Not even a hundred years ago trunks like these would have been the shiznit for going on a long voyage but today, I probably couldn't travel with them. If I insisted on trying it would likely cost me more to send the trunks than to send myself.
This is a good example of what I consider questionable progress. International travel is now fast, efficient and everyday. Add in the cattle car mentality the airlines have applied to those of us who travel as economy passengers and I guess this is why I don’t see international travel as adventurous.
In the day of these trunks going on an international voyage was an adventure. You had to be rich, save up your money or get a job overseas but it was still a possibility for people willing to take the risk and make the sacrifices. A lot of people might say that’s not so and that travel was exclusively for the wealthy, but I can look into my own ancestry at the son of a bankrupted carpenter who decided to travel from Quebec to Scotland to look for a wife is an example that travel couldn’t have been restricted to the wealthy - just the adventurous.
International travel today has become a really environmentally costly form of recreation. Don’t forget that an economy seat on a transatlantic flight has the same GHG effect as seven years of that guy driving his hummer around town - In large part because of releasing the emissions at such a high altitude has a magnifying effect.
So in my eyes when I look at this beat up old steamer trunk I see adventure. When you packed this baby up you knew that something serious was going down. When I see those drag behind rolling suitcases used by international travelers and commuters alike I don’t see anything special going on. More like something dreary going on.
When we have turned the adventurous into the everyday at great cost to the planetary environmental health, sure it’s progress, but is it really a good thing?
These are the trunks :
2 comments:
I have to take issue with the "planetary environmental health" statement. The planet is fine and life will continue on despite us. We just won't find the suitable conditions required for our continued survival past the next couple of hundred years.
Point taken. Some of us may survive - the crazy cannibalistic ones.
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