I am sitting in a B&B room, far from any place I could legitimately call “home”, writing this through the bleariness of jet lag and general travel fatigue as I wait for a dose of melatonin to kick in and send me off to dreamland in this time zone.  I listen to the rain of the Vancouver night drum down on the Queen Anne shingles and to the anonymous cars passing in the chill winter night, and my mind randomly wanders randomly…

Travel can be so strange.  I resonate with William Gibson’s metaphor that modern conveyance has outstripped the speed of the soul, so your “true self” always lags somewhere behind your physical presence.

Twenty-six hours ago, I dashed out of my apartment in Madrid, leaving my lovely wife blearily sinking back to sleep.  I dove into the stream of humanity, funneled hither and thither by our travel infrastructure, to be deposited nine time zones and 8,400 kilometers away.  Just like the subway, albeit on a vaster scale, I emerge to different surroundings, different shops and architecture, different sounds and smells, even different languages.  Intellectually, I know that these places are connected.  That if I traveled at a more human speed — say, by foot or horse or bicycle — I would see the change gradually.  In Madrid, you can walk from metro station to metro station and experience the “Aha!” moment as your cognitive maps of the stations click together and you finally see how the small islands of cityness surrounding each station are connected in a greater whole.  But with cities on different continents, it would be an immense struggle to even try to merge them through personal experience.

So I am left with the surreal feeling of emerging into a different planet.  A place so alien to where I started that there is almost no relationship, save for the universality of modern cities.  I have exchanged the early-morning odor of churros con chocolate for the late-night tang of frying fish and nam pla.

All I have for the experience of the travel itself — the getting from there to here — is a melange of impressions.  The sinus ache of flight and the institutionalized tinny blandness of transatlantic meals.  The wash of people.  The rounds of questions at customs bureaus and a handful of stamps in my passport to prove that I had permission to be there.  It might as well be a trip on the tube, for all of the distinctiveness that the already-fading impressions leave on my fogged consciousness.

At some point in life, I realized that certain places accumulate emotion.  Not precisely in the psychometry sense.  More that they are such quintessentially shared experiences that we recognize our own emotions mirrored in nearly everybody around us.  Churches accumulate a somber weight of hope, joy, and fear.  Sporting arenas accumulate hot, adrenaline-driven, competitiveness.

Hospitals and airports accumulate stress and fear.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is an exercise in capitalism run rampant, with a sensory-overloading barrage of shops polished to gleaming, chrome-plated perfection, run by smartly dressed and equally polished and anonymous salespeople.  Throngs of people alternately rush and loiter through its temples of duty-free consumption, pretending to delight while struggling with exhaustion and worries about missed flights and mechanical failures.

For a couple of hours during my interminable layover, I find pseudo-respite by talking my way into the British Airlines executive lounge.  But even in this hushed haven of peace, gourmet snacks, mood music, and free WiFi, there is still an undercurrent of stress.  Nobody is here to be here.  Everybody is on the way somewhere, and their thoughts fly ahead of them.  Will the flight be on time?  Can they steal a few more minutes of comfortable seating before sprinting for the plane?  (Eyes constantly drift back to scrolling flight announcement displays.)  Will they make the meeting, the wedding, the briefing, the reunion?  The submerged tension is amplifed by the mutually-consensual anoynymity.

I think the melatonin has finally hit.  Perhaps in the morning, Vancouver’s silver sunlight will wake me from this haze.