Category: Travel

My actual travels, those I aspire to, and those of others

Grinching

It’s a tough, strange time right now because of COVID.

Despite the predictable (and predicted) health consequences, governments are not willing to introduce restrictions which would help control this awful wave. They know that the politics of shutting down Christmas would be awful, both for enraged households that feel like they deserve for the pandemic to be over and for businesses that rely crucially on this period for profitability.

Then when it comes to adherence to the restrictions, almost everyone seems to see them as too onerous for themselves personally, given the ways they would prefer to spend their time. Everyone seems to have some nonsense rationalization about how someone else is doing worse things so their choices are fine, or that the omicron variant is nothing to worry about so we should let it spread. And so, inadequate policies become even more inadequate as implemented.

Having not travelled ‘home’ to Vancouver since 2010, I am used to lonely Christmases. I normally feel alienated from the population because their choices show that they prioritize their own entertainment and travel over protecting the Earth. That alienation is magnified this year, with people unwilling to even protect themselves.

I don’t know how we get away from a mindset where people feel such entitlement and lack of responsibility to others, but it’s one that is imperilling us on multiple fronts.

Open thread: Urban thru hiking

Apparently it’s something that’s starting to exist:

Day hiking within city limits isn’t a new concept, of course. There are guidebooks detailing trails in cities from San Francisco to Atlanta. But Thomas has pushed the pursuit further, mapping out routes as long as 200 miles from one corner of a city to another and using infrastructure like stairways and public art to rack up elevation gain and provide something approximating a vista. She started in 2013 with a 220-mile through-hike in Los Angeles called the Inman 300, named for one of its creators, Bob Inman, and the initial number of stairways it included. Among other efforts, she has since hiked 60 miles through Chicago, 200 miles in Seattle, and 210 miles in Portland, Oregon. In 2015, she trekked the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on the 50th anniversary of that historic civil rights march.

The way I see it, urban thru hiking lets you walk more comfortably with less gear since you never need to make camp. Routes that amount to a serious sustained hike can be added up from segments which avoid car traffic as much as possible, and which link up with public transit to let you get home at the end of the day and back at the trailhead easily the next one.

Related:

Greyhound shutting down in Canada

After shutting down everywhere in Canada except Ontario and Quebec in 2018, Greyhound is now shutting down in Canada completely, aside from some routes across the border by the American company (Toronto to Buffalo and NYC; Montreal to Boston and NYC; Vancouver to Seattle).

When the government is so keen to help out those who drive or fly, I can’t understand why they are willing to let intercity bus services come to an end. Particularly given the safety concerns about hitchhiking or traveling informally in remote areas, I think it would make sense for the government to take over intercity bus services as a nationalized entity if there is no commercial operator willing to do it. With passenger train services as slow, expensive, and infrequent as they are in Canada, there ought to be an option for people unable to afford flying or unwilling to use such an emissions-intensive form of transport.

Harris on wilderness

Besides, the historian William Cronon argues that there is nothing “natural” about wilderness, that it is a deeply human construct, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” Though I might be appalled by Marco Polo’s failure to swoon at mountains and deserts along the Silk Road, wilderness in his day implied all that was dark and devilish beyond the garden walls. The fact that I’m charmed by the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the breathtaking expanse of the Tibetan Plateau doesn’t mean I’m more enlightened than Polo, more capable of wonder. It means I hail from a day and age—and a country and culture—so privileged, so assiduously comfortable, that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.

It probably also means I read too much Thoreau as a teenager. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote, priming me to pine after places as far away from Ballinafad as possible, like Tibet and Mars. Provoking such distant wanderlust was hardly Thoreau’s fault or intention—he himself never travelled beyond North America—but I enthusiastically misread him, conflating wildness with wilderness, substituting a type of place for a state of mind. Cronon finds the whole concept of wilderness troubling for how, among other things, it applied almost exclusively to remote, unpopulated landscapes, fetishizing the exotic at the expense of the everyday, as though nature exists only where humans are not. This language sets up a potentially insidious dualism, for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel it. In that sense, biking the Silk Road is an exercise in calibration. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Alfred A. Knopf Canada. 2018. p. 149–50 (italics in original)

Ottawa bound

I’m pretty much focused now on spinning up preparations to go to Power Shift next week. That means preparing for my Wednesday morning tutorials on Quebec and Language Politics, and my Wednesday contentious politics seminar on framing and identity. I also have office hours with students who want to discuss essay drafts on Monday.

This time I will be taking the train, unlike all my previous Ottawa–Toronto journeys. I can’t remember how many years it has been since I took an intercity train (maybe to a climate conference in Montreal, from Ottawa, sometime around 2009?), but friends tell me it’s a whole lot nicer than the Greyhound, and in this case it was basically the same cost.

I went to a drop-in clinic about my enduring cold today and was told it’s not strep and that I should discontinue any medication other than ibuprofen and acetaminophen and try to get as much rest as possible. I’ll be staying in a large shared dorm with no privacy, so it would be quite a pain to be acutely ill while in Ottawa.

This will also be a good trial of my replacement for my nearly shredded Barbour Beaufort jacket. I’ve been testing it in various conditions in Toronto, including what passes for extreme cold here, but anticipating a fair bit of time outside and night-time walks in Ottawa I’m planning to bring a second pair of merino wool long underwear for layering.

Ottawa visit

I took a short but lovely comms off vacation to see my dear friends Andrea and Mehrzad in Ottawa. Having left my phone turned off in a box at home along with the token I need to login to GMail and pretty much all other online services was de-stressing and liberating, though I spent most of the weekend playing with their funny dogs and their extreme cute tornado-haired baby.

The one significant block of time I spent alone was a 15 km walk past familiar Ottawa sights: the Chaudière falls with their newly expanded hydroelectric facility; the TLC complex with its new cages to protect people from falling brick fragments; my old favourite depanneur in Gatineau; the Alexandra bridge; official buildings along Sussex Avenue; a circumnavigation of the Rideau Hall grounds; and then a walk back west past the University of Ottawa.

As ever my friends were exceptionally kind to me, plying me with excellent food and sharing the amusing company of their young son, who I learned enjoys having me jump beside him and make velociraptor snarling noises.

Greyhound shutting down outside Ontario and Quebec

I got an email from Greyhound which confirmed recent headlines:

We are permanently cancelling all Greyhound Canada services in the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

In British Columbia, we are cancelling all services as well.

This is a shame both for me personally and in general.

It means the train is now the only available low-carbon travel option from Toronto or Ottawa to Vancouver, making a repeat of my bus-based Low Carbon Cross Country (LC^3T) trip impossible after the end of October.

It also makes remote communities and their inhabitants more isolated and vulnerable, especially for people who lack the credentials or vehicle access to drive. It also seems to represent a breakdown in the idea that Canada ought to be connected as an entity, especially alongside the high cost and low frequency of rail services.