Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact # 19–a postcard of a 747 from QANTAS.

I’m not sure when this card entered the collection; it would either have been the 1972 return from my dad’s sabbatical in New Zealand, or the 1980 return from the sabbatical in Australia. At that time, airlines were pretty liberal with distributing things to help their passengers pass time during flights. My parents being the sort who never rejected a freebie and didn’t throw away things, when we cleaned up their house, we found playing cards from Malaysian Airlines, combs and toothbrush kits from Singapore Airlines, a few pieces of cutlery from SAS, as well as all these postcards, many from airlines that have left that great departure lounge in the sky.

I was reminded of this card today, as I read that the last Boeing 747 has just rolled off the assembly line (see link in comments). I am a bit over a year older than the 747 (though it had a significantly longer gestation than I did). I can’t tell you how many miles I’ve travelled, how many oceans and continents I’ve crossed riding comfortably in one of these incredible machines. Even though neither the 747 nor I are being produced any more, there are hopefully decades of service left for both of us. But to be sure, as far as the 747 is concerned, this is definitely the end of an era in travel. And, as much as any vehicle, the 747 functions as a symbol for something fundamental about how my parents brought me up, and reading this news gave me pause.

My brothers and I were raised as international travelers. When my parents went to Argentina for my father’s postdoctoral fellowship, my oldest brother traveled there as a babe in arms. He was walking well for the return trip; for that journey it was my middle brother who flew as a babe in arms (The culture of air travel was quite different then. Apparently my middle brother was such a cute baby that one of the stewardesses on the flight had no compunction about seizing the ¡Guapo bambino! and carrying him up the aisle to bring into the cockpit and show the pilot). I was five for my first big flight, when we all got on a 747 and flew, by way of Hawai’i, Samoa, and Fiji, to New Zealand for my dad’s first sabbatical year.

Since that trip, I have spent a lot of time spent on airplanes—from the Antipodes to Asia, every continent but South America, in everything from DC-3s to 747s, most recently to France in a 777. I’ve waited for luggage in airports that are sleek and hi-tech, and in sheds by unpaved airstrips. To this day, my sleep regularly brings dreams of travel—of the in between-space of the airport, of being on an airplane and expecting to be somewhere, of being in a hotel and going to see something new.

The experience of travel is core to who I am. Travel (and it must be stressed, voluntary travel, not the flight of a refugee) is the greatest gift my parents gave me. No book, no virtual reality experience, no movie could have given me the same experience of alighting, somewhat disoriented, in a foreign land and realizing that every person who is speaking unintelligibly and who looks and acts differently from me is normal, and that I am the weirdo. Seeing the sights is grand—I can’t oversell that—but for becoming a whole human, for developing empathy, you can’t beat traveling, finding that you are the weirdo, and somewhat helpless to boot. That is a gift from my parents for which I am eternally grateful. I am all the more grateful when I talk with many of my neighbors who have seen so little of the world—no more than a trip to Disneyland, or some city in America for a convention. I’ve met some that have never left Oregon in their entire lives. Their views are constrained, and their embrace of humanity barely goes to the horizon.

I don’t know if wanderlust is heritable, but it is strong in my family. One of my brothers has very itchy feet and pretty much always wants to be overseas (though it’s gotten very expensive). The other has taken a few trips abroad as well, most recently France and the Galápagos Islands. Of course, our parents kept traveling after my brothers and I left the nest, flying to Australia, New Zealand, South America, South Africa, Central America, and I forget where else. All this travel, of course, was by air.

Before my parents, my grandparents also did quite a bit of traveling. However, their voyages preceded the jet age. Travel then was so different that I have a hard time comprehending it. We have an artifact of that time, the equivalent of a carry-on bag, a thing to carry the stuff a traveler would need during the trip to the destination: an enormous steamer trunk. Steamers took my grandparents to Europe, Asia, and South America. I remember visiting my mom’s parents when the ship they were on—the SS Oriana—stopped in Long Beach on the way to parts south. Some of my great grandparents traveled extensively as well, a little over a hundred years ago (some voluntarily, some less so, but all by steamship). I’m amazed, when I think about all that was required for travel at that time—the planning, the logistics, the flexibility, the trust.

Obviously, then, I have to complement the engineers behind the 747 and its like, who made it possible for an upper-middle-class family of five to travel around the world so easily. Every time I’ve gone from one country to another—with the exception of a couple childhood drives to Tijuana—it has been by air. Transoceanic travel by steamer is mostly a thing of the past, and for sixty years the jet has been “shrinking the world.” The phasing out of the 747, combined with the growing awareness of the threat of climate change, though, makes me wonder if we are in for another change in how we travel.

Here I am now: my travels have left my feet quite firmly planted in the soil of a farm in rural Oregon. Travel is mostly in my past. The last time I used a passport was twenty years ago, and nowadays my very infrequent flights are for family visits, not to experience strange lands. Farms are very difficult to leave for any length of time. Also, the thought of burning gallons of aviation fuel on a warming planet, just for my own recreation, further dampens any wanderlust that I may still have.

Still, every so often, my sweetie and I speculate about places overseas we’d like to see (Australia again, and New Zealand, and France, and the Shetland Isles…), but these pipedreaming sessions have grown less frequent. We have no children who need the broadening experience of travel. If I’m being honest with myself, I would say that it is now an even probability that I’ll never use a passport again. The 747 and I came on the scene at about the same time, and it was, thanks to my parents, the vehicle for so much of my education and growth. It feels appropriate, as I have become more earthbound, that the 747 begins to fade from the scene.

Ave atque vale, 747.