Flights

RETURNING TO ONE’S ROOTS

Hostels ought to be sued for ageism: for some reason, they only offer accommodation to the young. The acceptable age range is determined on a hostel-by-hostel basis, but nowhere will a forty-year-old make the cut. Why should the young receive such special treatment? Are they not, even aside from this, showered with the privileges of biology itself?

Let us take as an example those backpackers who constitute the vast majority of hostel-goers: they are strong and tall – both the men and the women – with clear, glowing skin, and they rarely smoke, if at all, let alone take drugs, or at most a joint from time to time. They travel by ecologically friendly means – in other words, by land: overnight trains, packed long-distance buses. In some countries they even hitchhike. They get to their hostels at night, and as they dine they all begin to ask each other the Three Travel Questions: where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? The first question determines the vertical axis, while the next two establish two horizontal axes. Thus these backpackers are able to create something like a coordinates system; when they have all situated one another on that map, they drift peaceably off to sleep.

The guy I met on the train was travelling, like so many of them, in search of his roots. His was a complicated journey: his grandmother on his mother’s side was a Russian Jew, his grandfather a Pole from Vilnius (now Lithuania); they left Russia with General Anders’ army and emigrated to Canada after the war. On his father’s side, meanwhile, his grandfather was Spanish, and his grandmother a Native American whose tribe I can’t recall the name of.

He was at the beginning of his trip, and he seemed rather overwhelmed.