When Did the Geyser Get Broke?

Given the medium by which you're reading this, I probably shouldn't speak lightly of the internet right at the start--but I do spend too much time wandering pointlessly around the online world. It is a malady you have probably encountered yourself. This wandering has its uses, of course, since often enough, out among the pop-up boxes, spyware, dead links, and outright fraud, a person can find pieces of writing that get the mind working. Recently, I had this experience with a short piece that ran on Vagabonding, a blog belonging to travel writer Rolf Potts. Titled "The Tourist Is Always the Other Guy," it takes up, with some exasperation, the old distinction between a tourist and a traveler.

A "tourist" was once simply a person who went on one of the first package tours during the nineteenth century, but the word went rapidly downhill, until it came nearly to mean "buffoon." "Traveler" became the alternative term for those who thought of themselves as vacationing with aristocratic sophistication. A traveler is Ernest Hemingway going to Spain for the bullfights and the trout fishing; a tourist is the clueless Clark Griswold of the National Lampoon Vacation movies. Potts no longer entirely buys the distinction. He quotes fellow travel writer Daisann McLane, who explains that "We think a 'traveler' is cool, the 'tourist' is not, and there's a lot of snobbery attached to identifying oneself as the former. But I think we should let that go. We are all tourists. If you can afford a round trip ticket to Laos, and you go there for personal stimulation, not for a job, even if you end up staying for six months on the floor of a Hmong hut in a remote village, you're still a tourist."

Potts, in the end, decides that "the tourist-traveler dichotomy will never go away, no matter how irritating it becomes. The heart of this dichotomy, of course, lies in our own insecurities about travel. In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton's character, who has been crashing support-group meetings to boost his self-esteem, drops the t-word when another crasher, named Marla, starts showing up at the meetings. 'Marla, the big tourist,' he mutters. 'Her lie reflected my lie.' Similarly, we all travel with the knowledge that, by definition, a person journeying to a foreign place is an outsider, a dilettante, a superficial presence. Other travelers (i.e. "tourists") only remind us of that fact. And that's why we go to such great pains to make distinctions and split hairs." In practice, he finds, if a vacationer looks like a hippie, that person is a traveler; the suburbanite is the tourist.

Potts leaves me wanting more, though, because he considers the question only from the point of view of the wayfarer. Anyone who has spent any time staying put and dealing with the vacationing public on the job knows that there are travelers, and then there are travelers, some better, some worse. And then there are tourists.

The crucial question, as we know, is whether the wayfarer in question is driving with a full tank, as it were. Another advantage of the internet is the way things never quite die there. The following comes from a list of questions that tourists--yes, tourists--have asked rangers in various national parks. The list dates from the mid-1990s, but is really for the ages. At Grand Canyon: "Was this man-made? Do you light it up at night?" Everglades: "Are the alligators real? Are the baby alligators for sale? Where are all the rides?" Denali: "What time do you feed the bears? How often do you mow the tundra?" Yosemite: "Where are the cages for the animals? What time do you turn on Yosemite Falls?" Yellowstone: "Does Old Faithful erupt at night? How do you turn it on? When does the guy who turns it on get to sleep?"

This version of the list comes from the Urban Legends Reference Pages, the folks who investigate internet rumors and pronounce on their truth or falsity; they have refused to make a definite pronouncement about this one, but I can tell them that I was asked all those Yellowstone questions myself when I worked there, some repeatedly. I've seen other, similar lists, including one I wrote myself once, and a feature they share in common is that you can find in them a theme. Yes, the questions are dumb, but they also give the impression that the tourists asking the questions believe themselves to be in a totally artificial environment, a wilderness version of Disneyland. In other words, they're not paying attention, are traveling while half asleep. Any discussion of "tourist" versus "traveler" needs to take this inattention into account: the traveler is one who is alert, a condition that is not dependent on social class or style or any other superficial marker.

I wrote, in my last entry, that to live intensely is one way to be certain of living well. This entry drew an objection from a friend at UC Davis who comes from Billings, Montana. He wrote an email saying that "Yes, the 'lived life,' getting the most experience out of life, is definitely best. But why must it involve national parks and hiking? As someone growing up in Montana, that is familiar, and experiencing the unfamiliar--urban, ethnic environments--is much more exciting to me. Eating sushi, going to the symphony, riding a subway--this to me is experiencing life to its fullest." He forced me to refine my thinking. About the most intense week, for me, of this decade so far was the trip I made to a convention in New York City to interview for teaching positions a couple of years ago. I'm also well aware of the advantages of the big city, like reliable electricity, and jobs.

Still, I can't help but notice that, in a city, nearly all experiences are made for you by others, usually for a price, and so a crucial quality of independence is lost. That includes the high-cultural brainiac stuff: you go to the Museum of Modern Art exhibit titled "Dung: A Retrospective," and even if you conclude that it is, well, a bunch of dung, you still went and took it seriously because the art elite told you to. In addition, you're always on guard in a city, constantly aware of the potential for interpersonal embarrassment (a problem in small towns too, of course). In really crowded circumstances, this turns into a kind of paranoia: you become convinced that your fly is unzipped, then, with the slyness of a thief, search out a way to hide so that no one notices when you make the Tug of Reassurance. And the noise, the jostling, the traffic; after a while, you're just shell-shocked. You can have an adventure in a city. It's easier there to get into a knife-versus-broken-bottle fight with an agitated schizophrenic who thinks you're a space alien come to steal his plasma. You can have your mind and senses turned on completely in the city same as in the country, although in the city it's liable to happen most memorably when the bus runs over your toes.

Of course, this is all partly a matter of individual preference. Still, after a long day in the urban blare, you are as out of it as the national park tourists who asked the rangers those silly questions. The senses blink off one by one. There are often good reasons to endure this reduction, and when that is the case, let the mind be the last to go. Then again, some of the best times I've ever had in cities happened when my mind was as disabled as I could make it, but that's another story.