The Journey Defines the Place

Maybe it's because I was an English major in college and studying literature has deeply informed my worldview. But, for me, this world and this life that we bumble our way through is most enriched when populated with stories. I say "enriched," but maybe "enchanted" better captures what I'm going for. Because stories, as meaning-giving, hermeneutic devices, imbue our discrete experiences with what is often for me a sacred dimension. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo that is.

Here is what I mean. A couple of days ago, I drove thirty miles from my sister's house to the Snoqualmie Falls. As I am prone to do, I got lost along the way and took a detour, bringing the trip to something more like fifty miles. The detour was both worthwhile and frustrating. I got to see beautiful parts of the Pacific Northwest that I would not otherwise have gotten to see, but I was also obviously delayed from arriving at my ultimate destination, the Snoqualmie Falls. Finally, after asking for directions at a gas station, I found my way to a lookout point. I parked my car in the parking lot and walked all of ten yards to a gazebo from which I could enjoy a quite stunning view of the falls. An hour of driving, getting lost, asking for directions, and thirty short seconds of walking. And there it was, Snoqualmie Falls as though in a postcard picture.

The waterfall was impressive but very much a letdown. Gazing down from the gazebo platform, I remembered another similarly sized waterfall I went to see last year, El Paílón del Diablo in Baños, Ecuador. To get to that waterfall, I biked for an hour and then hiked twenty minutes before having the waterfall unveiled to me from behind formidable rock formations. I could hear the thunderous roar of the waterfall well before I saw it, and as I approached, anticipation built even as my body tired. Undoubtedly, the path to the waterfall had been paved in a very literal way to ease my journey, but still, I felt that my view of the waterfall had been in some way earned. Seeing El Paílón del Diablo was a qualitatively different experience than seeing the Snoqualmie Falls. Much more gratifying.

So the journey defines the place. And what else is a journey but a story? Another example. This one from Kerouac's On the Road:

The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoon this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn--a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances--a little girl in the back seat, crying to her mother, "Mama when do we get home to Truckee?" And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and then down the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air--air you can kiss--and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of a bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept soundly for the first time since Denver; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the fact that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt's house in Paterson, New Jersey. I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco--long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. (60)

Kerouac presents San Francisco in its physical context, in its geographic setting. For Kerouac, having hitchhiked, bused and driven three thousand miles from the East Coast, San Francisco is a physical destination in a way that it isn't for me. After reading this passage, it dawned on me that I arrived in San Francisco by being dropped from the sky. My experience of the city is as a result qualitatively different from Kerouac's. Lacking a substantive journey to precede arrival, emptied of history, stripped of meaning, a city is nothing more than a bunch of concrete and glass, an abstraction of industrial development.

It is in this light that I have begun to understand technology. Technology shortchanges the journey in order to deliver the place. Snoqualmie Falls delivered to me. San Francisco delivered to me. What energy did I expend personally to arrive at these places?

I think this is why I experience aversion to things like Facebook. Facebook has the power to deprive social interaction of journey. As far as maintaining a social network goes, Facebook is infinitely more convenient than having to go through the trouble of composing a thoughtful e-mail let alone scrupulously handwriting a letter. Convenience is Facebook's utility. But at the same time, its convenience shortchanges the usual journey that is required of keeping up a healthy interaction.

The same logic can be applied to food. What knowledge do we possess of the journey that the food we consume took in order to arrive on our dinner plates? Most often, nothing. This is the magic of industrial agriculture and technology. Food delivered to us. Unfortunately, the anonymous food that we consume, and our ignorance of its journey, deprives the food of any real meaning. There is little to no enchantment involved in scarfing down a BigMac. We enjoy it only in an abstract sense.

None of this is to say that I am a Luddite. Believe me you, I enjoy my BigMac or McPollo as much as the next guy.

Thoughts inspired by The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan on which I will write more...