Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Some sort of a robe is indispensable whenever you have to share a bath. Pajamas are not utterly indispensable. Slippers are not indispensable but a pair of very light-weight ones are a desirable comfort. Extra shoe strings can be carried no matter what your weight allowance and not only are they needed in a hurry when you break one but they double as clothes lines most opportunely. A small flashlight is always a convenience and you can count on it saving your neck at least once. But I said "small." The ordinary household or automobile torch is too heavy and too big; get one of those which looks like a fountain pen and fits in a lady's purse or a man's vest pocket.

  You can save weight and space by transferring medicines and toiletries to polyethylene bottles obtainable from any drug store. This also eliminates breakage-have you ever had a bottle of hand lotion spread itself through an entire suitcase of clean clothes?-and it also lets the bottles "breathe" at high altitude. In the latter connection, fountain pens and lighter fluid are not things to take in airplanes; use a ballpoint pen and refill your lighter in tobacco shops. Matches are hard to obtain the world round; you will probably want a lighter with you. If you are a steady smoker, you can resign yourself to smoking some odd mixtures, for, if you attempt to carry with you enough of your favorite brand of cigarettes, you will not only weigh yourself down to an impossible degree, but you will also find yourself paying around a hundred per cent duty over and over and over again. So relax to the inevitable, or ask a waiter to buy you American cigarettes on the black market-he will almost certainly be able to do so.

  We have already been over the horrors of getting the numerous papers needed for foreign travel. Remember that the State Department puts out a pamphlet on passports, the Public Health Service puts out one on medical requirements, and the Treasury Department puts out one about customs requirements. Then when you are traveling be sure to carry on your person your passport and all other travel papers including spare photographs and traveler's cheques whenever you cross an international boundary. They are bulky but it is usually only for an hour or so, and the one they want to see is always the one you packed away.

  Make up a small notebook, as small as possible, and list in it the number of your passport, the cable address of your bank, all the addresses you will need while out of the country and any that you might by any wild chance need, including the addresses of all those relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances you promised to send postcards to. Then write in this notebook all memoranda you need before you leave (such as prescriptions for spectacles, promises to buy things abroad for people, etc.). Then never use anything else for memoranda. If you don't follow this rule, you will never be able to find a piece of necessary information when you need it; you will be smothered in little pieces of paper. Most especially use this notebook to record foreign purchases since an exact record of such things will speed you through customs on your return and may save you quite a lot of money. We got through customs swiftly in Hawaii because we could present the inspector with an itemized list showing when, where, and how much, all prepared from our little notebook. The inspector glanced at it, congratulated us on having taken the trouble to comply with the law, asked us to open just one bag, and sent us on our way.

  But make it hard for him and he may make it hard for you.

  A medicine which you may need but which I did not list is a malaria preventive. This depends on where you are going. But there is no way today to vaccinate against malaria.

  A deck of cards and a few items to read are not necessary to minimum-luggage travel, but I consider them worth their weight. I feel the same way about a small camera.

  Barbiturates and Dexedrine are dangerous drugs, but used with care they can smooth over the inevitable disturbances of travel most wonderfully. I carry them-but use your own judgment.

  Everything mentioned above is compatible with two suitcases per traveler. Now let's see what Ticky did to run it up to five each-with my help, I must admit. Typewriter-Corona puts out a seven-pound model these days called a Skywriter, but the cost is rather high unless a typewriter is a necessity. I carried one that weighed more than twice that much; it was a mistake. Ticky carried an "international" electric iron, which worked on any current and had plugs for any sort of socket. It was a mistake, too, as electric irons may be borrowed or rented for a few pennies almost anywhere there are facilities to use them. She hardly ever unpacked her own iron. But pressing cloths are hard to lay hands on; it is worthwhile to carry one. I carried lots more camera equipment than is necessary to "Kodak as you go" and camera equipment is always heavy. We carried binoculars, but they were featherweight; both the Germans and the Japanese make powerful binoculars which have been miniaturized remarkably. Unfortunately they are rather expensive. Between us we carried about fifty books. This is quite unnecessary unless carried for business reasons (which some of ours were)-buy pocketbooks and magazines, read them and throw them away, or mail them back if you want some of them.

  Ticky carried capsules of detergent, much advertised these days for travel. She found them not worth the space. She carried some little dabs of spot remover called "Spotwix" and these, she feels, are worth having along, since cleaner fluid cannot be carried if one is to fly. She packed everything in polyethylene film freezer bags, which simplifies packing, keeps clothes in good condition, and adds little or nothing to weight-and most importantly makes it possible for a customs officer to examine baggage without actually handling or mussing a lady's fancy frillies. She carried shoeshine cloths but we never used them, not once.

  Ticky strongly recommends carrying enough hangers for all your clothes, because hangers are scarce everywhere outside the States and non-existent some places. I have strong doubts about this recommendation. Hangers are remarkably clumsy to pack. I favor putting up with one inconvenience rather than adding another.

  We carried extensive maps, an atlas, and books about each country we visited-a luxury well worth while if you aren't trying to stay under the 66-pound limit. I wanted to carry a globe but could see no way to do so other than in my hot little hand.

  But most of the additional space was taken up just by clothes. Ticky simply prepared us for any occasion, sports, informal, and formal. I had both a tuxedo and a white dinner coat, with shirts, pumps, ties, and accessories to match. She had plenty of evening dresses and dinner dresses. We had swimming suits and shorts and a wide variety of sports wear. She had handbags to match all outfits. We both had plenty of shoes. Men's shoes are very heavy and both men's and women's shoes use up a lot of space. None of the above is necessary; all of it makes life pleasanter-except for the maddening business of handling it when you are on the move and of keeping track of it.

  The problem of keeping track of it she simplified by making a careful inventory of each bag and by having me paint large numerals on each bag. The latter enabled me to "call the roll" in a hurry and at least twice kept bags from being left behind; the former enabled her to go right to the proper bag to find something, without pawing through them all. The inventories were set down in the little notebook mentioned above. If you do travel abroad with lots of luggage I strongly recommend both expedients; they will save you many headaches.

  I asked Ticky to list the variety items other than ordinary clothes which she had found useful. Here they are; some of them are quite light in weight and might be classed as indispensable: whisk broom, sun glasses, sun hats, run-proof nylon hose, sun tan oil, adhesive tape, fever thermometer, Aureomycin, sulfa pills, Scotch cellophane tape, Kleenex, a box of pins, paper clips, rubber bands, string, and needles and thread.

  You will want phrase books, of course, but don't let foreign languages scare you; if you are patient, there is always a way to communicate. Our geographical isolation has made us Americans very poor linguists, of which I am an outstanding horrible example. But I had no trouble once I overcame shyness. In the first place a most amazingly large percentage of people have English as a second tongue. But in the second place, if you will write things out, using a phra
se book, and have the other party do the same, you can get around the baffling hazards of pronunciation. In particular, numbers, addresses, dates, hours, and prices-anything numerical-can be written out in the figures common to all languages and often these items are the single barrier to understanding.

  Don't be afraid to wave your hands around. We've been taught that talking with your hands is vulgar-and so it is, in the finest sense of the word. Gestures are the oldest, the noblest, and the most truly international form of communication. You can say almost anything in pantomime; just let yourself go and enjoy it.

  Don't be embarrassed by the amusement created by your wild mistakes in grammar, syntax, and pronunciation. Your listener will feel tolerantly superior because of your ignorance; this will make him feel kindly toward you and he will go out of his way to help you.

  Travel by ship is an invitation to stargazing. Simon & Schuster puts out a pocketbook called Stars, part of their Golden Nature Guide series, which will pay for its slight weight (four ounces) in pleasure. If you start stargazing, you may want to find out something about how the ship is navigated. Mr. S. Y. Tupper, our jovial companion in the Gulf Shipper, taught himself to navigate after a long, full life ashore, bought himself a sextant, and navigates right along with the mates wherever he goes. It is most unlikely that you will wish to emulate his gentle hobby (sextants are expensive and heavy) but there is usually a sociable and good-natured ship's officer who will teach you how to read a sextant and let you take a sight or two-it is no harder than aiming a rifle and much like it.

  It has suited celestial navigators throughout history to pretend to laymen that the art is difficult and mysterious. This is a lot of guff. I have practiced and taught navigation and I will swear on a stack of Bowditches that the basic principle can be taught to any normally-intelligent grammar-school graduate in twenty minutes and that he can be given sufficient skill to enable him unassisted to establish the position of a ship accurately through star and sun sights after only four hours instruction. Never mind those screams of rage from the old salts in the rear of the hall-it is true. Oh, he won't be a navigator; as with any art it requires study and practice to attain speed, accuracy, and self-confidence. But he will be able to get a decent "fix" by himself.

  Let me give one illustration of the single, simple principle of every sextant sight. The mate uses the sextant to measure how high above the horizon the sun (or a star) is, in degrees and minutes; the sun is ninety degrees high if it is directly overhead, zero degrees if it is at the horizon, something in between for a typical sight. The process is no more mysterious than measuring an angle on a piece of paper with a protractor, but with a sextant an angle can be measured with great accuracy . . . with great ease, too, as the process is almost exactly like that of focusing a camera which has a split-image focusing arrangement. You simply look through a peephole and turn a little knob until the sun appears to touch the horizon line. It is easier than firing a gun or using a camera, because your accuracy does not depend on holding the sextant perfectly steady; you can sway around all you please as long as you can still see the sun through the peephole.

  The rest of the job is the simplest sort of arithmetic not to be compared with balancing a check book. You compare the altitude of the sun as you just measured it with the altitude you thought it should be based on where you thought the ship was. Not very clear? Well, we're doing this without diagrams or pictures, so look at it this way: if you were down at the equator you would expect the sun to be overhead, wouldn't you? Contrariwise, if you were at the North Pole you would expect the sun to be near the horizon- above it, below it, or on it, depending on the time of year, but near it. All right, let's leave the North Pole and travel due south; for every degree of latitude the sun will get one degree higher in the sky. By the time you have traveled south ninety degrees of latitude the sun will have climbed ninety degrees high in the sky, be right overhead, i.e., the sun's altitude tells you at once and directly just what your latitude is.

  That illustrates the one and only principle of celestial navigation: as you travel toward a star or the sun it climbs higher in the sky, as you travel away from it it sinks lower. If you compare the body's measured altitude with the altitude you thought it should have for where you thought you were, you get a correction, a difference between the two altitudes, which you can draw with a ruler on a map to correct your estimated ship's position and make it what the stars show it to be-simple addition or subtraction, nothing more.

  It is true that there are hard parts, very difficult, but they are all done by astronomers and mathematicians ashore; a navigator does not have to bother with them. It used to be that a navigator, after he finished taking a sextant sight, had to solve a very tedious and fussy problem in spherical trigonometry-but not today. All that work is done for him now, by young females employed by the Naval Observatory; the answers are all arranged in tables for every possible combination of date, latitude, longitude, heavenly body, and time. All he has to do to impress the passengers is to look up the answer in a book.

  To make it still easier, the nautical mile (6080 feet) has been made just the proper length to match in with these measurements of angular altitude of heavenly bodies. If you were to travel south a distance that made the sun one degree higher in the sky at noon, the distance traveled would be by definition sixty nautical miles. This is the only reason why miles at sea are longer than miles ashore; it makes the arithmetic easier in navigating.

  Although celestial navigation is simple, piloting and ship-handling are very difficult; there is no easy gimmick, but there is endless pleasure to be derived from watching a master handle his ship in tight waters, such as going up channel, or docking. The beauties of it cannot be seen too easily from the parts of the ship where passengers are usually permitted, but there is a way to get around this. Do not ask the captain for permission to come onto the bridge at such times. Instead, ask him for permission to watch him handle his ship from the flying bridge, where you will not be in the way. Put this way, he is almost sure to grant permission-and there is at least one chance in three that he will invite you onto the conning bridge itself. He does not want you there, but captains are human and respond to sweettalk just like anybody else.

  If he does invite you to the conning bridge, stay out of everybody's way and don't ask questions of him when he is busy. Then you will be invited back.

  Almost immediately after our return to Colorado I had to go to New York, thus completing our journey around the world with a trip coast to coast in our own country. In the last thirty years I have made this crossing about twenty times but this time I looked at my own beloved native land with new eyes, trying to see it as I had seen the countries we had just visited. How did it stack up? What was good about it? And what was bad?

  Jacques Barzun has just done a beautiful and sagacious book on this subject God's Country and Mine, so I won't try to say what he has already said so well-but read his book. The first thing that anyone is bound to notice is that prices in the United States seem terribly high compared with most prices elsewhere. But prices are relative. I for one will always feel emotionally that the "right" prices are the prices of my childhood, with grade-"A" milk five cents a quart and large eggs ten cents a dozen. This conviction is nonsense and I know it intellectually as well as you do. True prices depend on wages and salaries-how many minutes a journeyman carpenter has to work to earn a kilo loaf of standard bread. I tried to get answers to that question around the world, and the answers I was able to get, plus the statistics I have been able to dig up since, show clearly that a workman works a shorter time to earn the staff of life in the United States than is the case anywhere else in the world. Australia looked pretty good by this scale but even there it took him half again as long; New Zealand was far outclassed. All the other countries we visited were not even in the same league.

  Of course everybody screams about high prices, but no matter how you work the above problem the answer always clearly shows that we, as a
nation, are eating high on the hog, higher than ever before in our history, higher than any other nation on the globe, higher than any nation ever before in history. The consumption of luxury items makes the difference even more marked, whether it be telephones, automobiles, or soft drinks. (Not alcohol however, as we drink much less alcohol than we could afford; we are far from the drunkest nation.)

  This is the only country in the world where a man will drive his own car down to pick up his unemployment compensation check.

  How do our manners stack up with those of other countries? I had about decided that ours looked pretty good, on the whole, when I hit Pennsylvania Station, took a cab, and at once found myself an unwilling spectator to a screaming argument between my driver and one in another cab, followed by a wild ride which bruised my kidneys and gave me a headache . . . a type of ride, I am sorry to say, that I experienced almost every time I stepped into a cab while I was there.

  On the other hand, manners in general in New York were about on a par with manners all through our country, except that everyone is always in a hurry. Our manners cannot match the courtly politeness of Latin America, but they are not bad; we have no reason to be ashamed on that score. Even New Yorkers, always hurrying nowhere, are almost all willing to listen, to help, to take friendly interest. The extreme rush that characterizes New York is a burden of its size; distances are so great and the channels are so choked that everyone must hurry or perforce waste most of the day simply getting from point to point.

  New York is a very special case, both the most gigantic and wonderful mechanical toy the human race has ever built, fascinating in its incredible complexity, beautiful in its intricate, functional design-and a colossal slum by sheer weight of bodies too closely packed together. More conscientious cleaning goes on there than anywhere else; the city remains dirty, even the air is dirty. More genius has gone into its services and its transport than into any other city; it remains the most uncomfortable place to live in the United States.