Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Later postcards, even those not sent at sea, frequently reflect on the dangers and indignities of travel. Even when she is not actually sick, she is often traveling to or from a doctor. In 1978, Bishop mailed a copy of a 1857 clipper card, advertising the departure of the clipper ship Witchcraft from Boston to San Francisco, to her friend Dorothee Bowie in Seattle. The clipper card included Bishop’s own address at Lewis Wharf in Boston, the modern postcard traveling in the same direction westwards to Bowie as the Witchcraft had more than a century ago. Alongside the humor of the visual joke, a flimsy postcard now outpacing the Witchcraft, the message tells a related if much sadder story about time speeding up for the author of the card too. Bishop’s main reason for writing to Bowie is to ask her to source a hair dye called “Precious Pewter” she last found in Seattle. “I’m getting whiter,” she admitted.
Getting from one place to another often becomes an explicit or implicit metaphor for negotiating emotional turmoil. The journey between moods (or juxtaposition of tones) is something Bishop worked on in private and in public (Trousdale). “I think one can be cheerful AND profound,” she declared to Anne Stevenson: “or, how to be grim without groaning” (Pr 417). In another postcard to Bowie, one sent shortly after Lota’s death, a happy-seeming image of a car traveling through a Rio park with Sugarloaf Mountain in the background is off-set by the knowledge that the car is passing through the park that Lota designed, a park that the postcard mislabels in the caption and that Bishop corrects in a handwritten note.