Travelers Discover Anew That Seeing Is Believing

As I have said, one of the rewards of travel is that it validates what one has read of famous places. Today we see everything in movies or on TV, but there is still no substitute for being there.

Except for excursions to Long Beach, Balboa and Mojave, I had never traveled any distance from home until, at 18, I hitchhiked around the Southwest. I went to Yuma, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Taos, Denver, Salt Lake City and Sacramento, before coming home.

It wasn’t until I got to Salt Lake City, and gazed upon the famous Mormon Tabernacle, that I had that sense of verification. My books were right. There was indeed such a place. I was also reassured by the Capitol in Sacramento.

Years later, as a scullion on the Matson Line, I sailed to Hawaii, American Samoa, the Fijis, New Zealand and Australia. Perhaps my greatest thrill in traveling was the early-morning sight of Diamond Head from the ship’s bow. I believed then in King Kamehameha, Capt. Cook, Bligh and Mr. Christian, Robert Louis Stevenson and all the lore of the Pacific.

Since then I have stood inside the Parthenon, heard Big Ben toll from across the street, stared up into the dome of St. Peter’s, heard the singing of bishops and the glory of Bach in Notre Dame and stood before the Great Emancipator’s statue in the Lincoln Memorial.

Each of these confrontations, as I say, reinforced the beliefs that I had had about the world. If my books were right, if there was a Parthenon, then there must be a Colosseum, a Sphinx, a Taj Mahal; and if those edifices indeed existed, then there must have been a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Washington, a Madame de Pompadour and a Cleopatra.

I am aware, however, that sometimes our first exposure to great monuments can be a disappointment. Perhaps that is subjective. I am reminded of the two women from Iowa who stood on the Palisades in Santa Monica and gazed out for the first time at the Pacific Ocean.

One said, “Why, it’s not so big.”

“Speaking about having to see places to see if they really exist,” writes John Degatina, “I finally went to the Grand Canyon. It didn’t look as real or impressive as it did in Cinerama. . . . Maybe it’s just too vast for me to appreciate. . . .”

Curiously, Degatina says he has never been out of the United States, but he has more feeling of reality about vacation spots around Paris than he does about Malibu. He thinks this might be due in part to the French Impressionist painters.

That may be true. When I saw “A Day in the Country,” that marvelous exhibition of French Impressionism at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I felt as if I were actually walking through the French countryside or flying over it in a balloon.

Degatina makes a provocative point about our own landscape. “Come to think of it, David Hockney’s paintings look more like Southern California than the real thing does. Can’t help but wonder why.”

I do not have the language, expertise or insight of an art critic, but I suspect Hockney’s paintings look more like Malibu than Malibu does because they are Malibu intensified--the vivid reds and greens, the sapphire pools, the golden flesh, the sense of time stilled in an exquisitely sensual environment. Also, they reflect a life too lush, opulent and sterile for ordinary mortals, yet in his work it seems palpable. If we had entree to that private Malibu, we would probably say, “Yes, there is such a place.”

Oddly, I did not have a sense of America as reality until World War II, when I was transferred from Los Angeles to Washington by train. I remember that when we pulled into St. Louis, and I saw the name of some St. Louis brewery painted on the side of a brick building, I finally realized that America--the heartland, the Mississippi River, Chicago, Toledo, Buffalo, New York City and Washington itself--in fact existed.

Despite the miracle of jet travel, many children today are doomed to live their lives in the neighborhoods of their birth. Many Los Angeles children will never see the Music Center. And most will never see a David Hockney painting.

We should make sure that, at least, they see the books that will tell them those things exist.