I've been planning a Travel Trilogy for quite some time. It's different from Zwei Frauen, which had to do with being properly prepared for travel and involved both Beverly and me. The Travel Trilogy deals with my personal initiations with different travel situations. Beverly is only involved at the end of Part Two, and then only as a witness to one end of my "time" experience.

Prolog   I speak of "space travel" and "time travel" in a unique way.

By space travel I do not mean going to the moon, but moving geographically in space along the surface of the earth from Point A to Point B. It is the only travel of the two that is actually physically possible.

By time travel I don't mean science fiction travel into the future, but going backward historically from one date back to an earlier one. Time travel in this sense is all in the mind, requires imagination to gain significance, and is aided by theatrical devices.

Geographic space travel always had a meaning for me. Historic time travel was an acquired taste, one acquired over many years, as I suspect it remains to many, and is now at least on an equal plane with the former to my way of thinking.

"Far-away places with strange-sounding names, far away over the sea" was a song that had meaning to me, yet only later (Travel Trilogy III) did the sea come into question. It was "over the land" first.

I remember very distinctly in elementary school, maybe third grade, that a group of 3-4 of us, after we had learned about states and capitals, decided to do a project, just for ourselves, just for fun. We acquired 48 penny postcards, which already dates this story: only 48 states, and postcards costing only a penny. We addressed each card to the "Chamber of Commerce, [capital], [state]" and I can quote you to this day exactly what we wrote: "Please send me information on your state. Thank you." Maybe 2/3 of the cards brought replies, and in retrospect, what they sent us was junk literature that you probably wouldn't even bother to pick up on a rack of brochures in a hotel. But in those years, it was pure gold that arrived in the mail from such "far-away places" as Sacramento, California!!!, and Cheyenne, Wyoming!!! I kept that collection for many years.

Chattanooga   Given my preordained interest in far-away places and the fact that I had never been away from home, it was a time of excitement and great pleasure when my family, all five of us, decided to take a road trip to visit my cousin and his mother in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They had moved there from New York the previous November when we went for two weeks at Eastertime in 1953, at the end of March and early April. I was 13 (my age always follows the year). As far as I was concerned, we were headed to Shangri-La.

We crossed each state line with wonder. I remember clearly the central part of the trip going along US 11 in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and on to Tennessee. I'll get back to that point shortly.

Chattanooga had the additional bonus of lying on the Tennessee state line with Georgia. Leave Chattanooga to the south and you add another state to your list!

You have to enter Georgia to visit Chattanooga's most spectacular site, Lookout Mountain, only the northern tip of which is in Tennessee. From Point Park you're on top of the world, overlooking the city in a bend of the Tennessee River.

Bev and I have gone back to Chattanooga several times over the years, if for nothing more than to spend an hour driving through, maybe going up the mountain and see the view, and then continuing on to our destination. It had no great significance to her, other than I liked going there. It will always remain my Shangri-La.

But there's a lot more to this story than that. My point is, that original trip is unrepeatable in the form we did it in 1952. Thomas Wolfe, living not that far away in Asheville, North Carolina, said "You can't go home again", and he of course was absolutely right. But I need to explain, because today, the tail wags the dog.

From the beginning of time, be it in the Middle East, in medieval Europe, in colonial America, settlements, that is, towns and villages, were the center of civilization. Roads then spread out to connect them. To go from A to D you first went from A to B, and hoped the highwaymen or critters didn't get you on the way. Safely arrived in B, and with additional provisions purchased there, you proceeded to C, then to D in a similar manner. That's how it went for thousands of years. It doesn't anymore.

Cars, which in the first half of the 20th Century were mostly pleasure vehicles and not as widely owned as today, became much more serious travel vehicles in mid-century, especially after World War II, and this changed the relationship between towns and roads. Merchants and residents didn't want a lot of through traffic in town. Drivers didn't want to keep slowing down in towns. And civilization as we know it changed.

The vehicle of change for this massive turning around of history was ... the bypass. Not war, not pestilence, not earthquakes ... the bypass.

It must have struck some highway engineer that the easiest way to satisfy the merchants and residents on the one hand and the drivers on the other would be to separate them, and the bypass was born. Now a driver could leave A, go around B and C, and reach D directly. Wonderful. Then how about bypassing all the towns entirely? Why not build a highway that doesn't go anywhere at all, it just goes NEAR a lot of places. As of this stage, roads are no longer secondary to towns, they have taken on a life of their own. Now the towns are secondary to the roads, just things that get in the way of a good drive. This is the tail wagging the dog.

And of course this decentralization of urban life expanded and continued in the 1950's as the "move to the suburbs", where the centers of cities were cleared out and left to the poor, to the point where "inner-city", instead of referring to the height of civilization, is a code word for decay, abandonment, poverty.

[Digression: Of course the bypasses developed their own strip malls, discount stores and others moved to the bypasses on the edges of towns, the centers of towns died--but that's another story.]

Now lets get back to Chattanooga and US 11. In 1999, when Bev and I took a number of week-long trips that eventually convinced me that the following year we could manage a five-week trip to Europe for the first time in a decade, one of those trips was a slow, week-long drive from Tampa to New York. We stopped in Chattanooga (of course!!), and at that point, Bev could still walk with me, with help, out into Point Park on Lookout Mountain. Then we made our way up US 11 through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. It was a beautiful trip, but totally different from that original one. It was difficult to try to stay in towns, even if you wanted to. You were always directed to the bypasses, which now form the bulk of US 11, which is virtually a different road. To see the towns, you of course have to take the Business Route, which almost sounds like a dirty word. Of course the drive is more pleasant if you want to move along, but it's a totally different experience than in 1952. You don't get the flavor of towns, and the homogenized strip malls on the bypasses are all the same.

The old, fondly remembered, see-America route between home and Shangri-La is no more.