The best moment of the ferry ride to Bainbridge Island is near the end. At a certain predetermined yet unpredictable moment, the engines shut off and the ferry glides on in eerie silence. If you’re standing on the deck and the wind is fluttering your clothes, it’s almost like you’re flying. Each time, a small part of my brain can’t help wonder if the captain cut the engines or if something mechanical and bad has just happened. Nevertheless I enjoy that moment to its fullest, because it is the peak of my ride from Seattle to Bainbridge. It is the moment when I am most aware I am in a different place from where I am going and where I have been.

Transportation is always about movement between places, journeys from one world to another. The journey itself is often its own world. The interior of a car or bus or train, the cabin (or cargo hold) of a plane or ship, these are as much places as the interior of the building or home they eventually deliver one to. The fact that automobiles often sport the creature comforts of home – hi-fi stereos and heated seats, jumbo-sized cup holders and climate control, DVD players and flat screen monitors – is a testament to this. And most car owners have spent at least few moments (and often considerable time) decorating the interiors of their cars, making them into livable spaces in anticipation of the time they will spend in them. The US Census Bureau estimates that the average American spends 100 hours a year commuting to and from work (that’s 12.5 workdays, folks, or two weeks of vacation). As cities become more and more expensive and people move further out from these urban cores to economically survive, commute times will get longer and longer.

The worlds we inhabit during our journeys seem to me a kind of borderland, a place between places, just as the Limbo of Roman Catholicism separates the present, the corrupted earth and the eternal hereafter. Since it’s always fun to coin a new term, let’s call this the “limbic world”, after the Latin limbus - “border, hem, or edge” - from which Limbo and the limbic system (another important term for this discussion) are both derived.

It makes perfect sense on the ferry, which we inhabit only during the time between places. Indeed, in ancient Greek myth, it was a ferry ride that transported souls from the land of the living across the Rivers Styx and Acheron (Charon is the ferryman) to the land of the dead, although one doesn’t imagine that ferry had vending machines, video games, and a bar.

Our trips to work or the grocery store or the post office or the dentist, are all within the orbit of our familiar world, and I believe we view these journeys as of a different sort than the ones we take to visit loved ones in far cities or to vacation in strange lands among strange people. I think we tend to not see them as journeys at all, because they are so short and so regular, but I think they are powerful reinforcers of the limbic worlds we inhabit. One doesn’t really look at the world outside during these shorter commutes. We are more likely to gaze out the car window or out the plane window if it is a new or infrequent trip than if it is a regular journey. If we do it everyday, we turn inward to our electronic - or, for the Luddites like my girlfriend, paper – devices. (Note: As I write this sentence I am sitting on the Bainbridge ferry, gazing at a laptop screen instead of looking out at a summer day where the sun is shining on the water like a glittering, rippling, highway of gold and the sky is a huge vault of faded blue hung with tattered white streamers and the mountains jut up out of the ground like the shoulder bones of fossilized gods. See? I prove my own point.)

One wonders what it must be like for a nomadic people like the Tuareg, where the journey IS the home? Or the homeless, where the outside world that would normally be a temporary, transitional space is instead a trap they can’t escape.

Limbic worlds are a big part of the hero myth (read Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, or Edith Hamilton and you’ll start to see how important a trip can be). Almost invariably male, the hero goes on a transformative quest that also tends to be a journey through a series of exotic new worlds. In the successful quest, the experience of and adventures in these new worlds changes the individual for the better, changing boy into man, weakling into warrior, scoundrel into hero, etc. The question is, are we in our real lives transformed or changed by our journeys, even the common, day-to-day ones? If not, why? Is it a matter of control? Meaning, now that we are able to warp our limbic worlds to please ourselves instead of being forced to allow ourselves to be changed by them, does that new power destroy the possibility for transcendent transformation? Let me put it to you this way: When was the last time you looked out the window and were moved by what you saw?