Travel

This is a thought I've been considering for a good while but have only returned to very recently.

On my car trip to DC and ultimately Virginia Beach to start my bike trip, I had been hearing a lot about what it means to be an American from many a National Monument and Smithsonian exhibit. I began mulling on a few thoughts about what makes Americans unique from people of other countries. We are individualistic and adventurous-- or at least we are taught to value these traits within ourselves.

While watching the landscape go by, I tried to answer the question: Is there a connection between 'Travel' (adventurousness) and 'Individualism' ?

A few years back I had read John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie" where he proposes that Americans come from a rootless stock of ancestors. We are descended from those intrepid enough to sail away from everything they've known to a new home, and even more who have trekked ever westward to new frontiers.

As a scientist, I wasn't completely satisfied with this explanation. If the urge to leave one's community and strike out on our own were genetic, then we would continue to be a country of nomads. By now the entire population would have been driven to move to the West Coast by the instinctive urge.

While it's undeniable that a lot of people have urges to get out of where they are from, I feel like this at least partly a developmental stage-- particularly to twenty-somethings like me. For the last year, I've wanted nothing but to get away from the very welcoming but, to me at the time, unbearable home of Indianapolis.

I felt like the landscape, the ways of thinking, the types of people that made up the place didn't match me any more. This was kind of new, since I had always enjoyed being from Indiana in the past. We do have beautiful springs and autumns. The summers are humid but the smell of new mown hay in the country always made me happy. Hoosier/Midwest mentality isn't always 'cool' but it's friendly, and I understand it.

What has changed is that I've gotten older and am at the stage in my life where I want to explore, but it also may be something else. In the previous year, I had been able to get out and live elsewhere for the first time in my life. Sacramento, Boise, Lafayette (Louisiana), and New Orleans all seem like homes away from home to me. Working with NCCC, I had experiences that only a handful of people across the US can say they can share. As a result, coming home seemed very alienating. Even the people who knew me best from my college years didn't seem to get me completely.

I've since experienced a similar phenomenon coming back from Bike and Build-- since there's so few people who have seen what I have seen it's hard to completely relate. If people ask me how my trip was, all I can usually say is, "Great." Then they say, "Cool." and walk away, even though I wish that I could go on for hours trying to describe what it meant and to be on the same page. There's simply not enough time, and people simply don't give that much of a damn.

As a result, it seems to me that travel breeds that sense of alienation, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. It makes you feel slightly apart from the rest, but it also means that your experiences are very unique from those around you and therefore you are unique. If it comes off right, one accepts that 'apartness' with boldness and feels happy with being unlike anyone around them. Thus travel, through that alienation, creates individuality.

If I had never left home, then people would know exactly what to expect of me and I of them. I feel like this happens for a lot of small-town residents who never venture out. It breeds a sense of comfortability with each other but unfortunately not many original ideas. If people all experience the same things, they tend to think alike based on the few things they have come in contact with. New things seem hard to understand, or even dangerous. Thus a lack of travel does the opposite: it creates cohesion through shared experiences and shared thinking.

I guess what this all means is that our ancestors came to value individuality because it was they only way they could get along. They all had to adapt from coming from the comfortable lives where everyone knew everyone to a new home where this was not the case. People were crammed together after coming from very different places with different ways of seeing the world. Not only did we adapt to each other, but we were in turn challenged, changed, and-- in most cases-- bettered by what others had to offer. If this hadn't been the case, why else would this individuality be a trait that we all value as Americans?

This is all very lofty and is a skeleton of an argument, but I hope it makes sense.