It’s important to travel, travel well, and travel responsibly
I am, by my nature, a traveler. I’m most comfortable somewhere between Point A and Point B and relish the idea of being in an environment or situation unfamiliar to me. I am not, however, a relaxation traveler. I understand – intellectually – the appeal of snoozing blissfully on a beach or taking in a magnificent vista as the sun slowly sets. It’s just not for me. I want to see and feel and taste and, more than anything else, learn when I’m on the road. That’s what recharges me.
Except when it doesn’t.
I was 21-years-old and working at a local hotel when Hurricane Hugo battered the Carolina coast. I remember turning the corner into the lobby only to be met by scores of the displaced, unsure of what remained of their homes. Even for one as young and callow as myself – and believe me, I was both – it was pretty devastating.
Still, when my aunt, who was visiting from the Pacific Northwest, expressed an interest in driving out the Charleston to see what a hurricane can do, I agreed to accompany her and my mother. I saw myself as a guardian in what I believed, post-storm, may have become a lawless land. In reality I was an unprepared observer of shocking destruction and, I’m still embarrassed to admit, a tragedy tourist.
I vowed to never be one again. It is my belief that in driving through that wreckage, I was not helping, but rather hindering reconstruction efforts. Perhaps, as I gawked through the car window, I was even celebrating the chaos. And so, I choose not to go, without true purpose, to those places wrapped in tragedy – past or current. This has hit home not only with people making slow rolls through Augusta neighborhoods post-Helene, but with the sort of callous approach many have taken to destruction in and around Los Angeles.
I believe in being a tourist, but I also believe in being a responsible tourist. Travel is not about destroying or observing that which has been destroyed. It’s not about embracing tragedy. It’s about connecting with the world around you and allowing travel to teach a greater understanding of what it means to be human.
This week’s Magic Three look at some sort of sketchy travel destinations and a filmmaker, who despite his dark takes on American life, remained an optimistic observer of our culture.
This house is not a home
Last year, the German film “Zone of Interest” was greeted with real critical and popular acclaim. A stirring look at the banality of evil, it focused on the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp and his family, who lived in a house just outside its walls. It never explicitly details the horrors happening while children play in the garden and meals are cooked in the kitchen. Instead it weaves evidence – most profoundly sound – into the mundane day-to-day.
It’s an affecting piece of cinema because it is true. And soon, people will be able to visit that house.
I favor understanding the past so it is not repeated in the future, but there is something about opening this house that makes me uneasy. I feel the same about Auschwitz itself. I understand these are not traditional tourist attractions with an exit-through-the-gift-shop mentality. But I also fear that by allowing people to trapse through these sites unfettered lessens the impact. It’s a tough balance, and one I’m not sure can be struck.
To the moon Alice
In February 2024, the Houston-based spaceflight company Intuitive Machines became the first private entity to land a spacecraft on the moon. It was one small step for an increasing number of privately held companies focused on monetizing everything outside our atmosphere, and perhaps a giant leap for those who see tourism dollars in the Sea of Tranquility.
To be certain, nobody is taking reservations for doubles-with-a-view at the Marriot Moon. I assume we are decades away from that sort of travel. But it is getting closer and feels inevitable. Inevitable enough, in fact, that the World Monuments Fund, an organization that draws attention and raises funding for endangered cultural sites, recently added the moon to its 2025 World Monuments Watch list. The idea is to get an early start on protecting those space spaces and places famously owned by no national entity. The goal is to set up protections so the Apollo landing site, for example, might be preserved instead of littered with air-tight tourist attractions and gift shops hawking t-shirts and other lunar laundry. Travel has impact.
The donut
Last week, the legendary – if not particularly prolific – filmmaker David Lynch died. Over the course of more than 40 years, he had made it his business to, on occasion, drop the odd cultural chaos bomb that upended the popular perception of how we live and who we are. Whether it was turning the deformed and disenfranchised into an authentic heroic figure (“The Elephant Man”), imploding mainstream television procedurals (“Twin Peaks), inventing suburbia noir with what I believe is the finest film of the 1980s (“Blue Velvet”), Lynch was, as an artist, kind of the perfect tourist. He went to familiar places and then, with the deftest of hands, showed you everything that was both obvious and unexpected – the seen and the unseen.
I believe much of his magic came from his ability to show without telling. He didn’t have to explicitly say that Hollywood is a false front, a hall of mirrors that allows people to get lost in the idea of the cinematic dream. He could just show us, as he did in “Mulholland Dr.” He didn’t need to explain the mysteries of charisma as an attractor – for better or worse. All he had to do was have Nicholas Cage slip into his “Wild at Heart” snakeskin jacket and instantly his missteps were forgiven. By showing us exactly what was there, he posed questions, sketched philosophies, and layered mystery upon mystery. It is – was – quite the slight-of-hand.
Lynch had a famous quote that, I believe, was both a finite and abstract explanation of his art.
“Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.”
See what is there. Examine the obvious. The invisible will take care of itself.
Be that kind of traveler and see the world for what it offers.