Stuff That I Have Noticed #21 The Efficacy of Slow Travel (and Video Editing)

As reported in the first book of my memoirs, Three Stages and in the third, Waiting for Elizabeth, I have had the indubitable pleasure of slow travel across the USA numerous times.

My first continental crossing in 1947 when 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 wouldn’t cause it to begin being built until a few years later so in our fastback Chevy we drove two lane asphalt pretty much all the way.

1947 Chevy Fastback

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, Tucumcari, Amarillo, Phoenix and on and on.

Did you ever see any of those details 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. And since the story is set in 1950 the flight wasn’t an option, but I digress. The lengthy sea journey 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.

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

One last related story – Slow v. Fast – not about travel but video editing is discussed in Waiting for Elizabeth. Here’s an expansion on that.

Before the early nineties film was edited by a tediously slow physical method. From the film negative a (usually) black and white “work print” was struck. Every shot in the picture had multiple takes from several angles (master shot which included all actors in a scene, closeups and “two” shots etc.) and many – fortunately not all – of them were printed. At the rate of 90 feet per minute (35 MM film) with a 100 minute movie and multiple takes per scene that is a lot of film. Simply screening and sorting it could take weeks or months. Then the actual editing process involved cutting and splicing hundreds of clips together with a special device and clear tape. Then a “rough cut” had to be made at a film processing laboratory before each work in progress could be screened. “Cutting” an entire movie typically took several months, sometimes a year or even more for a long feature or a documentary.

When video tape became the editing medium the process was sped up considerably but it was still a lengthy proposition.

To quote the 2,000 Year Old Man: “Now we’re modern and lucky!”

Someone figured out how to digitize the moving images and sound, feed them into computers and created software enabling them to be edited in a non-linear, non-destructive way.

Editing on a computer is extremely fast compared to editing on film and considerably faster than tape-to-tape. This is generally considered a good thing and in most respects I agree. But that statement comes with a big “however”. To a large extent when cutting a movie the editor benefited from the delays necessitated by the methodology of working with film which allowed the ideas to percolate. When the results are near instantaneous he or she 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 to 9th Avenue, my first full length documentary, because they provided me with some distance from the project and I always came back to the edit with more ideas and more clarity. Here’s a short vlog about that shoot.

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. And slow video editing gives the creative juices time to flow and percolate.

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