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The Artists Almanac
February 15, 2004 - Travel
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Samuel Johnson said
happiness is not local.
We all promise
ourselves, he went on, some longed for trip, once we finish this or
that tedious work. We nod and add that, once we retire, we may do
little else. The thrill of starting to some different place, with
strange climates and customs, is so intense and broadening, we could
do it all the time.
And yet, despite our
yearning to escape everyday duties and our own stressed selves, we
find these or other problems follow us as we take our vacations to
those places pictured in the travel brochures. We sign up for a
cruise with beautiful people to exotic climes and find ourselves at
table with a manufacturer of gears for engines where we are treated
to the details of his distribution plan or his record golf games. It
rains, and our shore leaves are on the same clock we came to escape.
We stand in groups and lines to visit crowded sites and restaurants.
Then, on our return, frazzled from airports, exotic viruses, and
living off the charity of strangers, we find our local problems, far
from solving themselves, have conspired with each other, bred and
multiplied. The crowded in-basket and clogged answering machine
frown at us, unless we spoiled our trip by having it all forwarded.
At least we have our slides to warm up our memories after our credit
cards have cooled down.
There are other forms
of travel.
One, ever more
popular, is virtual travel. We can go via Internet or The Travel
Channel to explore the surface of Mars, the coastal highway of
California, the Temples of Japan or the Louvre, Turkey or the Left
Bank of the Seine. Sight, sound, light and action: all but taste and
smell are there. Even these may be sampled at every imaginable
variety of local restaurants, where the natives may be seen and
heard speaking the language. Walker Percy thought this might be done
as well with books, with the added bonus of imagination. He called
it a Rotation, said we all needed it, and thought the virtual
variety was as good as the real. It is the theme of his hilarious
novel, The Last Gentleman.
For some, there is an
even better way.
Arizona Highways
devoted an entire recent issue to visiting all fifty states, without
once leaving Arizona. They carried it off. Using fogs, palm trees,
conifer forests, seasonal marshes, blazing Autumn maples, the orange
groves of the Valley of the Sun, the sere plains and cloudscapes of
the Mogollon plateau, the ski slopes and lofty snowcaps of the
sacred mountains of the Navajo, the rocky coasts and sandy beaches
of Lake Powell and the lower Colorado River, they took us to the
beaches of Hawaii, the Mississippi Delta, the Carolina low country,
the Great Smoky Mountains, the ski slopes of New England, the
measureless forests of Minnesota, the rocky fog-shrouded coasts of
Maine, the swamps and citrus groves of Louisiana and Florida, and
the great prairies of Kansas and Wyoming, with distant views of
mountains beyond.
And yet, our mind
reminds us, we cannot all live in the splendor of Arizona.
Maybe not. But look
around yourself, wherever you live. Here in Tennessee we have it all
- mountains, forests, streams, lakes, abundant fish and wildlife,
handsome cities, shaded town squares set off with picturesque old
courthouses, gardens, produce markets, classical old homes, native
bluegrass music, log cabins, every sort of tree, long views, and
handsome people. All these pearls are strung on the necklace of a
river the Indians once called Warioto, meaning “beautiful”. We have
in greatest abundance what Arizonans and people around the world
cherish above all else – water. We have miles of lakeshore, several
times the length of the entire Atlantic coast. Arizonans have an
overworked descriptive term, riparian habitat. My friend Steve once
surprised me with the observation that “out West what they treasure
most are those rare areas which look most like Tennessee, where
green trees cluster about running water.” Each new day we get a
different colored lens to view it through – a change of weather.
The estimable Doctor
Johnson gives us a great truth: that we each find our happiness
within ourselves, wherever we may be.
Everydayness dulls our
appreciation of beauty: it is the Artist’s job to surprise us with
the riches we live amongst. We never quite saw the sparkle of water
until Monet painted his Impression of Sunrise, and clouds, the only
unaltered part of landscape entirely designed by God, took on new
meaning for us after Constable painted them, without traveling more
than three miles from home.
Bill
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