Travel Broadens

     My friend Harry loves to travel. With jaunts and journeys he indulges a yen to see what's around the next bend.
     Like Harry, I enjoy the experience of new places. Unlike Harry, I do not enjoy getting from here to there. Travel is said to broaden a person, yes, but the same could be claimed for the medieval rack.
     Air travel often is necessary. Automatically this puts my trip on the wrong foot. I resent having to patronize an industry whose customers widely consider that getting a dollar's worth of value for a dollar would be a pleasant surprise.
     Air travel horror stories are too common to need itemizing here. When forced to fly, I try to distract myself by treating it as an opportunity to study human behavior. For example, what about the training of airline employees ? Where do they go to learn the demeanor of B-movie prison guards?
     And among the passengers, what will be the mixture of tough guys and collaborators? The tough guys radiate anticipatory resentment. They expect a bad experience, perhaps by virtue of being often correct in this regard. They wear stone faces. They glare at seat-backs or the floor.
     The collaborators are at the other pole. They address the cabin crew with a kind of grinning obeisance. Possibly they hope that faking Stockholm hostage syndrome will spare them being confined long enough to develop the real thing.
     For shorter trips, we take the car. Here too, I embark with a bad attitude. On average, an experience of Interstate highways puts me in mind of Napoleon's retreat from Russia.  Too often I reach my destination as a twitching, harrowed survivor.  And auto travel shakes my faith in my own memory. Was there really a time when truck drivers were called the knights of the highway?
     Still, the experience of new places is gratifying. And  Harry's example is a spur. He travels with an embracing attitude that we all should want. From each trip he returns with fresh appreciation that the rest of the world -- even the part just over the state line -- is unlike the place we call home.
     If more of us took Harry's cue, there might be a lower incidence of regional and cultural prejudice. We all have it. For my own part, I have a hard time with Texans and New Yorkers. There is no valid reason. It is rank bias.
     When guilt overtakes me, I seek comfort in the example of the late C.S. Lewis, the distinguished scholar and author. At about the age of ten, Lewis stepped up to his father's easy chair and announced  that he had a prejudice against the French. When his father asked why, Lewis said that if his attitude were amenable to explanation it wouldn't be a prejudice.
     As a native southerner, I have some experience of the receiving end of prejudice. We children of the South are accustomed to being stereotyped as bumpkins or worse.  We get it even from people who know us personally. For years, a dear friend in the northeast -- an urbane and experienced man -- ducked my invitations to come for visit. When I finally asked why, he confessed to fearing that he might be shot if he drove south with Yankee license plates on his car. That was 40 years ago. He still hasn't come.
     I tell myself that I am not chauvinistic about my native region, but of course I am. Everyone is chauvinistic about home. I remember a dinner with a batch of new friends on the prairies of the upper Midwest. I mentioned to a table-mate that I enjoyed her accent. She raised an eyebrow and asserted that she didn't have one. I made the mistake of offering examples of her vowels. She became prickly, to put the matter charitably, and doubled down on her denial. No accent had she, no sir. Not a hint. Only other regions had accents.
     The conversation sped downhill until I inadvertently changed the subject. I stopped the dinner cold by putting sugar in my iced tea. My new friends had never seen it done. Moreover, it was not simply a difference of custom. It was an offense against The Way Things Were Supposed To Be. My miffed hostess assumed that I was openly denigrating the quality of her tea.
     My friend Harry would not be surprised by this story. Out of his vast travel experience he would explain that everyone thinks their own ways are the norm and other people are the ones who are "different." And so, with Harry's example in mind, I persevere in thinking that I should now and then seek the experience of new places.
     Attitude remains a problem, but I do try. Perhaps the flight attendant just has sore feet. Surely the tailgater on my bumper loves his mother.
     For the parts that simply will not abide a rose colored-view, I try to focus on Saint Paul's admonition that suffering builds character.
     I feel a better person just thinking about it.