I think it was somewhere around 3 AM, hurtling at hundreds of miles an hour over the North Atlantic and crammed uncomfortably next to a snoring, burly Swiss man, that I realized just how much I dislike flying. I was trying my best to remain calm and pass the time by reading, but my thoughts insisted on drifting back to my neighbor. I’m sure he’s a nice man, I reasoned. He might not even have ever been told that he snores. That seemed possible – even a little comforting. I could almost feel sorry for this man if it wasn’t his fault. He was afflicted! Perhaps he and his wife have massive, marriage-crippling communications issues and she’s avoided ringing up both his snoring and his complete inability to maintain an erection because she’s bitter. Okay, the pity thing wasn’t working; I tend to get a little mean-spirited when I’m crowded and sleep-deprived. I’d apologize, but I’m pretty sure I requested a window seat, not a spot next to a fucking human buzz saw.
It had been five years since my last transcontinental excursion – ten days spent exploring London and its surrounding areas with a group of my fellow high school students and several of our English and Theater teachers. Much of that trip is (thankfully) lost in the fog of distant memory now, and the trip itself to and from England is even harder to recall. What I can remember is a hazy mish-mash of miserable hours; time I spent powerless to sleep and unable to get comfortable.
By the time I boarded my plane for the Netherlands, however, I had forgotten those experiences. In fact, I had purposefully selected the red-eye to the Netherlands, foolishly believing, “Hey! I’ve heard that air travel can be somewhat unpleasant, so I’ll just take a flight that coincides when I normally plan on sleeping, and I’ll just go with my body’s natural rhythms and be unconscious throughout the entire trip! God, why didn’t I think of this before?” I was far too optimistic; I thought I’d sleep at least a little, perhaps dozing in and out of consciousness every few hours.
I did not sleep for one fucking instant on that goddamn plane.
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Part of it was undoubtedly from my companion in the next seat, a middle-aged, genial seeming man from Switzerland (where we were headed first) who I’ll refer to as Sven (mostly because I never actually managed to get his real name). I made the mistake of automatically believing Sven was American as I ambled up the aisle of the plane when we boarded. We were leaving from Boston, after all – where would someone who didn’t speak English come from? What is this, the Twilight Zone?
I realized pretty quickly he didn’t understand me particularly well. “How ya doin’?” I said when I first got to my seat. He gave me an enthusiastic, exaggerated, and somewhat deferential nod, and then turned back to look happily out his window at attendants loading luggage into the cargo holds in the belly of the airplane. I sat down, mildly puzzled, and started fiddling with the little prize package of pillows and blankets and headphones that come with your seat.
“You know where these plug in?” I asked him, holding up the headphones.
He nodded enthusiastically and pointed at his own set. He turned back to his window.
“Okay, cool, good to know,” I said.
My guess is that Sven wasn’t especially excited about flying. When we took off, the roar of the engines shuddering to life and pressing everyone back into their seats, I looked with some measure of panic at the window to make sure that nothing important was on fire – somehow had to keep an eye on the wing, I thought. It looked flimsy enough to snap off if I leaned on it, let alone if it were subjected to the rigors of upper atmospheric travel. The stewardesses could probably use a helpful heads-up if it broke off somewhere between here and 38,000 feet.
I noticed Sven’s sweaty, closed-eyed grimace and his white-knuckled grip on the hand rests. I felt for him; even through my own nervousness about flying I felt strangely compelled to comfort him.
I suspect I can’t help but inwardly categorize someone who doesn’t know English as pitiable, as somehow undereducated and who needs my protection and my kind assurances that the magical mechanical super-bird will indeed deliver him safely back to his village. I realize Sven probably is doing as well as if not markedly better than me in the world, but such is the sort of instinct I’ve developed after years of being exposed only to people who speak exclusively like I do.
I tried to think, as we reached cruising altitude, that maybe Sven would be good for me – maybe I could learn something for him and he from me, too. I’m something of a student of language, and it’s always helpful to be able to learn a curse word or twelve in a new tongue. Think of it as a small bridge between different cultures. I couldn’t muster up the courage or the interest to initiate a conversation, though, and after the stewardesses served our dinners, he fell quickly into a deep, imperturbable sleep.
-
I did not follow him. I realize now that I’m fundamentally unable to sleep on planes, and moreover, I don’t understand people who can. They’re designed specifically to keep you from sleeping – when’s the last time, for instance, you reserved a hotel room while on a trip? Did you say “And please, I need to be able to rest well in my room. Could you get reserve me one with an undersized, immovable chair and a flat, scratchy pillow that will give me chronic neck problems and cripplingly bad posture for the rest of my life?” Of course you didn’t.
Despite the inherent lack of comfort in airplane seating, everyone but me seemed primed to pass out immediately after dinner. The cabin lights turned off without fanfare around midnight. I stole glances at my fellow passengers and saw people with wraparound neck pillows. People removing ear plugs from special leather ear plug cases that had been passed down through the generations as family heirlooms. People with blindfolds. People with blindfolds manufactured with soothing images of nature on the inside to help with sleeping peacefully. I sat awake in the dark, listened to Sven snoring, and sullenly watched a showing of Ben Stiller in Starsky and Hutch.
The movie ended at about 1:30, and the tiny screen on the back of the seat in front of me defaulted to rotating information about the flight. I saw how many miles we were from our destination, our estimated time of arrival, and how high we were in the air. And, strangely, the screen told me how cold it was in the air outside of the cabin – almost 50 degrees below zero. I’m not sure why I needed to know that yes, in an airplane rocketing at 500 miles an hour through the night sky over the North Atlantic ocean, it’s really fucking cold and you will die if you get out of the plane, but I gave a silent little sarcastic nod to the screen anyway.
I turned to Sven, still asleep, and said, “I hope you don’t get hot and want to roll down the window.”
-
The descent to our landing at Zurich took approximately three years off of my life.
Cruising in an airplane doesn’t bother me. There’s the illusion of safety when you’re cruising; you think, stupidly, that simply because you haven’t been bumped or tossed around in some time that you’re not in any danger. The reality, of course, is that you’re still screaming through the upper atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour and could die in an explosion at any fucking second. It seems safe, though, and that’s all that matters.
Taking off and landing, however, is an entirely different ballgame played at a entirely different ballpark. And the ballplayers have knives and guns and they’re trying to kill you with. Taking off feels like I imagine going into space feels like – all the barely contained explosions of massive combustion engines and machinery that feels a lot more rickety than I imagine it should. And landing; literally, plunging towards the ground in a rocket-propelled container with wings on it? This sounds like something that’s safe, that’s a good idea? I think I might genuinely feel safer taking my chances jumping with a parachute from about 10,000 feet.
I’m sure that in a relative sense, our landing wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. We banked. We turned in long, yawning arcs. The nose of the plane abruptly dipped and we dropped hundreds of feet in the air in an instant. I’m sure that pilots and frequent fliers were bored by these things, and by the plane banking unexpectedly and suddenly giving half of the passengers a terrifyingly unexpected, daredevil-on-the-wing’s view straight down to the ground. And that’s great for them. Congratulations on your experience and your courage. As far as I’m concerned, however, for the sake of the faint-hearted rookies that may be out there and flying for the first time, I’d appreciate it if in the future airplane pilots could know how they’re going to fucking approach the runway in advance. You’ve got eight hours of flying with which to think about how you’re going to get us on the ground, and we’re doing barrel rolls at 600 miles an hour to get ourselves in position to land with three minutes to go? How did these people manage homework in flight school? They might’ve had trouble getting to class on time, let alone getting qualified to not kill me in a plane crash.
When I felt wheels touch ground, I turned to Sven. Our eyes met for a moment, we exchanged smiles, and turned away. Though we came from different worlds and spoke different languages, I believe that in that moment something passed between the two of us – Thank God I didn’t just shit my pants.
-
I expected Europe to be immediately foreign to me. I expected to be disoriented by flashing neon lights and voices shouting in other languages. I expected handfuls of euros to be viciously hurled at me. Crowds would gather and taunt me with anti-American slurs. “Awful Yorge Doublevu Boosh man!” they’d shout, with pitchforks and torches raised angrily. “Take ze boodveizer American beers back to the americas! No coca-cola!”
I walked through the tunnel off of my flight into Zurich International Airport, though, and was greeted by nothing at all. Everything was essentially the same as it was in Boston – right down to the ubiquitous presence of the English language everywhere I went. Switzerland isn’t an English-speaking country, of course, but even so the language was everywhere, labeling everything. Where something was labeled, Swiss was written first, and then directly below it would be English, same as ever, stunningly plain and familiar.
It was embarrassing in a way to see English so frequently – I felt like I was being unfairly catered to. Why not have Chinese or Arabic hanging around everywhere, too? Aren’t there just as many of them in the world? It wasn’t necessarily anti-Americanism I was feeling; it was more shame at being unfairly accommodated or revered, like an art student whose rich parents have bought their subpar work a prominent place at a gallery. I want to be respected because of who I am, not simply by default because I come from a certain country.
-
My connecting flight was two hours from Zurich to Schiphol in Amsterdam. It was a stark contrast to my experience crossing the ocean – the flight was quiet, relaxing, well-lit, and perhaps most importantly, almost completely devoid of other passengers. I shared the cabin with five or six middle-aged men, most of whom relocated shortly after we took off so that they could lay down and nap across two or three vacant seats. There was an elderly couple who sat in silent, rapt attention as we glided through layers of cloud cover. Another couple passed a set of headphones back and forth, giggling conspiratorially.
My neighbor on the flight was a twenty-something from England who had relocated in recent years to the Netherlands; she now lived in the Hague. After my eight hours of painfully polite silence with Sven, I was happily shocked when she made friendly conversation with me in the last half hour or so we were in the air. We talked and shared fears about air travel. And by that, of course, I mean that I gushed to her about my own fears about air travel in obsessive, nonstop detail, and she made a valiant effort to try and appear interested. I’m guessing this is a good example of that legendary British hospitality.
“It’s really quite a beautiful country, all ‘round,” she said to me of the Netherlands. We were descending towards the runway by then; it was 11 am and a gray day already thick with rain clouds. “The only problem is that most of the time it looks like this,” she said, nodding out a window already beaded with morning drizzle.
-
I felt as tired as the day outside looked as I stood in line for my bags. I had been awake for well over 24 hours, and most spots on the baggage terminal floor were looking like fantastic spots for napping. I could suddenly see perfect logic behind the presence of homeless people in the world – these were people so desperate for a cat nap that they were willing to curl up with a newspaper blanket and a sturdy cardboard box for a few hours of solid shuteye. By the time I had my bags and walked through customs and into the new arrivals lounge, I felt like joining them simply out of desperation for rest and for a reprieve from travel-related anxiety and frustration.
But when I walked through the sliding doors and saw Marissa there in her coat, I was awake again and I remembered why whatever irritations went with traveling were worth it in the first place. She was there waiting, just as I had imagined in waking dreams that she would be, bright and brave like the morning sun that cuts through even the thickest cloud cover. Where all of the stress and annoyances had pooled before in my mind like dirty water in a puddle, at the sight of her there, they evaporated all at once into the air and, blessedly, were forgotten.
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