Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008 - (Page 36)

Is traveling really romantic? By Justin Nobel I raced home from work on empty roads under a waxing moon with open windows, a cold wind blasting my face and worries about my dissolving relationship on my mind. It was 3 a.m. and I had promised Rachel I would be back by midnight to help pack for a road trip we were starting the following day. Perhaps, we were told, a romantic getaway down the California coast would make up for weeks of late nights and a soul-sapping loss of intimacy. During the bride-by-capture era, which lasted through the Middle Ages, grooms would kidnap their wives-to-be the month before marriage and try to impregnate them before relatives could come to the rescue. By the 19th century, wealthy couples were more likely to go on month-long wedding extravaganzas, a trend referred to as honeylunacy. Lovers, accompanied by family and friends, trekked across the country to watering holes such as Berkeley Hot Springs, Saratoga Springs, the Jersey Shore and Cape Cod. “The fashionable tour” was a roster of such must see Americana locales, and by 1900, Niagara Falls topped the list. But by the 1950s no aristocrat in his right mind would be seen there—the popularization of the automobile made getaways available to the masses. In Walt Whitman’s times vacations were unheard of, explains Dr. Ellen Furlough, a historian at the University of Kentucky. Taking time off work was an idea that came about in Europe in the 1930s in the form of state-sponsored vacations. Nationalistic governments recommended vacations to build support for the regime. In the U.S. the engine pushing vacations wasn’t the government, but advertisers, whose industry exploded in the flush times after World War II. “For the traveling middle-class the honeymoon had become an established fact,” explains Karen Dubinsky, in The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymoon and Tourism at Niagara Falls. According to Dubinsky, the purpose of the honeymoon in America fifty years ago was for newly-wed couples to go away in order to have sex in private. A sexually unsuccessful honeymoon could lead to lifelong impotency for males. Women were known to suffer from honeymoon shock, which led to nervous breakdowns and mental disorders. “Postwar sex experts imagined a direct line that began at the honeymoon and extended to the health and well-being of the marriage and, hence society itself,” writes Dubinsky. “A good send off, in the form of a proper honeymoon, was crucial.” Today, few couples wait for such a “send off” before having sex but a good trip can still spark magic. Rachel and I met in New York City the day after Valentine’s Day, but it wasn’t until a road trip to an uninhabited Georgia island that we consummated our love. We slept on a balmy beach under a stroke of stars and in the orange sunrise our young love seemed to glow eternal. Three months later I was offered an internship at a newspaper in California and we were on the road again, taking the long way across the country, through rural Quebec and the North Woods. We made love in the Black Hills and the Big Horns and in the Oregon desert saw the sky scream red from a windswept ridge. But in California my newspaper job became my newspaper life, and I rarely saw Rachel. When I reached home the night before our getaway, I expected her to be waiting up, but she wasn’t. I dumped my bags in the hallway, cracked the fridge and picked through a platter of dayold nachos. “I only get you when you’re tired and hungry,” Rachel said after I finally slipped into bed. “Your work has taken over everything.” She wore a loose blue shirt with pink swirls and in the dim light I could barely make out the curve of her collarbone. I wanted to tickle her neck, taste the inside of her mouth, but, completely exhausted, I fell asleep. If the romantic getaway is a form of therapy then the road trip is the ultimate panacea. Driving is an escape, a chance to leave the humdrum past in a swirl of smoke and seek new experiences. There is something beckoning about an endless glaze of asphalt, the novel stitching of scenery that zips by the window in a montage of straightaways and curves. But it wasn’t until the advent of the automobile that most Americans could truly explore this sensation. “The wealthy could make the fashionable tour in 1825 and the well-to-do built up the summer resorts of the 1890s,” says Foster Rhea Dulles in a history about leisure travel in America, “but every Tom, Dick and Harry toured the country in the 1930s—thanks to the automobile.” Travel has changed since that time, but the road trip is still the free-spirited getaway of choice. Airplanes are stuffy and nervewracking, a bus is hardly romantic, a boat is too much work and a train doesn’t give much chance to explore off the beaten path. But cars are carefree, come and go as you please, you choose the route. With our coffees in the cup holders, bags in the back, eyes on the road and fingers on the map we getaway. But, where to? Dennis Portnoy, a therapist in San Francisco who has counseled couples for more than 25 years, recommends Highway One road trips to buck up ailing relationships. It is essential that couples get away from the distractions that keep them from being intimate in their everyday lives such as work, children, friends and phone calls, says Portnoy. “Newness stimulates desire,” he adds. “These little breaks away from the routine put the juice back in.” Romance has long been associated with escapes into nature, says Robert Gurval, an expert in Roman culture at the University of California Los Angeles. Often, this meant a passionate, carnal, infelicitous breed of romance. Marriage was banal for the ancient Romans, according to Gurval, part of one’s duty. True love only occurred with a lover, and it didn’t occur in the city or village or even within the confines of society, but rather in an Eden-like garden setting called a locus amoenus, a place found in poetry but seldom in reality. Classical love poets described this lovely place as a pastoral setting with trees and streams where lovers flee to entertain lascivious affairs. “The very nature of love poetry is about the locus amoenus,” says Gurval, “this momentary dream-like ideal that just doesn’t last.” Ovid, the Roman poet known for his steamy lyrics of lust and deceit, often brought his lovers to a locus amoenus. Book IV of Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, tells of lovers Pyramus and Thisbe who are escaping fathers that oppose their love: “At last their parents they resolve to cheat To steal by night from home, and thence unknown / To seek the fields, and quit th’ unfaithful town.” The lovers meet at a tomb beside a gurgling brook. After a moment of confusion brought on by a lion’s roar, both commit suicide. Shakespeare adapted the story into Romeo and Juliet. He also borrowed the idea of a locus amoenus. Shakespeare’s lovers often fled the city and its imposing social structure for places where sexual fantasies could be acted on freely. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream a trove of fairies are involved in a complicated love triangle in an enchanted forest: “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,” says Oberon, king of the fairies, “Where oxlips and the nodding vine grows There sleeps Titania sometime of the night / Lull’d in these flowers with dance and delight.” As Rachel and I followed the coast past Carmel, my Titania began to giggle for no apparent reason. Her nose scrunched and 36 coastaltraveler summer

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Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008 Contents Coastal Connoisseur Coastal Picks Coastal Art Coastal Flyer Coastal Sex Coastal Eco Coastal Surfer Coastal Adventurer Coastal Snaps San Diego La Jolla Laguna Beach Malibu Santa Barbara San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station Fairfax Inverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast

Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008

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