Going backwards to go forward

You might say I was open to suggestion. I wrote last week about two men sitting in a club in Boston in 1908 deciding to travel to Nova Scotia, and I wondered what a person might choose 100 years later. So I took a look.

Mozambique, for a safari to Gorongosa, a national park. St. Lucia, with its Caribbean rain forest. Montenegro, the new European Riviera. Ecuador, with a sophisticated cultural scene. Sicily, with its vineyards. San Diego, full of the young, the restless and the loaded. Hainan Island, in China, southwest of Hong Kong, with its beaches. Oman, in the Middle East, for sophisticated travelers. Puerto Escondido, where surfers go – in Mexico, where Canadians go to get murdered. Paris, to see the new president and his girl friend (or is she now his wife?).

I'd like to say that I quickly booked a ticket to, say, St. Lucia, but I didn't. I could see it was hopeless. I'll be lucky this winter if I get to Kentville. How do people find the resources and desire to jet around the world? And what do they do it for?

When the two men were sitting in the Boston club they were planning an adventure that would challenge them, fishing and camping through a largely-unexplored wilderness. There is an appeal to that. The challenge of not losing one's bags, or of not getting held up by security in a crowded airport, or of not seeing poverty while traveling through it to a luxury hotel just doesn't have the same appeal.

The two men who came to the wilderness in our back yard had an experience that is being celebrated this year with the Tent Dwellers Festival. It would be hard to conceive of a festival celebrating a trip to Puerto Escondido a hundred years from now, given that it features surfing, hot sun and fancy drinks on the beach.

Wait a minute. That doesn't really sound too bad.

Yet it is hard to get over the feeling that the more we gain in terms of being able to travel around, the more we lose. A century ago the people living in our house could take a wagon down to the train station in the village of Caledonia, where they could board a train that would take them to New Germany, and from there to Bridgewater or Middleton. From those points they could reach Yarmouth or Halifax, where they could catch steamers or passenger liners that would take them virtually anywhere they wished.

Now, I know that the Caledonia train station didn't have some of the advantages of the Stanfield International Airport, but it did have a pot-bellied stove and benches on which to sit while waiting for the train. It is true, too, that an editorial in the Gold Hunter described the station's surroundings in summer as a howling frog pond and bog-hole, and in winter an impassable quagmire, but that has to be measured against the attractiveness of an endless sea of parked cars surrounding the airport.

It's not that the clock could, or should, be turned back. The problem with travel today is that the process of getting to a destination is regarded as something to be endured, whereas for me the journey should be more than half of the fun. When I travel to Toronto and back by air, jammed into a little seat, it doesn't seem as if I have really seen anything beyond the city itself. When I go by train, I get to watch the passing scenery, talk, read, dine at a table on good food and sleep on good sheets.

Years ago we took a backpacking trip across Europe, visiting 14 different countries. We had a Eurail pass, which meant that when we felt like it, we could catch the next train and travel to wherever we wanted. We stayed in what are called pensions, a far cry from resorts and their buffets, but for food we went to little cafés or bought wine, cheese and bread.

A friend called the other night to say he thought that, given the cost of fuel these days, we should mount a campaign to bring trains back to the South Shore. Silver Donald Cameron, writing in the Nova Scotian, said last week that you could fly a safe (filled with non-flammable helium) airship around the world for the same fuel as it took to taxi a jetliner from the terminal out to the runway. Airships would have lounges and dining rooms, and space in which to stroll around.

Airships, like the Caledonia station, first operated a century ago. Maybe we should go backwards in order to go forward.

-Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com