Travel sanitized

In his Saturday column a couple of weeks back, Dimon Kendrick-Holmes talked about road trips he once took with his wife and children, and his descriptions made me wish I could turn time back and duplicate them myself. The one trip that really rang a different bell for me was the one he described when the children missed seeing snow in favor of on-board movies. I’ll explain in a moment.

It’s fruitless to compare today to past years. Different time, different circumstances, different distractions. Still, I do it a lot. The different reactions of children to travel, then and now, fascinate me. The trips of my childhood were lilliputian by today’s standards, but they were magical to me. A trip to the county seat, 6 miles away, had my eyes bugging out coming and going. Not that there was anything all that fantastic to be seen, but it was all new to me. Even better were the infrequent visits to my Uncle George, in an adjoining county.

My father and his younger brother visited each other only every couple of years or so. After all, they lived some twenty miles apart. Frequent trips of such distance would be wasteful and frivolous. I remember one specifically, when my dad took my older brother and me in his bedraggled 1930 Model A Ford pickup to make one of those visits. Jammed between the other two, I strained to see every farm, every country store and, finally, the incredible sights of the town where Uncle George lived, a metropolis of several hundred souls. Such lengthy trips and such amazing sights as my uncle’s hometown were rare, and the memory of them was lasting. I’m glad I didn’t have a digital device to keep my attention inside the vehicle.

My own children traveled long distances almost from the moment they were born, so they never were as amazed by the passing outside world as I had been. There was some reading, but small personal screens had not yet come into vogue in their growing up years. And we did have conversation on those trips. While it may have been, in the early years, mostly me talking and the others feigning interest, as my kids approached adulthood our conversations became richer. My daughter, who has always been one of my favorite discussion partners, and I shared numerous trips of several hundred miles to and from her university or for other purposes. We talked endlessly about books, politics, religion, nature, family, current events, or anything else that happened to appeal to us at the moment.

But times have changed. I have made numerous drives in recent years, from a few miles to several hundred, with my adult children individually or with my daughter and her family. On the long trips there is a smattering of talk, most often related to what has just appeared on a cell phone screen. Shorter trips have fewer human interruptions.

The recent visit here by my daughter and her sons was typical. When we drove here and there around the area, I was pretty sure no one but I knew or cared where we were at any given moment. Unlike the me of long ago, my passengers had no interest in the changing scene outside the car; it couldn’t compete with the wonders of video games and Internet news flitting by on those tiny screens. And while I missed the conversations of the old days and had to forgo listening to the radio for fear of interfering with my passengers’ intense concentration, I could at least appreciate the peace and quiet.

We can’t hold back the flood of advancing technology. Sometimes pieces of it dovetail together wonderfully. For example, I recently complained about the current efforts to produce self-driving cars. Now I begin to see their value. I can imagine, in the near future, the sight of such cars speeding by safely, all their passengers, including the “driver,” with heads reverently bowed as they study their tiny screens.

This story was originally published April 13, 2017 at 7:32 PM with the headline "Travel sanitized."