You might believe, foolishly, that the advent of super-advanced modern technology has made the world smaller, that it has in some vague way succeeded in bringing humanity together. And really, who could argue with that? Think of just a few of the incredible innovations we’ve witnessed in just the past few decades – transcontinental flights by the thousands zoom nightly through the skies, ferrying people to every conceivable location on the planet. Ultra high-speed commuter trains and automobiles powered by both gasoline and electricity unite our cities and towns like never before. The birth of the internet has given us all the power to instantly disseminate information anywhere in on the globe. In the modern age, truly, most anything you can imagine is possible.
And if you believe any of that bullshit, odds are you haven’t spent any time losing your goddamn mind while trapped on an all-night transatlantic flight lately. I’ve recently returned from just such a flight, and allow me to assure anyone foolish enough to believe the world has somehow grown smaller: the world is fucking huge.
My girlfriend is spending the Spring semester of her junior year in college in the Dutch city of Utrecht. As I’ve grown very attached both to her and the happier, more optimistic version of myself that tends to surface only when I’m getting laid on a regular basis, I decided to visit her in the Netherlands for a week at the end of March. If we were filming a movie together, you and I, reader, fictionalizing this experience, at the end of that last statement would be where the rock music cuts in, I scream “SPRING BREAK!” at the camera, and suddenly we jump-cut to me in a hot tub filled with nubile young co-eds and hard liquor.
Unfortunately for everyone, we’re not in the business of filming or fictionalizing anything here; I deal only in cold, immutable, unbending fact. So instead of a sudden jump to breasts and bourbon, we fade in slowly to your intrepid narrator, on his back on the floor of a Portsmouth bus station, eating handfuls of Cheez-its and waiting for a ride to the airport.
I’ve got my headphones on and my head is propped up on my backpack. I’ve got an hour before the bus arrives to take me to Logan, and so my mind wanders. I look around at the other people waiting in the bus station; there’s a woman wrapped in several quilts, asleep a few feet from me. A middle-aged guy in a pilot’s uniform, reading the paper. A toddler in overalls doing laps around the waiting room. A teenager in tight, faded jeans and earmuff headphones is stealing glances at me. I muse idly that there’s a certain unspoken camaraderie between us, the denizens of the bus stop waiting room. We’re all waiting for our ride to the airport, and then to who-knows-where; we’re destined to part quietly and most likely without exchanging a word. In the shared, weary glances we steal, though, there’s a certain sense of connection, of shared acknowledgement of an arduous journey to come. I realize the teenager in the jeans and the headphones is probably in the same situation as me, and perhaps he feels the same sort of unspoken commonality that I do. When I catch him glance again, I smile and nod – I know. I try to communicate with my eyes that he and I – everyone in the bus station – we’re all in the same boat, here.
He nods his head slightly and makes a brushing motion on the front of his shirt. Any notion of a silent spiritual connection between strangers vanishes when I look down at myself and realize that my shirt is covered in orange Cheez-it crumbs. I get sheepishly to my feet and brush myself off. I look back over at the teen and he is laughing quietly to himself, switching the song on his ipod. I wonder if the rest of the people I’ve been observing have been keeping their own running tallies of how many Cheez-its I’ve been able to successfully stuff into my mouth and how many have tumbled messily down on my chest.
I hate my fellow travelers.
-
The coach bus takes me from Portsmouth to Logan, and drops me off at my terminal. On the way, several little ceiling-mounted television screens play old bits from episodes of Johnny Carson – a man who constructed elaborate, tall wooden sculptures that performed simple household chores; a German woman who was a veteran of the traveling circus and played classical music on different sized bits of metal arranged on a marble table; several audience members who hop in an on-set shower with Carson to take pictures. I am on a bus bound for an airplane that will take me to Europe and I am watching old Johnny Carson footage; as the nighttime lights of the miles of urban sprawl that surround Boston zoom past my window, I cannot help but be somewhat alarmed that my trip has already begun to take a decidedly surreal turn. We roll to a stop outside my stop at terminal E, and I wonder what’s next.
The terminal is empty. Three women are standing at the check-in counter and talking. They are eyeing me indifferently as I shamble my way through the maze of barriers between me and the counter. I get to the counter, give the woman my passport, and pass over the luggage I will check.
“Not too busy tonight, huh?” I say. She looks up at me from behind tiny glasses and seems amused I would ask.
“No, not yet,” she says. “People don’t usually feel the need to show up until they’re already late.”
“Oh, isn’t that the truth,” I say. I don’t know that this is the truth, but it seems like a appropriately idiotic, good-natured thing to say. If this woman now suspects I may be retarded, she is at least nice enough to pretend otherwise – she hands me back my passport with a wink, gives me my tickets and sends me on my way.
I am a little hesitant in my movements, both because I haven’t been in airport or on a plane in five years and because I realize this nervousness probably makes me look like someone debating with himself over whether he should or should not detonate the bomb inside of his shoes. I’m not nervous about flying, necessarily, but rather about the minute, procedural sorts of things that everyone else around me intuitively knows – where to go, what to do when I get there, if I have to take off my belt to get through the metal detector, and so on, and so on. I picture being tackled and wrestled to the ground, hogtied and tossed into a holding cell while someone calls my father to come and pick me up.
I get to the security checkpoint for my terminal and immediately encounter one of these situations. I try and walk through, but a security guard with a goatee and bags under his eyes holds a stop-sign hand out in front of him and says, “Sir, you’re going to have to get rid of that soda before you come through.”
I look down at the Mountain Dew in my hand. “Oh, really? I’m sorry,” I say. Though I now happen to think it’s a little silly to be denied my soda in the waiting room lounge, I felt at the moment like I was lucky not to get a night stick to the spine. It was Mountain Dew, but I felt like I had been nabbed with a live grenade.
“You went to college, right?” the guard says. “Down it.” The female guard next to him is looking down at the floor and smiling, and I suspect vaguely that this is not an actual regulation, the dangerous soda rule, but rather just a routine this guy pulls on dozens of bespectacled nervous guys per night. I realize I am basically being challenged on my manhood by a jock, though in a slightly different setting. Finish it, fag! Pound that Mountain Dew or your frat membership is GONE!
I feel compelled to follow his orders despite my reservations, and so in the middle of Logan airport, in a security checkpoint line with twenty or so people behind me, I rear back and chug the better part of a bottle of Mountain Dew. I swallow the last of it, toss the bottle in a recycling bin, and belch, more than a little teary-eyed.
He nods at me like I’ve just taken the first unsupervised shit of my life. “Nice,” he says, and I am whisked through the metal detector and the rest of security. I feel like a VIP.
-
The problem with airports is that their priorities are flipped to be exactly the opposite of what they should be. That is to say – airports want you to be relaxed, safe, and secure in your knowledge that your flight is going to go well. In the pursuit of doing that, though, the environment of most airports ends up being overly sterile, boring, and uncomfortable. Think about it this way: airports have bars in them. It should be the other way around, with giant, never-ending bars with airports inside of them. Imagine simply killing time at a bar – sports on television, loud music on the stereo, as many wings and nachos as you can eat – before your flight? Doesn’t that seem like a better idea than sitting glumly in plastic chairs with headphones or a book for three hours?
Three hours is precisely what I found myself facing after zipping pretty quickly through airport security. I tried to read, and I tried to lie on the floor and listen to music, but the constant milling about of hundreds of people isn’t exactly the most conducive environment for lazily drifting off into relaxation. The best I can get as far as resting is a sort of waking coma, in which I’m dimly aware of the world around me but never in any hurry to interact with it. I found myself reclined in a blue plastic chair next to two elderly women about to start a night shift as janitors. A flat-screen television played late-night political analysis from a few feet away, and the three of us shared an aggravated, knowing chuckle when Dick Cheney was interviewed.
“He crazy!” one said, throwing her hands up in the air in resignation.
-
When my plane, bound in eight hours for Switzerland, boarded, I stepped bravely into line, like I knew exactly what I was doing and wasn’t in the slightest bit imagining my imminent fiery demise. As I got closer and closer to the smiling attendants that were taking people’s tickets, I tried to think of things that were inspiring – memorable playoff wins by my favorite sports teams. Songs by Queen. I thought, abstractly, about love, and about my girlfriend waiting for me on the other side of the ocean. Without really realizing it, I whispered to myself: “Up, up in the friendly skies.” That was almost comforting. I stepped up to the lady at the ticket counter and smiled.
“Ready to go,” I said, handing her my ticket and passport. She cocked her head slowly to one side, and suddenly I felt a terrible, earth-shuddering tremor just beneath my feet. The ticket attendant smiled sadly at me and began shaking her head.
“Don’t you know?” she asked, sweetly.
She shook her head back and forth in an exaggerated no. The Earth shook more and more. The flat-screen televisions in the lounge disconnected from their ceiling mounts and fell in unison to shatter on the tile floor. The floor itself began to rupture and crack like cliff faces being ripped savagely apart by seismic shifts. The counter attendant’s very flesh began to melt away. She cackled in horrid glee. I screamed for mercy. The ground gave way around the counter attendant and I and fell away, stranding the two of us on a tiny island of solid ground that was suddenly encircled by towering walls of white-hot flames. The counter attendant gripped my shoulders with skeletal, cold hands and now fixed me with a bone-chilling gaze.
“YOU’RE GOING TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE!” she bellowed.
-
“Sir?” the counter attendant asked, worriedly. I looked up – the world was intact. Her face was normal, a naturally pretty young brunette without a trace of demonic inner evil. I glanced behind me. People were tapping their feet and looking at watches impatiently. I took my ticket and passport back.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Have a pleasant flight,” the counter attendant said, a smile frozen on her face.
“I will,” I said, walking stiffly into the hallway that lead to my plane. “Up, up.” I mumbled, but the words were mostly drowned out by my heartbeat and the revving of the plane’s engines.
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