Yes, I know it’s not the most eloquent title I’ve ever come up with, but sometimes… Sometimes to get to the core of a thing, to reach inside it and tug out its reluctant essence, you just have to beat it about the head and neck with words you learned when you were seven.
At any rate, I had planned this first post form Australia as one filled with pictures of the travelling process, but this was stymied by the fact that they don’t let you take pictures of anything in airports. Presumably out of the realistic fear that you are a terrorist, or the even more realistic fear that people will see the pictures, realize how much things like neck pillows and copies of “GQ” cost in the little store, and simply bring their own. It would be a horrid blow to the micro-economy of any airport.
This trip began the way most of my trips do, with waiting around. I got to JFK early, had the last cigarette of my life (we all hope) outside, then checked in. I cleverly brought flip flops and packed up my sneakers, which put my bag 1kg overweight, thus resulting in a fee. I am not actually clever, evidently. Comfortable and bagless, my carry-on and I proceeded to the gate, where I ate some terrible food and waited around for three hours. Getting on the plane, I had an exchange that has no become familiar. It is an internal one between the me that’s all worried and the me that refuses to take anything seriously. It goes something like this.
Me that’s all worried: Take it easy, take it easy… Everything’ll be fine. You’re not going to die in the plane.
Me that refuses to take anything seriously: Of course not! You’ll die whilst on fire, rocketing through one of the holes in the fuselage!
I’d be mad at him if fuselage wasn’t such a funny word.
Anyways, I got on the plane, sat between two old people who then turned out to be together, and at the advice of a flight attendant, moved to a seat on the bulkhead. I don’t know exactly what a bulkhead is, but it’s a funny word and sitting there means you have twice the leg room you usually do, which for a person of my size is important. I am large, you see, and it will forever be the curse of people over 6 feet or over 200 pounds that air travel simply isn’t good. But this, the flight from NY to LA, was actually the easy one.
Arriving at LA 6 hours late I was already kind of sleepy and quite a bit groggy. And the plane was delayed. A British Airways flight was taking its sweet time (“Sorry old chap”) getting cleaned out and the Qantas flight (“G’day”) I was supposed to be on couldn’t get into the gate. So they moved it. To a remote gate. For those of you who don’t instantly recoil with horror, a remote gate is a thing sitting somewhere in the middle of the asphault acre-or-seven of an airport. It’s a stout little building with an entrance on the bottom, and the usual plastic tunnel to get into the airplane on top. The problem is that with a remote gate, you have to be bussed from the airport building proper to the plane itself. This means taking all the people who are going to be on a large aircraft and cramming them into TWO busses. No more. Just two. And before that, of course, sharing the bus-loading, remote-gate area, with tons and tons of people bound for China, in an un-air-conditioned, under construction space. It was not fun.
The bus to the plane was cramped, obviously, but after 20 minutes or so, we got to the plane, an hour late. I went to my seat to find that I was once again in the middle but at this point I didn’t even care. I sat down and tried my damnedest to hide from the people next to me, a semi-kindly middle aged woman from Toronto and a loud-mouthed guy from New Jersey (bit of redundancy there, but I felt he was exceptional). The woman eventually buried herself in a book, sleep, and then movies, and I was planning to do the same to pass the 14 hours I would be in the air. New Jersey guy seemed to have other ideas. He wasn’t friendly. That would be too simple. He didn’t smile at me once, because that might make our interactions easier. No, instead, he decided to talk at me whenever I appeared to be awake, and share with me his observations about how much things “suck” or “are gay.” I don’t know if he actually used the word gay, but I feel he likely would have, so my characterization of him includes it.
At any rate, I did the responsible thing and grabbed my 2 melatonins, my noise cancelling headphones, and put on “The International,” some sort of… Clive-Owen-is-a-bad-ass/Banks-are-evil thriller that was actually not bad. Melatonin took effect and I went out like a light. I awoke some time later, to discover I needed the bathroom. The entire row decided for a trip, because if one person’s getting up, everyone else might as well. I returned and passed out again, after checking and finding that we still had 7 hours to go. I did not celebrate. The cycle of sleeping, peeing, surruptitiously passing gas and stretching my legs continued until (I can’t even claim to know what time it was) they turned on the lights about 3 hours before Sydney and brought around breakfast. Airplane food gets a bad rap, so I’m not even going to go there, but I’ll say this: It deserves a bad rap. A wedge of seemingly year-old frittata and I was back asleep. I woke up and felt like utter crap, my legs seemingly swollen and stiff as boards at the same time, my tailbone screaming at me in pain, and an incredibly strange impulse to pick a direction in open space and run until I collapsed.
They announced over the loudspeaker that we would soon be beginning our final descent into Sydney (not my final destination, but hey, it’s the right continent, and that’s important). They also announced that anyone who had a connecting flight was surely going to miss it! So there I am, an hour or two from Sydney, not knowing how to get to Melbourne or more importantly, how to tell the woman and two-year-old boy waiting for me in Melbourne that I would be hours late (a fact that, when with a two-year-old boy, is likely important). I landed in Sydney and was given the instructions to go through customs, get my bag, then check my bag, take a bus, go through security, and get on a different plane.
Go through security again? Yes. In case the people in NY or LA or on the plane had missed me building a harpoon gun out of a bent plastic fork and those little socks they give you.
I won’t belabor you with the details, but think of it this way. At this point I had been in planes and airports (and the same clothes) for 20 hours or so. I had been fed airplane food/whatever I could scrounge in airports, and slept sweatily between two people whose sole objective at the time seemed to be to generate heat. I was not in the mood to do anything else. Until I got to the plane…
And found it was nearly empty. And the flight to Melbourne was only an hour and a half. Now maybe it was the fact that I was cooled, given a diet Coke and a personal carrot cake, but I started to develop almost a Stockholm syndrome as an airplane passenger. What would it be like to no longer be on the plane? Was it going to be scary? Could I handle it? I actually had forgotten what life was like not sitting on a plane.
And then I arrived, and got my stuff, and felt fresh air and the sun (admittedly on the wrong side of the sky, by my standards) on my face, and all that pretty much disappeared. I can barely remember the plane trip now, and instead I sit here in the living room of a suburban house. The neighborhood is a cross between the American southwest, England city life, and… some other inexplicable craziness. Pictures will come, and more stories from the wrong side of the Earth will follow. But for now, rest assured that Airline Travel… It sucks all hard.
RJC
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