There's No Place; Like Home

I'm not sure when I grew out of the hotel experience, but it seems long enough ago now that I can hardly remember any different.  It used to be a major goal of life, to leave home, to drive somewhere far enough away that it became painful after awhile, far enough that picking the right stops for gas seemed like strategy, far enough that you got to sleep that exotic sleep in the womb of the humming car, only to arrive somewhere that was a castle with your own room, the scent of chlorine promising your own blue pool.  Back then the immaculate rooms seemed new, made especially for you. 

Who would have known then that it was all a ruse?  An industry made to make you feel exactly like it was new when it wasn't at all--in fact, the opposite?

Part of disenchantment with hotels is simply the baggage of adulthood--hotels aren't cheap, after all, and when you're left holding the plastic at the end of a stay you realize you're paying someone for a bed in which you didn't feel comfortable in a room that was always either too hot or too cold in which you could only sleep or watch TV and from which you had to venture out into a hostile jungle to procure sustenance anyway.

But for me, now, it also has to do with hotels being no place.  Oh, granted, in the hotel we stayed at recently we could pull the drapes completely in our swanky poolside room so that when I woke up I had no idea if it was six o'clock and dark or noon and broad daylight.  Where else can you have that experience?  Malls and casinos, the other places that try to make you forget where you are on planet earth.  Of course, the point of hotels is to "get away" and to be able to forget the alarm clock, so on one hand it makes sense that one would be able hole up and forget for a night the patterns of the earth.  But when you add the price tag in to doing this, then you realize that sequestering you is part of the strategy for keeping you, part of the plot against you being anywhere else but in a dark room with the intermitting flashes of tv scenes lighting up your face.

And stepping outside, too, just sends you right back in.  The hotel that we stayed at was just off the freeway, next to another hotel, adjacent to a pizza place, across a four lane street from a trendy strip mall with a Spanish tile roof--in Minnesota--and just down from some storage sheds and warehouse-type buildings.  This meant acres and acres of parking lots and pavement.  It was literally impossible to walk anywhere.  From outside, the castle wall revealed cracks; the parking lot moat was turning to rubble.  I went back in, to the facade of the new, but in the hallway the maids--toward whom I tried to be overly cheery becuase I've just reread Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed--were Central American and embarrassed me by the ladder that I knew separated our lives. 

Scott Sanders and others talk about the purpose of travel, of leaving home to experience other places so that one might return home with a new sense of life, so that one might infuse home with the wonder of the world.  And I did hear at least two stories of "city experience" that got passed around by travelers from our town at the state tournament:  two girls and a guy kissing in a hotel pool (ours); a transvestite on the monorail.  Unfortunately, these stories were already being used by the travelers as a perfect reason to return to the womb of home and leave it completely intact. 

Another metaphor for this excursion was pilgrimage, especially since our entire town traveled to the city, mainly to attain the relics associated with the state basketball tournament--"to Minneapolis we wend," that sort of thing.  However, the relics attained were really for adorning the sense we have of ourselves rather than emphasizing the experience of touching something other.

And the places we stayed, I'm saying, helped to insure all of this, to insure an insularity to the travel, to insure that we didn't here stories or experience places that moved us with the wonder of the world.  Sure, my wife managed to eat at Wally's Falafel and Hummus without me, and we had some overpriced Thai food, and I ventured into St. Paul with a friend of mine for coffee at a non-chain place, but the signature experience was sitting poolside as the kids swam till they were drained and their eyes blood red from an over-chlorinated pool, and then we slept, and then we went home.  There was no inn keeper to spin yarns of his childhood or musicians to play a reel we'd never heard before as we shared a pint of ale and forgot ourselves. 

No, no place had been prepared for us in advance, a safe, secure womb of false newness that is anything but virginal, and we indulged it and went home seeminlgy none the worse but definitely none the better.