How many families had done precisely that, come not as tourists, but as immigrants, looking from those great barrack-like windows into the great unknown with apprehensive hope. I wrote a story about that once, or tried to, but I could not capture the sense of what it was like suddenly to have the floor removed from beneath one's feet. It is a clich of our country that we are a mobile people. This seems particularly true of the many young couples who transfer from coast to coast with apparent insouciance, Cincinnati today, tomorrow Minneapolis. An abiding metaphor for human life is the journey, a passage from here to there.
Nothing surprises so much as the inevitable.
But there are trips within the larger trip, and no experience seems capable of dissuading us from packing, boarding the plane, and flying off to elsewhere with a glint in our eye. Boethius said that one man's exile is another's home, and it is odd to think that what we find quaint is only the quotidian for the natives, much as they would find our plastic pastel lives exotic. There seems no place that isn't a possible target for the tourist industry. Half a century ago, the travel book was a respected genre. The author took us down untrodden paths, to places we were very unlikely to go ourselves.