Blue summer
The first way to travel known to man was to get the hell out of where there were big bugs or ice ages. Since then, almost all travel habits have improved, but others have remained as they were or have returned to their origins. It is not to point out, but now that fire is known, that animals and vegetables are already cooked, we eat raw fish or meat in carpaccio again anywhere there is an Italian or Japanese restaurant , that is, in all of them.
But the changes that amaze us the most when we stop to think about it are those that have happened more recently. One remembers what it was like to go to town in a 600 filled with children or buses with slashed upholstery suitable for an episode of Murder Wrote and with ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. And although it seems a parallel dimension to the current world of low cost, aseptic Birds or social networks of sharing cars, The truth is that it happened to us very recently. It was your childhood vacation.
He was traveling by road. To the beach, the town or the river: trips were made by car. In some cars in which the windows were lowered while you muscled up and the air conditioning was like taking a hand out. An uncle of yours had been on a plane once and he showed you the ticket.
The holidays were a season. You left with everything, you left almost forever, because you came back a different person, tanned by the sun and by the stones of the native children. You said goodbye to the neighbors, to those from your school, they claimed your debts and someone could even wave a handkerchief. Because, of course, people carried cloth handkerchiefs in their pockets. You too.
You carried large amounts of food. And not food to store at destination: only for the trip. Giant sandwiches, two-plate lunch boxes, and bags of donuts, fruit, and chocolate chip cookies. The trip was a long and mysterious territory where you had to stock up on calories in case the USSR launched the missiles. And as if to offer to the whole train, because they offered you everything and that became a picnic area on all trips. Eating was the ancestor of watching movies, the ancestor of fiddling with the cell phone.
Ham Ham
You sang the music. No one was wearing helmets. When the Walkman was invented there were two or three guys from the future who put them on, but they ran out of batteries long before the trip. The helmets were a headband topped with two orange sponges of absent-minded discretion . The music didn't stop at the guy's ears, it overflowed with joy through the surroundings.
you were talking Given the lack of entertainment on board, one sooner or later chose to talk. In your car there was always someone who knew someone who knew you, that's why you had left the same town. And strange and even terrifying stories were heard. The hypnotic rattle favored confidences or perhaps these were the usual themes on a long trip: death and love, jail and the military, the One, two three . At the end of a Bilbao-Valladolid you knew the name of the entire neighborhood gang of the gallows guy on your right and the ages of all the sisters-in-law of the lady across the street.
You read newspapers. There was no internet and you couldn't watch TV while traveling, so if you didn't read newspapers you didn't know anything. That happened a lot: long periods, especially on vacations when you didn't know anything about the people or the world. Can you imagine?
Your girlfriend fired you. Or family or a bunch of friends. The stations were a place to go, full of people hugging each other, and it felt weird if you arrived alone.
Fate was a Fate. The medium makes the message, and the slight back injury that a trip to Santander left you made of Santander precisely a place of mythological resonances, Shangri-Lá roll.
If it cost so much to get there, it would be for a reason.
*** You may also be interested in...**
- Summers in disuse: the beach
- Summers in disuse (II) : when we smoked on planes
- All the articles of Rafael de Rojas
Room in Rome