After nearly a week of freezing rain, hail and family coughs in the rolling countryside of Haute-Saône, on the border with Switzerland, this vacation season, I found myself dreaming of faraway travel. I love eastern France, a place that's been familiar to me since I was born. However, I also love the smell of being somewhere new, the one that grabs you by the throat when you set foot on the tarmac of an unknown country. Or should I write "I used to love it"?
It's undeniable that with three young children, we've undertaken fewer excursions around the globe than we did before they were born: They're too expensive and too tiring. It's also undeniable that, with climate anxiety on the rise, we'd think twice before emitting the equivalent of 15 tonnes of CO2 for a round trip to Bangkok, for instance.
Three tonnes each is more than what a human will be expected to emit in a whole year by 2050 so that the planet does not warm above 2°C. In her column "Chaud Devant" ("Coming In Hot") my colleague Cécile Cazenave recently highlighted the strategies of globetrotting parents to show their children the world without burning it up (too much). The result: railway odysseys in sleeper cars and an exploration of the European continent. As one resigned mother put it, San Francisco will have to wait.
Simply asking this question in such terms carries significant social weight: In France, every year, between 55% and 70% of French people go on holiday, and of these, about 20% go abroad. So, we're talking about a privileged minority, to which I belong. I had the incredible privilege of traveling at a young age, which I appreciated even then. Without an ecological guilty conscience, I could hardly have anticipated that it would soon be a thing of the past. Are our children condemned to experience every trip as a transgression and an offense? People of my generation were given a backpacker's guide, a low-cost ticket and an order: Go far away! Now those doors are already closing, and a different message is emerging for the next generation: Stay at home!
Honestly, I don't know what to make of it. Part of me is saddened by the idea of our children giving up on the elsewhere, the vastly different, the uncomfortable. But another part of me wonders what they would really find there, in that elsewhere. I read Julien Blanc-Gras' new book this week, Bungalow (untranslated, published May 2). The reporter-writer-traveler has published several books on tourism and fatherhood (Comme à la Guerre, "Like War," untranslated, 2019). In his latest book, he recounts his family's four-month stay in Southeast Asia, with his wife and their nine-year-old son. They take four months of escape, literally, to avoid the wall his wife was heading toward at full speed in her job. As in all his books, Blanc-Gras deploys a kind of sarcastic tenderness, a humanist composure, a bit like dipping something by Houellebecq in a strawberry bubble bath. I found this book incredibly moving. He adds another dimension to the reflective melancholy of travel writers: that of childhood.
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