The Efficacy of Slow Travel: Video Editing & a Love Story

• Posted on 15th December 2015
• in divorce & remarriage, Entertainment, entertainment books, Final Cut Pro, Hollywood memoirs, Love Story, Video Editing
• by Ben

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As reported in my Celebrity Book Three Stages and in my

Video Editing

& Love Story Waiting for Elizabeth, I have had the indubitable pleasure of slow travel across the USA numerous times.

My first continental crossing in 1947 (I was thirteen) was, by today’s standards, really slow. It took five days to drive from Bristol, Tennessee to Los Angeles. Buckminster Fuller had conceived the interstate highway system a few years earlier and President Ike would cause it to be built a few years later but that hadn’t happened when we went west. So in our fastback Chevy we drove two lane asphalt pretty much all the way.

Excerpt from Three Stages:

As we traveled west (on the fabled Route 66 – no interstates yet) the wonders multiplied. The Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest were places I’d heard of but they didn’t look anything like I had imagined. I saw cactuses that also didn’t match the pictures in my mind. Once we were west of Arkansas everything looked strange. It was so flat, dry, brown. I found it ugly. It was many years later that I learned to love the sere landscapes of the West and appreciate their stark beauty and grandeur. But at thirteen and conditioned by the mellow old Blue Ridge mountains with their lush greenery and gentle rivers, this place looked like hell to me. But it sure was interesting. The names of the places alone induced wonderment: Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Gallup, Amarillo, Phoenix and on and on.

Did you ever see any of that from 35,000 feet?

These thoughts were prompted by a scene in the 2015 movie Brooklyn when the Irish girl got on an ocean liner to America. I realized that the seven days on the ship would serve her emotionally as a transition from the old world to the new world in a way that a seven hour plane trip would not. It can be seen as analogous to the difference between slowly, one foot, one leg, one hand at a time adjusting the body to cold water rather than the shock of plunging right in.

In 1990 Elizabeth and I did a six week car trip. I described it in the first chapter of Waiting for Elizabeth. Here’s an excerpt:

Taking turns at the wheel we both relished just being together with no distractions and actually enjoyed the passing USA immensely. Driving into St. Louis and seeing the landmark arch at sunrise was spectacular.

… I have no idea how many times I’ve flown from coast to coast and innumerable points in between but I have driven all or a part of the land seven or eight times… The plane flight, when repeated a few times, shrinks our country in your mind. It takes five or six hours and makes it easy to forget that when my generation’s grandparents were born it took nearly seven days and when their parents were born it took four to six months. …

Elizabeth and I found a kind of magical tranquility about being encapsulated in our cruising Saab as the earth rolled eastward and we rolled westward on never changing ribbons of asphalt surrounded by ever changing vistas. And it’s surprising how little we listened to the radio or tapes. We enjoyed the silence and free-flowing conversations about … everything.

One last story, the video editing part, about Slow v. Fast in another excerpt from Waiting for Elizabeth:

[Some] observations about the plusses and minuses of non-linear (computer) editing particularly as they apply to movies and specifically to documentaries. Editing on a computer is very fast compared to tape-to-tape and especially to editing on film. This is generally considered a good thing and in many respects I agree. But that statement comes with a big “however”. To a large extent when cutting a scripted feature the editor needs the delays provided by the exigencies of working with film for the ideas to percolate and when the results are near instantaneous he is robbed of that time. This applies even more to documentary work which is more amorphous and abstract. I found that I welcomed the interruptions in the work on “Nyack” because they provided me with some distance from the project.

Besides several car trips all the way across and part way across this continent I saw the country on a tour bus with the Norman Luboff  Choir in 1963 and let me tell you again; seeing our country on wheels is an experience not to be missed.

Slow travel – on wheels or water – allows the body, the mind and the spirit to acclimatize to distance in a manner not afforded by air travel. Slow travel gives you the opportunity to decompress and unwind the influence of the environment you’re leaving and open yourself up to the environment into which you’re moving.

Try it. You’ll like it.

Click here to get Three Stages and Waiting for Elizabeth