In talking with our friend Hendrik last night he reminisced about how wonderful it was to visit Venice in 1972. The adventure of a Baby Boomer exploring the world. I thought of Kit Carson whipping by me on his bike, how in an earlier incarnation, retired from mountaineering, he might have had nostalgic moments in Taos recalling buffalo hunts in the Black Hills. Venice before it got crowded, the Black Hills before it was turned into a buffalo boneyard. Wherever we travel, discovering it for the first time seems ideal. It’s the frontier fantasy. Just as Mark Twain lit out West and told us all about it in “Roughing It” he turned around after river boating the Mississippi and toured Europe and the Mideast. Especially with Americans, it’s hard to let go of the frontier fantasy. For Twain, James, Hemingway, Stein, and Miller, revisiting Europe was the start of a new adventure and reading about it was exciting.
To feel the thrill of exploring It seems America and the increasingly wealthy world have been touring ever since. We all get a kick out of moon launches and space station antics, but all it really comes down to is watching a sci-fi movie with limited special effects. We’re not up there defying gravity with maddeningly boring billionaires. No, we’re figuring out how to get a deal on plane tickets and a halfway decent rate on a place to stay. This last frontier is expensive. But if your booking ahead of time is fortunate enough to avoid the most recent conflict, just as settlers heading west lucked out by dodging raiding parties, the ability to bounce around asking ChatGBT what street art is in the neighborhood, or what restaurant nearby has good Mideast food, would have left Carson, Twain, Miller, et al, shaking their heads in amazement.
