Twas Best Done Slowly

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a French corporation’s attempts to resurrect sail powered cargo ships.  Almost immediately, I received emails about a different French company that already has such a ship crossing the Atlantic, carrying French wine to America and chocolate back to Europe.

While the Grain de Sail is really cool, I doubt that she is going to revolutionize the cargo ship industry.  On her maiden voyage, the aluminum-hulled sailing vessel was able to transport 15,000 bottles of cognac to New York.  For the sake of comparison, if just the French champagne annually consumed by Americans were shipped this way.... They’re gonna need another 5000 sailboats.

That’s assuming that each sailboat can make the scheduled 4 voyages a year.  It also assumes that the crew of four on each boat won’t sample the wares on a 30-day crossing.  Nah, no sailor would do such a thing.  

The company claims that the gentle voyage, the natural rocking of the ship, and the far better conditions of their cargo hold as opposed to a being locked inside a hot closed cargo container, will deliver a better bottle of wine.  I admit to being a contrarian by nature, but in this case, I bet they are right.  And by some back of an envelope figuring and total guess work, this method of shipping probably adds a minimum of $10 in shipping cost to each bottle.  

I will probably never know, since $10 is getting pretty close to the top of my wine price range.  My personal wine philosophy says it doesn’t take an oenophile to find a good $25 bottle of wine, but a true connoisseur can find a decent bottle for $15 that doesn’t come with a label reading “Australian Fighting Wine”.

Still, I like the idea of those sailboats and I really hope the sailing ships are a great success.  Maybe, it is time for travel to slow the hell down.  If the only point of travel is to get to the destination quickly, why bother?

There is a great passage in the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant where he describes his journey to West Point.  Having just been appointed to the academy, Grant left Ripley, Ohio for Pittsburgh by steamer.  At that time, riverboats had no defined schedule and would stop as frequently, and for as long as necessary, to pick up passengers and freight.  Today, the trip will take about five hours by car, but for Grant, the trip up the river took three leisurely days.  

From Pittsburgh, Grant took the Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg Mainline Canal to Harrisburg, deciding against traveling by stage, since he described travel by canal as the most comfortable method of travel possible.  I heartily agree.  While traveling through the Oxford region of England, I once got off a canal boat, turning the duty of steering the 60’ boat over to my twelve-year old son, The-Other-One.  (It wasn’t like he could get lost on a canal:  it wasn’t even wide enough to turn the old boat around, and if he really messed up, he had his fourteen-year-old brother, What’s-His-Name, to help him.)

Once on the tow path, I slowly stretched my legs, stopping frequently to admire the magnificent gardens.  When I got tired of walking, I took a short nap on a waterside bench.  Presently, the canal boat caught up and I boarded again.  The only things lazier than a canal boat are stalagmites and congressmen.

Where was I? Oh, yeah.  When Grant arrived in Harrisburg, he boarded a railroad train bound for Philadelphia.  This was the first train Grant had ever seen.  As he wrote:

In travelling by the road from Harrisburg, I thought the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.  We travelled at least eighteen miles an hour, when at full speed, and made the whole distance averaging probably as much as twelve miles an hour.  This seemed like annihilating space.

How wonderful!  Twelve to eighteen miles an hour is fast enough to get somewhere, but slow enough to see the countryside, and occasionally read a book while the scenery races past a window.  In travel, speed is the antithesis of enjoyment.

I made a list of my favorite writings by Mark Twain and quickly found an obvious pattern.  Twain’s stories of traveling by riverboat in Life on the Mississippi, his account of traveling across the American West by stagecoach in Roughing It, and his remarkable and unforgettable accounts of Huck and Jim’s raft floating down a languid river in Huckleberry Finn…. All are about slow, dignified travel.

I cannot imagine anyone writing as memorable a story involving someone traveling across an ocean in a 747.  If Marco Polo had gone to China by plane, his book would have been a forgotten pamphlet.  Travel used to be a way of broadening the mind; today it is just a way of lightening the wallet.  Traveling by air has all the dignity of being sentenced to a weekend in the county jail.

Perhaps we have made travel too easy.  I remember when my wife and I took our sons from London to Paris.  The Chunnel had just opened, and we took the train.  For a while, the signs in the little towns that flew by the windows were in English, then we went into a tunnel for a few minutes and when we came out, the signs were in French.  My sons were only dimly aware that we had journeyed to a new country.  We never even saw the water.

Think of the history of what crossing the English Channel used to mean.  Monarchies rose and fell on crossing that strip of water.  Countless thousands of men died in the attempt.  All the power and military might of Hitler and Napoleon couldn’t cross that channel and their failure changed the future history of the world.  And my sons had just done it in the time it took to drink a coke (and I wasn’t even sure if they knew we had done it).

Half a century ago, I used to drive my aging pickup down to the beach at Corpus Christi.  The old highway took you through every little town and village along the way.  The town of Beeville was about an hour away from the beach, and I’d stop at the town square and admire the Navy Skyraider up on a pedestal in the town square.  You couldn’t get too close, since the aging old naval jet was also home to a thriving bee hive.  Then, I’d stop in at a charming bookstore next to the diner that served a damn fine chicken fried steak.  

The last time I drove that route, the new highway was done, bypassing all the old picturesque little towns.  As we zipped down the multilane highway, I couldn’t even find the exit for Beeville.

I think we are all aware that the faster you drive a car, the narrower your cone of vision of the road ahead becomes.  Today, travel has become so fast, that I fear we can just barely see beyond the tips of our noses.  We can travel so far and so fast that we have just enough time to turn around and hurry back home.  

I don’t have any immediate plans to return to France, even if the pandemic would allow it.  But, if I do go again, I want to go on the Grain de Sail.  I’ll help them take care of the cargo.