The Green Green Grass of Home
I like to take my time traveling. I like one-way tickets, how they allow for travel without an imminent end date to hang over the last days like a cloud.
Back in the before-time, I had a friend who worked for an airline that still had a friends and family free stand-by travel benefit for their employees. This used to be a major perk offered by U.S. airliners to their employees, though over the years the benefit has become less generous. And with more and more airlines overbooking their flights as a standard practice, flying stand-by at the lowest priority level is less of a benefit and more of a form of purgatory. But my friend’s carrier had a good network of other airlines that honored the flight benefit and usually had space, like LATAM, Qatar, Iberian, and Qantas. There was a standard fee of just $32 per flight leg, even if that leg was as long-long haul as Los Angeles to Sydney. I didn’t even have to pay for a checked bag.
It also didn’t matter if booked the day-of or not, as long as there was an available empty seat, it was mine for that flat $32. I suppose it was traveling in those days where I picked up my allergy to the definite return.
The thing about a definite return is that it looms over a trip in such a way that it essentially precludes the possibility of homesickness. Being homesick is a condition usually felt by those who have moved away from home — though it seems to me to be much less present among millennials and zoomers, almost as if Gen X was the last generation to experience any real discomfort with being uprooted. Then again, the proportion of people that have a real home to be sick for has shrank with each successive generation.
Big subdivision developers like Stanley Martin and Ryan Homes like to emphasize that they are homebuilders, that they are building homes and communities, but the vinyl-siding abortions these companies are vomiting up all over the pristine farmlands and forests and grasslands outside of America’s cities are not homes at all, they are expensive slums for the desperate and depraved. They house the urbanite who got fed up with the disorder, dysfunction, and depression now endemic to nearly all American cities, the subcontinental tech worker rooming with his 14 cousins, the ruralite who couldn’t afford land or find a decent paying job back in the countryside, the retired couple waiting around to die, and the thousand other archetypes one encounters in the suburbs. They are in houses and apartments. Some of them may be homes, but if they are, the credit goes to someone besides the developers, who seem to go out of their way to make the modern residence an anti-home. Home is particular. Unique, special. I don’t say that mass produced houses can’t become home — Sears & Roebuck applied assembly line efficiencies to churn out scads of affordable cottages and bungalows and even full Victorian houses that you could put on a corner lot and really make the neighborhood pop — but the designs Sears had on offer were widely varied, and both aesthetically and functionally pleasing. All that to say, the contemporary subdivision has a spatial and environmental incoherence that simultaneously manages to crowd people in close proximity while making them asocial. It's a form of organized loneliness. Close enough to hear the lawn mower of a neighbor four houses down, too far to know their name. Sidewalks that lead nowhere, past front yards that are always empty.
I was roadtripping the D400 in Turkey some years back, on a beautiful stretch of highway cut into the mountains just outside of Kaş. Scanning through the radio stations, I found just one station playing music and left the radio tuned there. It was Turkish music, not necessarily to my taste but interesting enough. Then suddenly I heard Tom Jones’ smooth deep voice, “The old hometown looks the same, as I step down from the train, and there to meet me is my Mama and Papa. Down the road I look and there runs Mary, hair of gold and lips like cherries. It's good to touch the green, green grass of home.” Listening to that, with a rising full moon illuminating the mountains and the crashing surf of the Aegean on the rocks far down below, I was seized by a homesickness that wouldn't relent, even after Tom Jones had faded away and the station went back to playing the jingly jangly local music. I had plenty more to see and do on the itinerary, but that was it, the trip was done. I got back to my hotel, packed my bags, and drove into the night to the airport, where I caught the next flight to Constantinople and from there to America.
America. I have my complaints. When I complain it’s because I know we can and should do better. I know we can do better because we have done it better before. Like the way we built houses and neighborhoods and towns and cities. If we couldn’t fix it, there would be no point in complaining. (this is a central tenet of Karenism, an esoteric philosophical movement I am a devotee of). It wouldn’t be America if people weren’t complaining. For we are a restless, searching, dissatisfied people. Success is not enough and failure is merely jetfuel for the fire. Our despair drives us to greatness. Our greatness drives us to despair. Those of us who claim to be moderates are our most extreme, and the extremists are the ones most given to moderation. We are paradoxes posing as people.
We dream of other places and ways of life. il dolce far niente. The sweetness of doing nothing. Having a spritz in the sun. Wearing linen. Eating big plates of pasta with giant clams. Walking around walkable cities. It’s nice for a while. Then it starts with the little things. Missing the dog and the truck and a well-marbled ribeye or real cheeseburger (which can only be made with ((fake)) American cheese). Floating in calm crystal clear turquoise water is nice but doesn’t hit the same as that muddy river you tube on back home or the shark-infested riptide-ridden murky-water holy beaches of OBX. You notice that you don't even particularly like spritz. Jason Aldean is playing next weekend, lawn tickets are just $35 a pop. They’ll be out in the sundresses and boots. Tomatoes will be coming on soon, the potatoes will need to be hilled. Dad probably needs some weed-eating done up at the house.