At present, our bus is mired in a traffic jam somewhere in the hills south of Seoul. Our tour bus, crammed full of 20 EPIK teachers and all their luggage, crawls slowly along the narrow ribbon of highway weaving its way between a hundred Korean mountain and hillsides. At the end of our journey is Konkuk University and the promise of food, a hot shower, and warm beds, but for now, my travel odyssey, now nearing 32 hours long, continues. Just one of the many inconveniences of travel.
But I don’t mind. My nose has been pressed up against the glass for the last two hours, ever since I finally escaped the cloistered confines of Incheon Airport (where I landed at 3:30 am local, some 12 hours after leaving behind American soil) and breathed Korean air for the first time (a bit smoggy, but it smells heavenly after 28 hours of the antiseptic bottled air of airplanes and airports). Of my fellow teachers, at present count 13 are snoring in various positions around the bus, 5 are carefully studying their phones, and one is busily Super Smashing on his Switch. I’m the nerd looking out the window. On every side there’s something new to see – on one hand a cluster of distinctively Korean 40-story apartment complexes looming above the highway, on the other a verdantly wooded hillside leaps up into the air, on the gripping hand a quaint rice paddy with a small farmer’s shack nearby. I don’t begrudge the time. This is what I came here to see.
My rubbernecking started before I even left the United States. See, whenever possible, I always, always, always want the window seat on the plane. I’m a kind of gangly six feet, so I’d certainly be more comfortable sprawling in the aisle. But I never grew out of the window seat phase (I believe every child would prefer the window to the aisle seat on the plane).
Before we even left St. Louis, as we took off I was able to trace the roads away from the Arch – there lay 44, which meant that intersection was Laclede Station road, and if I follow that south, yes, there was the church, and across the street? An anonymous little roof amidst a sea of anonymous little roofs. One last look at home with my own eyes.
Across Missouri, and Kansas – rolling fields of green divided by ruler-straight roads, their stark artificiality a striking contrast with the more irregular shapes of the natural forests and fields. In places, little hamlets or even goodly-sized towns clustered around intersections, or else isolated farmhouses miles distant from any neighbor. Perfectly circular irrigation fields, again far too regular to ever be mistaken for anything nature would produce on her own, neatly checkering the landscape.* From the ground, Kansas is flat and boring as hell. But from the air, everything is beautiful.
On across the Rockies, the ground folding up and reaching out as if it wants to meet our plane halfway (please don’t), in places harsh, dessicated rock faces scoured clean by millennia of winds unobstructed by anything growing. Winding mountain roads, thick pine forests, in one place a mountain lake held back by a massive concrete dam, and, I’m pretty sure, the Continental Divide.
Utah, and Nevada – miles of bleak, scorched desert, red rocks, wind-carved canyons, and what looks like a blasted hellscape of heat and thirst. And yet, even here, every now and then, a little farmhouse, a small crop circle of green standing out amidst the waste, a road signifying that here, too, human beings live and travel.
Over the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Madre, the trackless mountain range one last reminder of Nature, red in tooth and claw, before the peaks fall away and yield to California’s softer, cultivated bounty. And then, San Francisco, the waves of her bay golden in the setting sun. One last look at the United States.
I would never give up the window seat for anything. Sure, I could have the opportunity to stretch my legs – but the price would be missing all of this! What a continent we live on!
But I feel like this attitude isn’t universal. Lots of people would prefer comfort, and convenience over spectacle. Well, far be it from me to judge – it takes all sorts to make a world and it’d be a really boring place if we were all the same. Adults have other concerns, far busier minds. They’ve seen mountains before. Deserts, too, probably. And it can get really cramped on a long flight (believe me, I know, and empathize).
Nevertheless, I think something important is lost when we start to prefer the aisle seat over the window seat. Travel means being inconvenienced. It means sometimes your legs are going to be cramped. Or you’ll be stuck on a Korean highway, tired and grimy and smelly from thousands of miles behind you.
Oh, well. I’ll have lots of showers, and beds, in my future. But I’ll never see these hills for the first time again. So, may as well enjoy it while I can.
*Can circles checker? I say they can. Checker pieces are circles, duh.
Gwangju Dreaming 