There are two kinds of folks in this world, my father used to say. Those who like to travel—they like to move fast, the faster the better, like your mother, and those who want to stay in one place forever, like me. He would often elaborate: I don’t even like vacations. I would rather every day be just like yesterday, ending with a Bourbon and a quiet sit out on the patio on a summer evening with nothing to do but listen to the insect songs. I am thinking about that now as a I pack for Maine, feeling the familiar sense of dread rising with the realization that I will leave home on the farm soon. My favorite days are the dullest ones with nothing to do and nowhere to go, when the hours ahead are like a sea of blank pages to fill with any dream or no dream at all.
The worst part of course is the long drive. Thinking about it, I am reminded of those dreadful family trips we took when my parents packed the family into our huge station wagon with no AC. Those trips happened only a few times before my dad put a stop to them. I am pretty sure he would relate to the speaker in this poem, “Family Town” by John Kenney, which I read on George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. As usual, George Bilgere's comment is priceless:
Why I Chose This Poem
And so the season of summer begins, along with that summer staple universally dreaded by all parents: the car trip. My parents took me and my two sisters on many such trips—one of them might have involved Mount Rushmore—although by now they have all blurred into one endless ordeal of car sickness, frequent stops at Stuckey’s, and the question we uttered every ten minutes: Are we there yet? I can’t remember if we ever made it to Mount Rushmore. I hope so...
On a more contemplative note, I am also reminded of Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem:
Questions of Travel
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"