Washington - The Santa Fe, New Mexico, airport looks like it hasn't changed much in about 70 years, which is to say it's charming, everything scaled down to human dimensions, almost like a small-town bus station.
I was flying in and out on an assignment and was immediately beguiled. The architecture is Western, with exposed beams, tile floors and a cafe where you can have a cup of coffee in a comfortable booth and look out over the tarmac. The airport has mementos and posters celebrating an era when travel was fundamentally romantic.
Of course you will then hear the announcement that everyone has to hustle through the security checkpoint, which is understaffed, and overzealous, because the TSA feels compelled to police the toiletries in the teenager's bag and use advanced technology to ensure that the woman with the baby strapped to her chest isn't smuggling high explosives. (Double-check the baby!)
I hate to romanticise the past, because let's face it, it was full of disease and discomfort and oppression and hatred and inequities and superstition and all kinds of cultural madness and horror. But it does seem that travel might have been more romantic. It wasn't just moving meat around.
People had those steamer trunks and travelled with fine china in case they wanted a classy picnic overlooking the Pyramids. Men and women travelled in style because they respected the transportation technology; it was just understood that you wouldn't wear shorts and a T-shirt or a track suit.
It is possible that I am not remembering real life but merely cinematic depictions of travel. But admit it: In the old days, most people who travelled looked like Bogart and Bacall. This is a true historical fact, surely, and if it's not, we should make it one.
I want to travel someday by seaplane. I want to travel in a customised rail car. I want to check into grand hotels with names like The Majestic and The Excelsior and The Royal Nebuchadnezzar rather than SuperLodge Express and Extended Stay Econo Suites & Inn and Billy's No-Tell Motel.
But no: We move through the pipes of America like a pumpable mass, everything measured with metrics that value foremost the delivery of the package (you) and the termination of the company's contact with the package. At some point along the way, the efficiency experts managed to wring the last drop of glamour out of travel. I am pretty sure the algorithms are in charge, in the same way that they increasingly run everything else in the modern world.
In the airline business, for example, “legroom” was discovered to be an inefficiency. Also, food. Success is defined primarily by on-time arrivals, even if the actual experience is harrowing, involving various levels of overheating, imprisonment, starvation, pain and an ordeal in many ways reminiscent of what Alec Guinness went through when he refused to let officers do manual labor in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
The latest news is that airlines are reducing the size limits for carry-on baggage. This is a good thing, probably, because too many people are carrying huge suitcases aboard planes and creating fuss and consternation as they implausibly try to shove their luggage into the overhead compartment. But petite luggage has its own challenges.
I have a new suitcase that is essentially just a small, lightly reinforced duffel bag on wheels. Tragically, it doesn't roll well. It's too small and too close to being a perfect square, and so it wobbles and tips on its side and acts like a drunk as I haul it down the concourse. It's an embarrassment. It reflects badly upon me and fails to be commensurate with my professional stature. The pathetic suitcase that can't roll worth a darn does not shout “Here comes an important writer-person who is a classy traveller dashing off to some exotic location!” No, my suitcase proclaims, “I'm a roller bag that needs training wheels.”
I can't do this anymore. Someone tell me, where can you buy a steamer trunk these days?
Washington Post