On the exit ramp off our flight from Glasgow to London, a young boy of around eight years old is puking his guts up against the glass window. His mother has assumed a wide-legged stance, her practical knee-high boots snug around her striped leggings, a backpack around both shoulders is strapped tight. She’s ready to plow through it all. Everyone in Heathrow on December 30 feels like they look—miserable, vulnerable yet martial and braced.
To say holiday air travel sucked is an understatement. Travel in the time of Omicron is a full-out Olympic sport—documents, COVID tests, money thrown at tests, little bags filled with toiletries, masks akimbo, cynical diatribes about the theater of the virus mixed with logistical fears of getting it, QR codes, complex sign-up flows for shitty Wi-Fi connections.
All that said, we made it to Scotland by air in three airplanes in mid December, then we made it further into the Highlands by one very small car. Then we went back through Edinburgh and Glasgow, enjoying a guest bedroom or two, and braced ourselves again to get home to Santa Fe. This trip was a beautiful journey to enjoy family, nature, and the cozy contrasts of shite weather and warm tea; it was also a journey that, to be honest, forced the question “Do you really want to travel anymore?”
Clearly, let’s start with the beautiful and warm parts. We had a magical time—my highlights involved being outside, with hiking boots, next to anything called a moor, loch, Ben or glen. Followed by heading indoors for warm elixir and mince pies. The weather was moody—changing from pouring rain to misting rain to diaphanous fog often. The sun’s presence, made known a few times, came with a whistle of angels singing. Look up now, they sang, because we’ll be gone soon. The land was full of texture—tweedy and lush with orange, green, brown and grey. The water—the moisture I miss so badly in my new desert life—poofed my hair, added a glisten to every surface. It was easy to feel at home and long to start knocking off some mountains on the bucket list. The people were lovely—polite, chatty, funny, charming, and, many times, impossible to understand.
Take the wee waitress at the remote restaurant, Monachyle Mohr, who had an accent that was not placeable—sort of like a wilding in Game of Thrones. “Aw me manager tol’ me to posh up me words coz nah one coulda ‘stan what’s I was sayin.” That was the posh up.
I also have many many nice things to say about the Brothers Tomnay and their hospitality but I’ll save those for a proper storytelling. I think you get the picture of what a lovely time and place it was.
The Question of Travel
Even before the pandemic I was starting to second guess international travel. It has been such a tremendous part of what formed me as a younger person—by 32 I had been in more than 50 countries—that I had always assumed that international travel would be a way of life for me. But to understand anything about climate change is to also internalize that cheap gas and cheap air flights are massive carbon generators (not to mention the sheer volume of waste produced by each flight with its avalanche of plastic food containers.)
Then, Instagram-hungry tourists mob most places of general interest. Cottage industries at every turn are profit mad. (We got our departure nasal swabs at a Botox bar in a Glaswegian mall by two enterprising Middle Eastern gals with very precise eyebrows.) Climate-fueled Big Weather and the Pandemic has made flight schedules unpredictable. Like are all the testy logistics and guilty stress worth it? It’s enough to make you want to puke up a NutriGrain bar on a glass window.
But the answer is yes. We should travel. In fact, I might argue we need it more than ever as the world writ large tilts on the axis of provincial right-wingism. It’s a necessary rearrangement of your internal placeholders. Does listening to BBC 4 in a small Suzuki while charging up the A8 change the furniture of my beliefs? Yeah, it does a bit. Maybe not in huge ways, but as a continued chipping away at my little American-born ideas into a broader thought: “We are all on the same planet, you know.”
If the wild and ancient beauty of Scotland are an obvious catalyst, there are the non-obvious ones too. Like having a cigarette with a gay East German man named Silvio who has a Glaswegian accent and harsh opinions about America. Or driving around the drab council housing schemes of Irvine—with the kind of boxy and dreary housing that screams “working-class Britain”—helps you understand the thrill of a fist fight. Or tucking into curry night in a remote pub and watch three local musicians pull out an accordion, a fiddle, and a guitar and take everyone around them into a time machine. Or attending country Christmas-day mass with a homesick Nigerian priest who forgets his lines but the steely local hens keep us moving through the rites.
Meeting family, feeling welcomed, watching Love Actually for the nth time. Perfect. But maybe the present I wasn’t expecting to get so much from—and the one I was longing for so badly in the face of COVID lockdowns—was leaving the States and getting more perspective on all this “exceptionalism.”
I was hard-selling Santa Fe as a destination to visit to anyone who would listen but few were interested. “We have a lot of other places we want to visit before the States,” said one. True fact and it’s a shame; I think we can agree that the American West is some of the most incredible scenery in the world. But the reality is also that our little red-and-blue bubble is less appealing than ever to the distant eye. We are in trouble and everyone knows it.
Travel across oceans, feels to me, to be an essential element of psychic innovation. While the outer experience of travel is revitalizing, it’s the inner experience that holds a key to our survival. Let it stay a pond, not become a moat.