Some travel habits

We've read a lot of grim tales so far, to be sure, but one thing's been bugging me—not about the plight of the “chiselers” and “shovel-leaners” but about why this class is called “The Travel Habit” and not “The Great Depression”. While the down-and-out are certainly an important and relevant subject for discussion, as evidenced by the majority of posts on this blog to date, it could also be useful to address a different aspect of these writings, the actual travel aspect, and what it entails.

I was particularly taken by the selections from Ernie Pyle's Home Country, especially his ruminations on the unusual perspective of the country afforded by constant travel, and his description of the very real travel habit he and “that Girl” developed. What began as immediate shock at each barren, desolate, ruined field soon became a kind of numbness, an acceptance that everything everywhere in the “Drought Bowl” was, is, and will continue be so ruined. The much deeper shock came later, when Pyle realized how he, like the farmers who lived on the land, had so matter-of-factly resigned himself to this desolation, and the “stupendousness” of it all. Not living in one place for any period of time made his connection to individual places rather shallow, but the breadth of his experience was truly incredible, and showed him a “big picture” that was stunning in its magnitude.

Pyle developed a real habit out of travelling, as he describes in the last chapter, both making himself and his wife a family that lived and could rest anyplace and noplace. Any mode of living becomes habitual, solidifies certain aspects of itself into routine, and has its own advantages and disadvantages. For most people, tied to some degree to a particular place—land, a house, an apartment, a neighborhood—much of their perspective and understanding of the world comes from the habits that that place provides or requires of them, both enriching and enmeshing them in that place. Making a habit out of leaving such places severs such habits that are particular to a place, an instead pulls habits from the experience of moving through the open space between them: of leaving and arriving, of short encounters, maintenance and correspondence.

Woo! Vacation!

To return to the down-and-out, many of those who lived a life of travel in the '30s did not do so out of choice or inclination, as did so many writers of the time, but out of desperation. They too developed a travel habit, but theirs was very different, generally far more difficult and at the mercy of chance, as described by Adamic in “The Girl on the Road”. The habit of the vagrant, though they travelled many of the same roads as the writers, did not offer some broad, stupendous picture of the country; they already had a perspective borne of hardship, deep and narrow and pertaining to themselves and their places and those they knew. Many people of the era traveled simply for tourism and sight-seeing and for them, the travel habit was part of living a stationary life, an occasional diversion, a way to appreciate what was at home and what was out there while maintaining a home to go back to, always. The perspective afforded by their travel habit remains a narrow one, deep only at home, vacation destinations serving to contrast or extend the home through shallow but delightful exoticism.