondrously you have to pay), amid air contaminated by engine oil and the pesticides used in fumigating the plane, a martyr to the airline’s idea of water, alcohol, snacks, and movies, you will also be at risk of congestion, constipation, nausea, dizziness, headaches, hypoxia, jet lag, deep vein thrombosis, solar flares, fleas, pandemics, colds, flu, flatulence, and whooping cough. No one ever seems to voluntarily delay a flight because of illness, even Covid-19 – that would be cowardly. No, they tramp on board in service to their microbes, and cough, sniff, and exude contaminants all over you for hours on end. You can catch Ebola or TB in the time it takes you to untangle your gratis audio set.

  I’m not saying your seat is small, but if it were a haystack, you’d find the needle. While the business-class swells chow down on their business-class lunches in their business-class lounges at the airport, and, once on board, guzzle their business-class suppers, encased in their big-assed business-class thrones, making big-ass business-class deals and getting business-class grease from their business-class filets mignons all over the business-class upholstery, the Economy passengers’ food, if it ever arrives, is a throwback to TV dinners of the 1960s. Or maybe they are TV dinners from the 1960s? I once ordered the kosher meal, just to see if it was any more palatable. The stewardess unceremoniously (and, I thought, rather antisemitically) flung a solid block of ice labelled ‘KOSHER’ on to my tray table. Inside it you could dimly see some kishkes. It might have thawed by the time we reached Patagonia, but I wasn’t going to Patagonia.

  I have no objection here to purposeful uses of travel, of course, as in the case of emergency workers, international election monitors, refugees, or political, economic, or environmental migrants. Seeking a safe haven is a human right and unavoidable amid war, injustice, and climate change. It’s also beneficial to the host society: as Fran Lebowitz said when discussing New York City, ‘Immigrants make the culture and tourists ruin it.’11 So, though travel’s no picnic, let the nomads, grape harvesters, sheep shearers, job seekers, asylum seekers, detainees, gypsies, adventurers, artists, earthquake sniffer dogs, and St Bernards with their little casks of brandy go wherever they need to go. My beef is with frivolous travel of the selfish kind, the act of inflicting yourself, uninvited, on other cultures, this constant movement to and fro of the chronically rich, with their taster menus of destinations to which they’re attracted purely due to their own lack of direction, humility, and self-knowledge.

  In winter, weather forecasters often warn people to avoid anything but essential travel. The trouble is, whenever anybody hears this, they seem to leap immediately into their cars and get caught in snowstorms. Maybe it was the same paradoxical impulse that led the Prime Minister’s senior advisor Dominic Cummings, at the start of England’s first lockdown in April 2020, to drive his whole family (some of them, including Cummings, already displaying Covid symptoms) from London to County Durham, including an educational side trip to Barnard Castle. His excuse for the latter jaunt was
that he needed to test his eyesight. There seems vast disparity in determining what ‘essential travel’ is.

  Is any travel really essential though? I understand that some travel is a necessary evil. Hoover salesmen and drug dealers have to keep on the move. Ditto estate agents, reporters, imams. It’s leisure travel, the time-filling, culture-sampling, cuisine-dissing, planet-defiling, water-guzzling invasions of the overprivileged that I really abhor, and that unthinking, knee-jerk rush to the computer to book cheap flights every January (we barely even notice we’re doing it any more!) because without a gad-about in Guadalajara, a dubious spree in Dubai, or the chance to go berserk (over pea soup) in Zeebrugge, people apparently lose all standing in society. We could just stay home and listen to Scarlatti but no, people are bombarded with bucket lists of faraway things they must accomplish, and they fall for it! Lambing in Maine, prancing through Croatian lavender fields, pottering round the Pyramids, personally inspecting the coral reefs and rainforests before they are no more (thanks to all the people who flew out to see them), riding on a donkey, a dromedary, a double-decker, trotting through Central Park in an anachronistic open carriage (who does that?). A hot dog here, couscous there, sashimi up, tortellini down, Figaro su, Figaro giu, always seeking some remnant – any will do – of uniqueness and authenticity in a world the human race is racing to destroy. Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!

  We’re such saps. We’ve been fed a great big bunch of flimsy reasons to travel, by evil geniuses determined to use up all the oil and gas as fast as possible so as to coerce us into adopting ‘cheap’ nuclear power, a craven idea that will torment and baffle future generations for thousands of years to come (if there are any future generations). Do we ever stop to think about all this motion, this commotion, this agitation and all of its attendant aggravation? Far from it. We gullibly galumph across the earth at our masters’ bidding and get ourselves into all kinds of scrapes. We get lost, we get robbed, we get raped, we get fleeced, we get flummoxed, we get misdirected, mistranslated, and misunderstood, we get hot, we get cold, we get sick, we get nervous, we get confused. We get delayed interminably in airports. We unwisely hang off cliffs or drown in waterfalls, all for the sake of a selfie. We struggle with unfamiliar phones, plumbing, and foreign currency, and collect bottles of limoncello or artichoke brandy, just so we can hold our heads up high when we finally limp home sick, broke, exhausted and bewildered.