Drying laundry on a balcony is the domestic toll booth where reality collects its due after a holiday. Stepping out of a pressurized aluminium cylinder and unpacking suspiciously heavy suitcases leaves the physical evidence of having briefly occupied Central America fluttering in the Lower Mainland breeze.
Eating pupusas in the shadow of San Salvador’s volcanoes at breakfast, passing through Houston by afternoon tea, and returning home in time to sleep in one's own bed is nothing short of miraculous. It took humanity several millennia of stubborn walking, horse-laming, and seasickness just to establish routes that modern travellers dismissively call a routine Wednesday with an ample connection.
Measuring a standard journey between London and New York in days rather than hours is astonishingly recent history. Until October 1958, when the commercial passenger jet age properly kicked down the door with the BOAC de Havilland Comet 4 and Pan Am’s Boeing 707, crossing that pond meant booking four to five solid days aboard an ocean liner like the Queen Mary. Even the early propeller planes of the 1940s and 50s turned the trip into a deafening, twelve to sixteen-hour endurance trial punctuated by refuelling stops in Newfoundland or Shannon. In 1957, ships still carried more transatlantic passengers than aircraft. By 1958, the sky won, and the concept of travel as an extended test of intestinal fortitude evaporated almost overnight.
When my international career kicked off in Kuwait in the early 1980s, jet travel had already become democratic enough to feel ordinary, yet the sheer audacity of it remains absurd. For roughly ninety-nine percent of human existence, moving across a continent required writing a will, saying tearful goodbyes to everyone ever met, and possibly dying of dysentery in a ditch. Today, Jay and I accumulate astronomical air miles, complain mildly about seat pitch or Houston tarmac delays, and return with a week’s worth of tropical cottons to peg out in the cool Canadian air. It is breathtaking hubris, really, but marvelous all the same.
