Good and Lost

A week ago, I was in Hamilton, Montana. By tomorrow evening, I’ll be in Istanbul. Total actual travel time: less than twenty hours. I move with my fellow international airport zombies, coffee-fueled and laden with carryon luggage. I stand in line, I show my passport, I sit in a soft seat and watch a few movies, and then, like magic, I am on the other side of the world.

A week ago, I was in Hamilton, Montana. Today, I am in Istanbul. Total actual travel time: less than twenty hours. I move with my fellow international airport zombies, coffee-fueled and laden with carryon luggage. I stand in line, I show my passport, I sit in a soft seat and watch a few movies, and then, like magic, I am on the other side of the world.

Surely this must be magic. Certainly this ease with which we move around our planet is unprecedented. A hundred years ago, the same journey would have taken months, or even longer. As I waited for my flight in the Missula airport, I imagined an alternate self, living in 1910, attempting to make the same journey.

In 2010, it was a cold and cloudy day when I drove up the Bitterroot valley to the nearest airport, in Missoula, some fifty miles away. I went through security and waited for around an hour before boarding my flight to Denver; two hours in the air and I was there, waiting for my connection to DC.

In 1910, Hamilton was a little town and seat of the county thanks to funding from a local copper baron by the name of Marcus Daly. It had dirt roads for its main streets, and a mile down river, a big lumber mill rumbled in operation. Four years before Henry Ford began production on the famous Model T, cars were still rare, especially in this part of the world, and most of the journey would have taken place by train. The Northern Pacific railroad had been in Missoula for three decades by then, and that would have been my first stop: then steaming west out of the Rocky mountains and across the still-empty great plains to St. Paul, Minnesota. Then on to Chicago, then alive and uproarious with the great surges of immigration, the meat-packing plants, and the corrupt underground organizations that would coalesce into Capone’s empire with the prohibition.

In 2010, I flew from Denver to Washington, D.C. in four or five hours, sleeping part of the way, and disembarked in Dulles to the light rain of a warm front coming off the Atlantic. I stayed at my apartment in northern Virginia for just under a week, packing my things and preparing for trip to Istanbul.

In 1910, I would have traveled by railroad from Chicago to New York City. The cities that had surrounded Manhattan island were well into the process of consolidation, and the city was awash with seemingly unlimited potential. It was also one of the most multicultural cities on Earth at the time, one of the main entry points for the United States’ “melting pot” approach to immigration–just under a million immigrants a year were being processed through Ellis Island, and to walk a few cities blocks from one immigrant community to another was like stepping into a whole new country.

Still two years before the famous sinking of the Titanic, this was the golden age of passenger liners across the Atlantic. One of the most famous of these, the Lusitania, was capable of making the crossing in under a week. The first class quarters and common areas aboard the Lusitania were luxurious to a point unimaginable just a few decades earlier, and, in comparison to other available sea berths at the time, even the second and third class areas were considered very comfortable. I would no doubt have made the crossing in second or third class, assuming I wasn’t able to work my way across on a freight or livestock ship.

In 2010, the second leg of my voyage began with a drive back to Dulles, twenty minutes going through security, and a coffee while waiting for my flight. My transatlantic crossing, from D.C. to Paris, took less than eight hours. I watched a film, read a bit, and slept.

In 1910, I would have arrived in Liverpool, in the east of England. Another major destination for European immigration, Liverpool had much of the same rough-and-tumble, multicultural feel I would have had in New York. The city also had a heavy Irish influence thanks to immigration a few decades earlier during the great potato famine, and as I walked its streets I would have seen a number of pubs on the Irish model, fiddle music drifting out through old wooden doors to the tapping of the patron’s feet.

The train would have taken me from Liverpool to London for a night or two–then the largest city on the Planet–and on to Dover, for a ferry crossing of the English Channel. At Calais I would have entered France and continued to Paris. Home to the Universal Expositions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris was then, even more than now, a world capital of technology, philosophy, sophistication, and culture. The Exposition of 1889 had resulted in an architectural “demonstration” that resulted in the tallest building–the Eiffel tower, a construction foreigners like myself would  (and still do) gawk at until our necks ached.

On the city walls around the train station, I would have seen posters with the names of strange places and the crescent and star of the Ottoman Turkish empire. And under these, two words: Orient Express.

In 2010, I disembarked at Charles de Gaul international airport and walked to the next terminal, where, only an hour later, I caught my final flight to Istanbul. The flight to Paris had been in a larger plane, full of passengers with western sensibilities who stayed seated and rarely talked, reading magazines or books or working on their computers. The flight from Paris to Istanbul was something else; it was full of Turks, and Turks are a much more sociable breed. As soon as the seatbelt lights were turned off, at least half of the passengers were unbuckling and walking up and down their aisles, leaning on seat backs and engaging in lively conversation, where they remained for the rest of the flight, while partaking liberally in the free beer and wine available courtesy of Air France.

in 1910, I would have boarded the Orient Express train in Paris that would have taken me flying across the French countryside and into Germany, through the cities of Strasbourg, Munich, and then to Vienna. After Vienna all of the cultures I would have been familiar with would have begun to fade as I entered eastern Europe, then tense with the just-beneath-the-surface conflicts that would in a few years spark the first world war. Budapest, Bucharest, and then the final curving line down along the western shores of the Black Sea until the land narrowed and, ahead in the darkness, the burning lights of Istanbul.

And this is where our two stories, of 1910 and 2010, converge: though means of transportation may change, I suspect that the feeling of wonder that comes upon you when you see a new place, especially a place with as much character, history, and sheer mass as Istanbul, is the same no matter what time you see it in. I left the airport by city bus and came into the city along the Bosphorus, the massive stonemasonry of the Byzantine sea-wall rising on my left, the glittering lights of the ships in the harbor on my right. Across the straits, the lights of Taksim rose into a low mist, Galata tower high above the rest, and along the expansive shores to the left, the spires of mosques towered into the night.

I was back.