On Anti-travel

I’m interested in anti-travel.

Travel has become a personality and a fetish and a brag (pre 2021 anyway) these days. But look at it this way. In, say, my 1994 world in MN, I might have considered a Mongolian-located herder-yurt “exotic” but we have to also consider the idea that the Mongolian herder next to the yurt would’ve considered my St. Paul back yard exotic as well given the distances in either meters or culture and the relativistic framing. Which was exotic, then, and worthy of "travel" in the western sense we know from the modern decadent world we now live in? Well...both I guess. So that means I needed to have considered my back yard worthy of examination from a travel sense in the same way that the braggarts -- with pictures of the pyramids or Antarctica or the great Wall -- might conceive of things from their superficial iphone perspective from the side of the yurt as they stood with their Apple-product triumphancy. Heh. I mean cmon.


William Least Heat Moon once did this kind of thing in "Prairie Earth" (PE) a book I didn't like too much and didn't finish but appreciated nonetheless. His works "River Horse" and "Blue Highways" were better. Otoh, PE was an epiphany. The dude walked every square centimeter of an acre(?) of land in [Kansas?]. He examined each blade of grass, each Osage orange, each upturned soup can or spindle or chunk of old leather. All of it was worth examination and also worth a inquiry into our memory and insight. St. Augustine did this once as well (Book 10 of "Testimony," a better translation of the title "Confessions") and found within the halls of memory what? Himself? God? Something, anyway, something other than the normal self....

So Anti-travel. You can go to Antibe or St. Petersburg on the cruise ships and bring back pictures and bragging rights on beaches and bikinis and mountainous bays, but me? Me? I will have merely traveled my back yard further than you could imagine and come back better informed than you on how the world works. Anti-travel.