Workwise, what I do now was alive and well then -- essentially, making up the news. Maybe even for a paper with the same name -- some of Edgar Allan Poe's most interesting stuff took the form of hoax stories for the New York Sun about thrilling balloon adventures and the like. (I'm not sure if that Sun survived into the 1900s, but the tradition was still alive.)
Then, as now, it didn't pay for shit.
I think travel as a what, hobby? Thing to do with vacations? didn't exist then as now, although I have a couple memoirs of long road trips (one by motor from NY to California, another by wagon across South Africa). I may have done some traveling, but am not sure -- I'm very much a stick-in-the-mud in some ways, and the idea of packing trunks for a three-month excursion into places with no running water or steady food supply is a little daunting if you're not wealthy enough to afford a fleet of Xocs.
My family being what it is, if I tracked up the timeline on my father's side, my life would be pretty similar to what it is now (his grandfather was a colonial immigrant from Scotland to South Africa, where he worked in newspapers). On my mother's side, it'd be radically different -- I'd probably be speaking German and hiring fleets of Xocs, or else (mother's mother's side), I'd be *really* big in dirt, with little hope of ever leaving the farm (and not much of even every seeing the ocean). German aristocrats and Boer farmers.
I'm concerned with travel in part because hey, wasn't the Titanic grand? and I really like going places, but also because I have an international, transracial family. My two youngest would *definitely* run into some cultural problems pretty much everywhere I'd wind up -- although I suspect in the short run, we'd be better off with the Boers than with the American urban media (given the Chinese Exclusion Acts that were underway, and anti-Chinese riots in California) and the cosmopolitan German snobs (who viewed my grandfather's marriage to a white South African as a crime against the purity of the family's bloodline). The Boers, ironically, feel to me like they'd be the most likely to sort of scratch their heads and leave us alone. Of course, the future would be fucking miserable there.
I'm even afraid Florida (where I live now) at the time wouldn't be that much better, although it might be. It was a former Confederacy state with all the racial legacy that entails, but it was also still very much a frontier. The Seminoles, actually, were probably the most-established (and least persecuted) of the so-called "tri-racial isolate" groups, in part because they lived way the heck out in mosquito-infested swamps.
Hmm. In 1906, I think Palm Beach was being established as a wealthy enclave for Gilded Age millionaires (Henry Morrison Flagler of the FEC Railroad built the city, more or less), but there were Indian trading posts not far from the island. Where I now live would be fairly rugged swamp, I think. |
