Few of us have ever lived better - From the cluttered desk with Keith Roulston

On reading a column from a Globe and Mail columnist, defending the sideline of tourism (he was writing while on vacation in Portugal and Spain) I got thinking it’s a sign of how well we’ve progressed in Canada (and North America) that people can afford to travel so much.

 

As an oldtimer, I can recall that, as a child going to school in the 1950s, most of our parents stayed home. Only a couple of families I knew about took southern vacations. 

 

As for travel, my father had journeyed back to the land of his great-grandparents in Britain as far as his army service in World War II went, but he was happily settled on a farm home in Canada after the war ended. We had Dutch neighbours who took ships to immigrate to Canada from post-war Europe. Still, otherwise, we stayed home.

 

Travel was so rare that we’d have guest speakers at school who had been missionaries or people who had been abroad through serving in the army in the post-war world.

 

But the stories that these people told, and the stories from our parents, planted seeds in my generation that made us want to see the sights they heard about. What changed was our wealth. We complain, these days, about how hard it is to earn a living, but at the same time most of us travel more than ever before. When the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Holland took place, my mother, accompanied by my sister, travelled to Holland to understand the experiences of my father (he had died by then), and she was overwhelmed by the gratitude to Canadian soldiers.

 

Jill’s dad, who served with the Canadian air force in Alaska during the war, built a new house in Scarborough afterward. The family didn’t have a lot of money, but later, with his second wife, he spent his retirement winters in Florida. Jill’s sister and her husband just returned from Florida and will travel in Canada much of the year. Lately, her brother and his current partner have been exploring California.

 

Tourism has become a big economic front these days since millions travel (while fewer subsist in tents here at home). A recent poll estimated travel adds $11 trillion (U.S.) to the world economy.

 

It overwhelms, at times. The people on the Canary Islands off Spain complain about the crowds of tourists. Venice is so popular that on busy days, a charge of five Euros is made to visitors to reduce traffic.

 

Nearly all these tourists use jet travel to fly to their exotic destinations, adding to the carbon emissions that are making climate change a greater global problem.

 

I’m not a big traveller and it’s easy for me to point an accusing finger at these travellers and their additions to carbon emissions. Then I have to take an honest look at myself.

 

We live in a house that is more than a century old. This house was built before electricity was added. There was a windmill in the yard that pumped water to the house and barn. By the time we moved here, an electric pump in the basement pumped water, from a shallow well which ran dry years later (just before our first granddaughter visited), We had a deep well drilled to provide water under all conditions.

 

Now, water comes so easily that I often flush water down the sink to get rid of something that looks a little untidy. Sometimes, when I do this, I think about women in Africa who carry water in jugs on their heads for two miles. I’m guessing they don’t waste much water.

 

The house was heated by burning wood from our own bush. Cooking was powered by the same wood and made the house so hot in summer that our house had a summer kitchen for cooking, as most rural homes did then.

 

Just before we bought it in 1975, the previous owners installed a furnace. Later, we installed ground-source heat. It also provides air-conditioning. The old summer kitchen was later demolished and replaced with a sunlit family room.

 

We drive in an air-conditioned car, not the horse and buggy of the first residents of our house, or the dust-filled cars on their last legs that my parents drove in the 1950s because they couldn’t afford any better.

 

Yes, despite some hardships, most of us live better than anyone in the history of the world. Ordinary Canadians, in many ways, live more comfortably than kings and queens of earlier eras - I always remember the shock of watching The Lion in Winter about Henry VIII in realizing what a primitive life he lived.

 

Most of us today have a good life compared to all previous humans, yet we need to be careful that, in enjoying that life, we don’t endanger it with the excesses so easily available to us. Despite the hardships for some, most Canadians have never lived better.