Three From the Road
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.08.01 | 8:54 PM ET
The New York Times tripled its normal travel essay output this weekend with a trio of excellent pieces. Terrence Rafferty weighs in on the state of road movies. “When we’re not feeling free enough, we take to the road,” he writes. “That’s the mythology, anyway. But as I look at the recent onslaught of American road movies, arriving at the multiplexes with the regularity of big rigs pulling into truck stops, I can’t help wondering if it isn’t time to lay that seductive myth to rest.”
In two other stories, writers struggle for connection and understanding as they find themselves stranded far away from home in the wake of the attacks in the U.S. Kate Wheeler bounces from airline waiting list to airline waiting list in Shanghai, and David Margolick discovers unxpected feelings in Italy. “The American, the New Yorker and the journalist in me all felt drawn home. All needed to share in whatever everyone else was experiencing,” he writes. “That was not to happen, of course; all flights back to the United States were halted. But there was a consolation, something I’d never felt before abroad: sympathy.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
