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The marvelous era of cheap airfare is over

June 29, 2008 12:15 am

DALLAS--

Go! I told her, and don't even think twice about it. The door is closing on a marvelous era, and such pleasures should be savored while they can be.

The era of cheap airfares is over. The head of British Airways said so, and who can possibly doubt it? I took the news surprisingly hard, because my children likely won't have the opportunities I did for exploring the world.

As a country boy visiting my great-aunts Hilda and Lois in their cabin, I would sit between them on their red leather couch, with a weathered Rand McNally atlas splayed across our laps. Those old ladies showed me the places in Europe they had been as Red Cross nurses in the Great War.

Using my finger as a pointer, we would take imaginary trips, with my elderly tour guides describing the people and places I'd see if I were there. Eccentric Hilda once read my palm, tracing with her long fingernail a line in my hand that prophesied a future of travel.

Well, I certainly hoped so. But people like us didn't go to Europe. In 1974, when I was 7, Mr. Bickham, the wealthy farmer who lived down the road, took his wife to Paris. Had they gone to the moon and back, I could hardly have been less dazzled.

Ten years later, I was standing on the Champs-Élysees. Our family hadn't gotten rich; rather, in 1978, the airline industry had been deregulated. Suddenly, ordinary people could afford to fly to Europe. I started buying inexpensive, off- season tickets and traveling frugally and frequently. Until I started a family and could no longer afford it, I went at least once a year.

Europe changed my life. One example, among many: On that first trip, as a teenager, I stood in the magnificent medieval cathedral in Chartres, utterly overcome by its beauty and complexity. What kind of religion builds such a temple to its God? I thought. I staggered out of that Gothic pile a different man, walking a new road.

"It was right that I had gone to Europe, if only because I could look again with wonder," a premature- ly jaded Truman Capote wrote in 1948. He described the continent as a bridge that led to his "imagination's earliest landscapes." That was true for me, too.

My great-aunts, see, had been far beyond our place, where nothing ever happened, and had come back with enchanting tales for a restless little boy. In their tin-roof cottage at the end of a pecan orchard, amid their cosmopolitan air smelling of jonquils and old books, I learned curiosity. And to develop nostalgia for Europe, a place I'd never been.

And so, the first time I set foot on the grandest avenue of Paris and remembered that it was on this very street that an unknown Frenchman had taken Hilda in his arms when news became general that the armistice had been signed and kissed her madly-- well, I was home.

My travels in Europe taught me to cherish many things about life that I might otherwise have overlooked: good food and drink, old places and traditional ways, the meaning of a sense of place, the company and wisdom of people not like myself. And, above all, the eternal possibility of wonder.

My one regret in life is that I never lived in Europe. But in that, perhaps, I was spared. Capote was disconsolate to learn that an American will always be an outsider in Europe. But then, he wrote, "gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: Rather, it could be a part of me."

That wisdom helped reconcile me to my insatiable European wanderlust and make my experiences there part of my own perspective. Will my kids have the same opportunity when they're older? Or will permanently high oil prices have once again made overseas travel a pastime of the rich? If the latter, my "Let's Go" generation will have been among history's most fortunate.

One day, my grandchildren may sit on my lap, and I'll trace the routes of my adventures on maps in the same musty atlas my great-aunts had. (It's on my bookshelf.) There's beauty in that, I suppose. Helas, there's no substitute for being there.

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist.