by Lucy Ellmann
People travel for business. Until Covid struck, academics never sat still – they were constantly in the air overhead, deconstructing something. Rewarded by financial bonuses and promotions for business trips and abstruse conferences, and ordered not to return without some impact and relevance, people learn to crave these junkets and to crow about how many they’ve been on. Their underlying assumption is that travel is irrefutably fun, worthwhile, and enviable – a status symbol – when really all that’s happened is that these poor wretches (more sheep than locusts, and therefore to be pitied) have left their work and their lives behind in order to spend twenty-eight hours in the air and in airports feeling disoriented, twelve hours drinking in a variety of unsanitary places, an hour or two at a dull meeting or under-attended talk, and a few hours playing hooky in unfamiliar surroundings and getting laid by a drunk and equally lonely business colleague, assistant professor, or total stranger. The possibility of sexual shenanigans, such as they are, is the big draw.
Eco-tourism is a nebulous concept, whereby the deteriorating environment is further warmed and eroded so that people who think they really understand nature can go enjoy its last gasps by surfing it, scuba-diving it, or climbing, caressing, and collecting it. The world’s tiniest begonia, newly discovered in Peru, is now at risk of being squished by a million amateur botanists stampeding up the hill in a frenzy to mark it off their score sheets. Nature would be much obliged actually if we would just LEAVE IT ALONE.22
There’s a multitude of alternative health tourism too, ashrams, hot springs and sulphur spas, meditation camps with ley lines to lie on, curative meccas to heal you in some short-lived way. You know what? Making debilitated people feel duty-bound to go to Lourdes, Baden-Baden, the Grand Canyon, the Dead Sea, or the Swiss Alps for the sake of their health is one hell of a despicable idea.
Alternatively, for those who have it all and want less, there are staycations, essentially stagnations, where you still spend a lot of money on yourself but stay within a few hundred miles of home patting yourself on the back for ‘saving the planet’.23 Or how about a starvation vacation, where you go all the way to Bavaria for a toxins purge, releasing more toxins into the atmosphere in your wake for the rest of us to purge, in a self-perpetuating contamination cycle. It’s a capitalist’s dream come true: pollute the whole world by detoxifying yourself.
‘Groundhog holidays’ are for unadventurous vacation-repeaters who want to return to the same dump in, say, Cancun, or Majorca, or the Black Sea, anywhere, even Denver, year after year. Well, you part-own some hideous condo so you’ve got to go at least once a year to make sure all the ashtrays are just where you left them. People really do this, and kick up a fuss if the other fifty families they time-share with have moved a chair!
These scaredy-cats are a world away from the daredevil traveller, the climbers and hotheads and perilous sports advocates. Skiers fly thousands of miles just to put themselves in traction. Arctic aficionados, jungle johnnies, rhino poachers: the idea is to test yourself and return home euphoric for having survived – if you do. One minute you’re in Texas, the next you’re up Everest in a blizzard, on a trip that set you back $100,000. They can’t help it, risk-taking is addictive. There are so many mountaineers trying to ‘summit’ on Everest right now, they really ought to install a funicular. In the movie Everest,24 a whole group of semi-experienced climbers gets caught on some narrow ledges without gloves or even a sleeping bag. It’s hard to believe, and harder to watch. (What I hate most is the way they all pretend to be interested in Nepal.)
Maybe the real purpose of travel is to scare yourself. First, on the plane (or other speeding vehicle), and later, at your sunstroke-ridden, malaria-swamped, typhoon-prone, elephant-stampeded destination. It’s all an experiment in alienation, a stranger danger endurance test. People really can’t decide between the horror of staying at home and that of dying in transit. They replace their natural fear of travel with fear travel, travel designed to scare you a bit. What is a trip to Vegas for after all but to frighten yourself by excessive drinking, whoring, and gambling? The birds do it, the bees do it, the holier-than-thou jihadists do it, and everybody likes Tom Jones.
You don’t have to poo and pee and copulate and take snapshots of well-known landmarks in every country on earth, you know? It’s not the law. But the PRIDE travel engenders is beyond belief. Smugness is a guaranteed travel bonus: they hand it out during take-off and landing.
I go [someplace], therefore I can gloat.
We booked, we bustled, we boasted.
Maybe people got sick of Marco Polo’s reminiscences too, and of Vasco da Gama’s, and greeted Amerigo Vespucci’s cocktail party chat with heavy sighs and glares – ‘Guy’s been to Rio twice and never shuts up!’ But at least travel then involved some genuine challenges. Now there’s very little to be proud of – if you have the dough, you can get pretty much any place you want, and fast. So, what’s with all the triumphalism? ‘We’ve been to China,’ they coo, or (the lesser claim), ‘We haven’t been to China yet but we’re going to go.’ China’s old hat! Everybody’s been to China now, even vegetarians (who always complain about the food – so why not stay home and eat your own damn bean sprouts?). Once they’ve done China, they have to top that with something even more exotic – Guatemala, Micronesia, the moon. Okay, go if you must, but don’t come back.
And they’re so bossy, these modern-day explorers, especially if you travel together. Having been somewhere once for a week, they’re bursting with superior knowledge of the place. They alone now know how to find the lesser-known museums, or what to order in Marseille (bouillabaisse) or Oaxaca (a tamal). They tramp you all over Moscow without pausing for a pepper vodka. They know every hidden lily pond in Lagos or Lisbon, and where to find a dentist, from Clapham to Cape Town, but they don’t know when to go fly a kite and jump in the lake.
The reckless needlessness of most travel is never touched upon by these eager beavers. Instead, we’re all just automatically supposed to join the exodus, at the risk of stability, sanity, and solvency. The illogicality of this push to be on the move is nicely touched on by Padgett Powell in You & Me, when two sedentary characters consider taking a supposedly desirable trip from Florida to some desert – a plan which actually fills them both with dread. None the less, they try to convince themselves to go.
Our tiny growing familiarity alone, as we sit there or walk around parched and frightened, will convince us we now know more than we did before the onset of the fear and the disgust, and we will feel better about the desert.
Veterans of an hour in the desert, we will like it, a little bit.25
*
Even charitable or political-action tourism can fall flat. It was great, for instance, that women marched on Washington to protest during Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Brava! But it would have been even better if they’d walked all the way instead of flying. And once they got there, why not stay? If only they’d camped out on the White House lawn until their wishes were met. Until the guy gave up the presidency in shame. But of course he has no shame.
However heartfelt the expedition is, the means almost always defeats the ends. Apart from those kind ophthalmologists who fly around Africa or Haiti fixing cataracts (hoorah!), and maybe a few UN or Peace Corps employees here and there (hard to verify), it’s time to reconsider most forms of supposedly altruistic travel. You might do more good in the world if you quit with the wanderlust and sent the cash you save to somebody who hasn’t got any disposable income. The New York Times’ educational trips for high school students, in the company of Times journalists, cost $5,000. On one such Student Journey to Peru, the kids were apparently ‘taught’ racism and disdain for the concept of white privilege.26The Nation offers similarly priced trips to Cuba for adults, as if there were something extra responsible about gadding about in a country America tried to boycott out of existence. These olive-branch tourists would presumably never dream of sacrificing five thousand bucks each to help Cuba or Peru dir
ectly.
Another popular destination for the conscience-stricken is the European concentration-camp circuit. Great day out for all the family!27 The Nazis put fossil fuels to previously unimaginable uses, and you too can deplete what remains of our irreplaceable energy supply by transporting yourself – voluntarily! – to Auschwitz to gawp at the gas chambers in a Hawaiian shirt.
The biggest travellers, the wealthy and mobile twenty per cent, are causing the most environmental damage. As Bob Hughes observed in his book about the ways in which technological liberation has liberated nobody, bikes and even horses are not only cleaner forms of transport but quicker too, if you calculate the actual time and energy invested.28 Airlines claim that their ever-bigger aircraft are more egalitarian and environmentally friendly, but they never add in the costs of enlarging runways, building the planes, and hiring enough Security goons to flatten all the passengers – I mean, protect passenger safety. There’s nothing admirable about getting on an Airbus.
As for the VIRUS, what it likes are cars, restaurants, airports, globalism, poverty, superspreader get-togethers, close contact, coughing, panting, yelling, and a catastrophically diminished environment. Covid loves to travel and it really gets around. It thrives on apathy – ours and that of our lethargic and asinine leaders. Let’s thwart it, beef up what the virus hates: community, quiet, carefulness, consideration, stasis, solitude. Clean air. Masks. Morality. Conservation, the common good, individual commitment to a single locale. And staying put. We fight it with these while we wait for the vaccine, whaddya say?
The UK’s Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020 did have one heartening effect: an almost instantaneous burst of wildlife. Birds sang more – for once, they could hear each other. Plants seemed to grow more vigorously, with better air and no one outside to trim or trample them. Weeds blossomed boisterously. Streets were calm and quiet. For a little while in Edinburgh, we were spared the sight and sound of cars in motion, and even of tourists clanking their wheeled suitcases over the cobblestones.
Dolphins have been spotted in Venice. In Hong Kong, within a week of the cancellation of the usual two hundred express ferries to Macau, native dolphins returned in great numbers. They played in the water, and apparently had lots of sex. Dolphins really know how to live – if only we’d let them.
There is beauty in less activity, less financial transaction, less mayhem, less hurry, less frenzy, less movement.
Individuals are not responsible for global warming, it’s true. Corporations are largely to blame. But irresponsible individuals don’t help! Maybe what we need is an intervention: just put travel addicts on a low-mileage diet, or make them go cold turkey. If they need ongoing support, they can join Carboniferous Anonymous (CA), a twelve-step programme I just made up for people stuck on burning up all the fossil fuels.
It will be hard to stick to your resolve at first, especially when you see your friends scoring their usual peregrination points. You may even be shunned for not putting yourself through several long-haul flights a year, not catching the usual half a dozen colds, and not knowing the best coastal bus route in Honolulu (No. 55). Don’t listen to them. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but travel buffs will never hurt you. Throw out your cholera pills. Recycle all those little plastic toiletry containers. And try having sex with people who live nearby.
__________________
1 ‘In 2019, the HHS [Dept. of Health and Human Services] conducted Crimson Contagion, a simulation examining the government’s ability to contain a pandemic… The scenario envisioned an international group of tourists visiting China who become infected with a novel influenza and spread it worldwide’ (Lawrence Wright, ‘The Plague Year’, New Yorker, December 28, 2020).
2 Aditya Singh hung out in Chicago’s O’Hare airport for three months, apparently for fear of Covid. You’ve got to really like airports to do that. (‘Man lived inside O’Hare for 3 months before detection…’, Chicago Tribune, January 17, 2021.)
3 December 27, 2021. What’ll the newspapers do if people stop booking these needless trips? All that ad revenue down the drain! No. Commerce outweighs Covid and the climate crisis.
4 ‘Metropolitan Transit’, Pretend It’s a City (directed by Martin Scorsese, 2021).
5 ‘After Barring Girls For Leggings…’ (New York Times, March 26, 2017); ‘American Airlines Suspends Flight Attendant After Altercation Over Stroller’ (New York Times, April 22, 2017).
6 Airlines never stop squawking about Covid travel restrictions (‘UK aviation sector need urgent support, industry leaders say’, Guardian, January 16, 2021). What crybabies, after they helped spread it everywhere in the first place!
7 ‘In 2017, United had the highest number of animal deaths of any US carrier… with 18 animals killed and 13 injured in transport. Six animal deaths in total were reported from the other 16 carriers…’ (Guardian, March 14, 2018).
8 ‘United Airlines “saddened” by death of giant rabbit after transatlantic flight’ (Guardian, April 26, 2017); and ‘Dog Dies after United Airlines Attendant Forces It into Overhead Bin’ (Independent, March 13, 2018).
9 ‘I apologise for having to re-accommodate these customers’ (https://hub.united.com/response-united-express-3411-2353955749.html; https://eu.courier-journal.com/story/news/2017/04/11/male-hs-teacher-aboard-united-flight-didnt-needhappen/100319308/; and ‘United’s Apologies: A Timeline’, New York Times, April 14, 2017).
10 Flight attendants somewhat redeemed themselves in January 2021 by urging their union to establish No Fly lists banning Trump’s supporters from homeward-bound planes after they’d staged the coup at the Capitol. (‘Flight Attendants Call for Pro-Trump Rioters to be Added to the No Fly List’, Revolt, January 11, 2021.) That was heroic, and the surprise this move caused amongst the insurrectionists was pretty gratifying.
11 ‘Who’s Afraid of Fran Lebowitz?’, All About Women Festival, March 6, 2018 (Sydney Opera House Talks and Ideas Archive).
12 Hannah Ritchie, ‘Climate Change and Flying’ (ourworldindata.org, Oct. 22, 2020).
13 ‘Fake US leg band gets pigeon a reprieve…’ (Associated Press, January 15, 2021).
14 Flights (tr. Jennifer Croft, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017, p. 125).
15 ‘Tourists urged to avoid riding donkeys up Santorini’s steep steps’ (Guardian, April 2, 2019).
16 Knopf (1985).
17 Created by Andrew Hinderaker and aired in 2020.
18 Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange (Greenwood, 1972).
19 Pride and Prejudice (1813). As it turns out, she goes to Derbyshire instead and spends most of the trip thinking about Darcy.
20 As the Martians tell him in Stardust Memories (1980), ‘We like your movies, particularly the early, funny ones.’
21 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768).
22 As soon as humans desert a place, ‘feral eco-systems’ emerge, no-man zones much appreciated by wildlife. See Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment (William Collins, 2021). Kim Stanley Robinson recommends leaving half the earth free of humans (Guardian, March 20, 2018).
23 The planet will survive actually, whatever we do. But we won’t. We’ll be extinct. And what a shameful mess we’ll leave behind. Dinosaurs and giant sharks lasted millions of years, and left the place as they found it.
24 Directed by Baltasar Kormákur (2015).
25 Echo Press (2012).
26 ‘Star NY Times Reporter Accused of Using “N-Word”…’ (The Daily Beast, January 28, 2021.)
27 Sergei Loznitsa has covered this new type of voyeuristic jaunt in his movie Austerlitz (2016).
28 The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World (New Internationalist, 2018).
BRAS: A LIFE SENTENCE
It’s like always meeting under a PYLON. The bra is the omnipresent structure of the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. Every woman you know, love, hate, help, vex, need, revile, misconstrue, and repudiate is probably wearing one, has worn one, and will continu
e to wear one every day of her life. Aunts, mothers, grandmas, teachers, doctors, estate agents, travel agents, theatrical agents, secret agents, dental psychiatrists, friends, sisters, daughters, and nieces are all enduring this unmentioned bondage, post-puberty, and we just accept it! They live and DIE in bras. Stifling cups and biting straps and niggly hooks and rotting elastic and silly little bows and frills and embroidered flowers or polka dots. Women have come and gone, fledged in love and hope and doomed to desolation, all whilst wearing bras. Their upper torsos have been twisted, tainted, squeezed, and adulterated by these garments, which rarely make them happy.
MEN HAVE MANAGED TO EROTICISE BRAS, BUT THEY DON’T HAVE TO WEAR THEM.
Apparently the smooth back of the human female must never be seen; it can only appear in public, roped in, with seams criss-crossing it, and bulges along the seams, that are now more familiar than a real breast, unleashed. We are so offended by the rocking and rolling of breasts when loose, so ignorant of their natural substance and behaviour, we have reached the delusional state of thinking it unnecessary and outlandish that breasts should ever wobble at all. Their gelatinous quality will not do. In its place, we get engineering feats that are more like BRIDGES than breasts. Are we trying to get to the other side?
CHILDREN MUST WONDER IF BREASTS WOULD FALL OFF IF THEY WEREN’T FASTENED ON BY BRAS.
Women survive WARS, or don’t, wearing bras. They cook thousands of meals wearing bras. They have arguments, go to movies and restaurants, go to the DOGS, wearing bras. They even manage to BREASTFEED wearing bras. They drive, they run, they dance, they trip, they fall… some even try to sleep, wearing bras. They collect prizes, pensions, the kids, the groceries, and the service wash, wearing bras (and have to wash the damn things back home by hand). They’re badgered by authorities and family members, beaten by bad men, given parking tickets, and disallowed child custody, wearing bras. They’re kept so busy doing all that stuff, they don’t have time to OBJECT to bras. Ideally, they’d be offered tax-free handouts annually, in compensation for this sartorial torment. Instead, all they get are strong shoulders, from toting their breasts in bra baskets all their lives. Only during the politically advanced sixties and seventies – and in 2020, as a vegging-out by-product of Covid lockdowns – have there been some poignant efforts at bra-avoidance.