La salida
Though it has improved, as of September 2011, Dulles International Airport remains a hellhole. Though the hole into/near/surrounding hell is not quite as infernal as in the past, hellish it remains. Luckily, while waiting in the several football-field-long line for international check-in, I was fortunate enough to have my distraught and frantic parents by my side to help me maintain my sense of equilibrium. Though the electronic check-in kiosk did not believe I was a real person, nor did it trust that I was not a terrorist trying to blow up La sagrada familia, I still was able to board my flight to Madrid.
Did I mention my flight was free? Because of flying back and forth from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Oregon for five years straight, I had a shit-ton of SkyMiles to use up. To be sure, it would more suffice to say that my parents had a shit-ton of SkyMiles to use up, but you know how that kind of thing goes. Suburban entitlement and all that. That I’m a spoiled kid, don’t know the value of money, etc.
Despite the fact that I purchased the tickets with SkyMiles from United Airlines, my actual flight service was provided by AerLingus, an Irish company, and let me tell you, this was the right decision. Those of you out there who have had the pleasure of hearing updates from the cockpit in a soothing, nearly-stereotypical brogue from the Old Green Country will understand just how awesome it was to fly AerLingus. The flight crew was an eclectic mix of genial Spanish folk, surly Americans, and plucky Irish lasses. This made for an interesting array of cultural hodgepodge.
And good goddamn, our plane was huge. There were three or four different partitioned classes, each with at least a hundred seats arranged in alternating groups. There were sets of two seats on the port side of the plane (that’s left when you’re facing the front of the plane) five (!!) in the middle, and three on the starboard (right) side.
Yes. I just looked those nautical terms online. They’re useful for aircraft descriptions.
Upon finding my seat (47A sounds right - let’s say 47A) I was more than relieved to see that it was a window seat in one of the port-side, two-person rows. “Thank God,” I said to myself for dramatic effect.
Before too long, a rather pensive looking man with gray hair came and claimed the seat next to mine: the proverbial 47B. We exchanged half-smiles and nods of courtesy, but we quickly went back to awkwardly feigning attention to our own just-arrived-to-our-airplane-seat affairs. Arranging carry-ons, strategically placing books and crossword puzzles. The standard fare.
After a few minutes had passed, our Irish-brogued pilot-oracle came over the loudspeaker system and informed us in dulcet, Celtic tones that due to “th’ fahckin’, god-fuhrsayken stahrms in th’area, wi’ th’ fahckin’ lightnin’ an’ whatnot, w’re goin’ ta hahve to l’cate a nyew pahth in which we c’n take off, th’re, ladies and g’ntlemen.” (He did not say the more profane first half of this sentence. You should pretend he did.) Naturally, as any good seatmate would do, I engaged in the archetypical make-friends-on-public-transportation strategy of Mutual Commiseration Over Typical Bullshit That You Just Can’t Believe But Have Come To Expect Due To The Incipient Retrogression of The World Into Medieval Darkness Technique - one as old and as stoic as time itself.
“Huh, shocking,” I said, turning towards my seatmate. “At least they have Irish accents!” You can tell that this was a positive point for me.
The man’s face, which had initially looked quite serious, if not a bit cold, slowly warmed. Slowly, like one of those new-fangled, curly lightbulbs. With a worldly chuckle, he said to me, “Well, you know, I’ve flown this flight a lot, and that’s one thing that always makes it better for me. I also love Irish accents!” At least, this is what I remember him saying. Who doesn’t love a good Irish accent? Nonetheless, with that simple offering of Mutual Commiseration Over Typical Bullshit That You Just Can’t Believe But Have Come To Expect Due To The Incipient Retrogression of The World Into Medieval Darkness - the oldest trick in the book - I made a new friend.
Goes to show you kids: don’t be an asshole on a plane.
I found out that my seatmate’s name was John, and that my first impression of him as stoic and cold was so very far off. John was a genial, bright-blue eyed man of about 65 years who maintained a reserved, wry smile the whole time I talked to him. John had seen many places and met all stripes of people: I found that he was not only a doctor of physics (from Penn State, undergrad in English at Virginia Tech) but for many years, he was a colonel in the Air Force.
So basically, if you’re reading this, you’re currently wasting your life compared to John. John was a rocket scientist and a high-level colonel in the Air Force. He has been to, like, every country on Earth. He can fly planes. He can build goddamn missiles. Shit, he can be build the goddamn plane and the missile. And fly the plane. And shoot the missile.
So throughout our hop across the Great Atlantic Puddle, he regaled me with myriad stories of his trips to and exploits within diffuse parts of the globe.
“I’ve been around a little bit,” John said a couple times, smiling that unassuming smile, relishing in his almost laughable understatement. At one point, he pulled out a book he had in his backpack. In fact, it was not any book, but an aviation industry catalogue that inventoried all the available types of planes on the market. “Every time I’ve ever flown, I found the plane that I flew in this book and made a little note of the year and date.” The book was full of black stamps and Sharpie marks. There was something on practically every page.
“So I’m taking it you’ve flown this kind of plane before, then,” I asked him.
John looked at me like I’d an asked an alcoholic from Kentucky whether he’d ever tried this stuff called bourbon.
“Oh,” he stammered, “well, yeah. This was one of the easier ones. Did this one a lot. AirBus [insert number and letter combination here]. In fact, this one was [insert tons of technical stuff that I pretended to understand].”
“Oh yeah, definitely,” I replied. “Definitely.”
So John was visiting his globe-trotting daughter, who just finished teaching in the Ukraine and recently moved to teach in Madrid. On the benefits of first-world residence, John said that “she’s glad the lights will come on every time you flip the switches. And that you can drink the water.” Apparently, you can’t always drink the water in the Ukraine. Not too big on water-drinkin’ from the tap ‘round there. Anyways, John reassured me that I would absolutely love teaching kids in a Spanish high school, and that his daughter had already told him that she never wants to come back to the United States, but that she would like stores to be open on Sundays occasionally. “They sleep a lot. The Spaniards really know how to kick back and relax.” I would later find out that this was another one of John’s famous understatements. But that’s for a later chapter of this story.
After a little bit longer of the Ol’ Colonel making me feel like I was one of the most uninteresting people on Earth because I had never been caught in a snowstorm in Antarctica, unable to safely return to Christchurch, New Zealand, after checking the parameters and readings of some ultra-super-crazy-ass, scientific data-collection shit at the South Pole, he decided he was going to try and get some sleep. He grabbed his Irish-themed, shamrock-bedecked AerLingus pillow, adjusted his seat back into its most non-upright position, and was out like a light.
I sat there for a little bit and thought about how if I hadn’t done the ol’ Mutual Commiseration Over Typical Bullshit That You Just Can’t Believe But Have Come To Expect Due To The Incipient Retrogression of The World Into Medieval Darkness Technique, I might never have found out about John’s wild, interesting life, nor would I have considered the shallowness and astoundingly low quantities of awesome, cosmopolitan, secret agent-rocket scientist-colonel-ness that compose my own. Goes to show you kids: don’t be an asshole on planes. Ask your seatmate whether they’ve ever been to the South Pole. Ask them whether they’re a Penn State-trained, James Bond-esque, Air Force Physicist Colonel. Or you may never know.
Me? I’m no near-hyperbole, paramilitary scientist-badass, so I can never sleep on planes. I sat there in my own way-too-tired and banal world for a while, ruminating on the interesting-ness of chance-meetings like mine and John’s, and I noticed how clear I could see all of the stars. The Big Dipper; the Milky Way; some other stars and shit with insanely long Greek names, peppered with a bunch of letters and numbers which make them seem way more epic (like Procyon A/B, 47 Ursae Majoris). I could see it all.
Then, at about 5 AM EST – or Some Other Time, Spain Time (I don’t like math or looking up foreign time zone names) I started to see a otherworldly orange phosphorescence on the horizon. And then I realized: it was a new day on another continent, one I’d never been to before.
And then I thought,
Oh shit, I’m going to be here for a year!
No comments:
Post a Comment