Tot Ziens, John Wayne

Diary

This is the day I leave the US for perhaps the world's least patriotic advanced country.

6:25 am. This is my last morning in the US. Tired of laying awake. I jump out of bed, fire up the laptop, and install Norton Utilities while I can still get free phone access to the internet for the updates I know Norton will require. I make a backup CD of critical data like this blog, my financial stuff, etc., and I pack it in the suitcase, away from the laptop so if one is lost the other will make it. I hope.

I'm packing heavy stuff in the box, and I realize that it is going to be too small. It's not like I can make a second trip to get the remainder, so I unpack all that crap and put it in a bigger box that I bought last night. It looks like it will all fit, so I run to Dominick's for Danish and Starbucks for breakfast and trail mix for the plane and first hotel day.

Two things about this grocery store trip. (1) Why doesn't a grocery store the size of a small, newly independent nation have trail mix? (2) My last morning in the US I spent in line behind a couple of overweight J.Lo wannabees prattled on their cell phones and waited for some damn labor-wasting Mocha Vanilla Low-fat Citrus Latte Cappucino Frappucino Crappucino foo-foo BS with freaking ROOM FOR CREAM (just a little). Just a little room?--shall we get out the calipers? Can't these Life Failures phone ahead for their orders, like normal people might order, say, automobiles? Doesn't anyone just order COFFEE anymore?

Made it to work at 8:57 for a 9:00 morning. Bad omen for later in the day. The meeting, it turns out, was cancelled. Bad omen #2. I confirm the airline ticket, phone the Naarden hotel that I'll be early. Finally have that meeting, visited a few people around the building--good politics, may as well practice now, the Naarden job is going to require it.

At lunch, I realize that for purposes of enduring a long flight, I've been doing everything wrong. I know that no one of these is a big deal, but they do add up...

1. Way too big dinner Thursday night, spicy Mexican food, even. Imagine what bean gas does at high altitude, and cringe.
2. Alcohol (Pacifico Clara, a weakness of mine, at La Magelena, then a Pilsner Urquell while packing).
3. Media overstimulation (U.S. Marshalls on TV while packing).
4. Way too little sleep the night before. Couldn't be helped. From this month in Illinois, one thing I've learned for sure is this: sleep deprivation does not get easier with practice.
5. Major caffeine hit at breakfast, enough to make me sweat all day. Dumb.
6. Spicy lunch (Cajun dirty rice, which it is unfair to expect this boy ever to resist) just before driving to airport.
7. Lost of carbonated drinks just before flying (see bean gas, above).

Oh, well.

When I tried to send a nice e-mail to my US friends, up pops a warning message:

your Lotus Notes address has just changed to EDOSE/NL. Do you accept this change?

I grasped the mouse, and hesitated. I watched the screen, but of course it didn't change. I drew a long breath and clicked

Yes, I accept.

I stood, I looked into my director's office and waved, dropped cellphone and heavy book off at Shipping so I wouldn't have to lug their weight through airports and hotels, left the building. At the bank, got new checks reprinted--they had done it wrong and I had discovered it only while packing, terrible timing. Bought more packing tape, bought trail mix at a drug store. Returned to dreadful hotel room, tried to close the suitcase and box. Nothing doing. I actually stood on the suitcase, reached down and zipped it shut, a first in all my travels, but this is desperation, folks. Same with the open box, on which I had to jump up and down like a damn kangaroo, roll of tape in my hand to seal it without stepping off lest it spring open like jack-in-the-box. I used almost the whole roll just to be sure, that is, to avoid being sued by an injured baggage handler.

Checked out of dreadful hotel room, Could hardly lift the heavy white box into the van and thought, either this is too heavy, or I'm getting too old for this. Possibly both. I race down the Northwest tollway to O'Hare until the inevitable traffic jam at Mount Pleasant, where we come to a stop. I look out the van's passenger window, with plenty of time to watch the departing jets, each heavy and slow and making O'Hare's famous steep climbing turns.

Give the rental van to this fat and truly nasty attendant, and an equally irritable driver dumps me and my big white box (ca. 30 kg), suitcase (25 kg), duffel and laptop case at the Northwest Airlines entrance. He speeds off. I ask about skycaps. "They don't work this floor." I look around the open space to see half a dozen travelers lifting, dragging, kicking large pieces across the linoleum floor. I do likewise, draging my near-bursting large white box, large suitcase, and two carryons across the floor to an automated cart stand--$2.00. I only have tens. But it does take a credit card. With the fearfully overloaded cart into and up the elevator, and a fifteen minute wait in line for Northwest Airlines, who tell me that my flight is all the way across the airport--"three terminals away, you go up the elevator and take the train. By the way, you can't take the cart on the train." Morons.

The first train is full, hopelessly full, Japanese commuter full. I watch it recede. If the next one takes as long as 15 minutes, I'll miss my flight and will lose a day of my life, a lot of sore muscles, $150 for a room, $200 for the ticket change, and probably a $500 fare increase. It takes 10 minutes. Everyone sees my predicament and crowds together, helps with the pieces, and helps me off at the other end of the line. As the train pulls away I wonder how I'm going to get this stuff upstairs to KLM, when a vision of grace and beauty, a princess, a saint--well, a bored young KLM flight attendant happens by with a cart--"I think you can use this." Bless you. Rats--no time to propose. Still, a good omen.

Upstairs, I cannot tell whether KLM check-in is to the left or right--no one thought to put up signs. I shrug and turn right, which thank God is correct. But the line extends through a serpentine corral, then 200 feet down the hall, messily crossing right through the two even longer Security lines the length of three terminal entrances. I and my cart take a place for my 5:10 flight. It is 4:05. The couple ahead of me asks if we're going to make it. I tell them sincerely that it doesn't look good. A uniformed teenager asks those of us near the end of the line for our tickets, and he writes 1610 on each. The clock behind the KLM counter reads 1610. I protest to him that I had in fact been in the Northwest Airlines line for a Northwest flight an hour earlier, and he tells us that he expects that we will make the flight. I realize that he is marking out tickets not as late but as being in line at 1610. I retract my protest and thank him. I tell the couple that it looks much better for us now.

And once the 5:05 Istanbul flight clears, the check-in line moves much faster. Then a line for...baggage security. The horror, the horror. I realize they are going to open every single luggage piece. I imagine what horrors they must find when combing through with their plastic gloves--dirty underwear, glow-in-the-dark sex toys, even Loose Boxes of Favorite Breakfast Cereals. I also imagine again that our jet will cross into Canada while we are still in this long, slow line. I imagine the consequences of their cutting the packing tape, and tomorrow my parents at coffee, reading the headlines: Overstuffed White Box Kills Owner, Five.

But the hippopotamus-obese Security handler checks that our suitcases are unlocked, tells us not to wait. He points around the corner to the final security hurdle. His unsmiling advice: "Run."

We pad barefoot through the metal detectors, claim baggage, run to the gate. Through the glass I note that the jumbo jet in indeed the same one I saw last week while waiting for the Dallas flight, to surprise Mom. I run down the dark passage way, both bags in one hand, fetching boarding pass with the other. It says "one carry on." Northwest had said two, but they had gotten everything else about this flight "of theirs" wrong so far, too. The blonde flight attendant in KLM blue smiles sincerely and points forward: "Elf-A, alstublieft." This is a second good omen, making us even now, two and two. The duffel fits overhead, and laptop under the seat in front. I settle back into the cushioned seat, feeling that I weighed 450 pounds. Or rather 200 kilos, now of course. Everyone around is calm. I calm myself, motionless for the first time in 11 consecutive hours. And now to be motionless, in a way, for the next 9 hours. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the aisleway video screeen displays hundreds of cuts of swans floating, necks twisted, beaks preening themselves, which I find utterly creepy. This probably intended to be calming and beautiful, but I can't ignore that the swans are doing this to root from their feathers mites, insects, all sorts of unmentionable pond detritus. They'll probably eat what they find. I think about the airline food to come. I look away.

The jet engines wind up, and the video gives way from coprophagic birds to a young flight attendant with a ghastly smile, who explains--in the unlikely event of landing in water--our safety procedures; that is, what exactly all proper citizens will do as the concluding actions of our lives.

I respect my longtime habit of setting the time-zone on my watch as soon as the engines spool up and we accelerate down the runway. I figure they are committed at this point. We roll forever, haul ourselves off terra firma, and climb steeply in a very steep turn. Why so slow?--Full of fuel for a long flight? I ate too much for lunch? My big white box? The wings level, we cross city shore to blue Lake Michigan, then over a bank of clouds. America disappears. Good bye, Uncle Sam.

Our world is now the noisy cabin. I put in ear plugs, decline the headset but accept one for the sleeping guy sprawling across the window seat and part of mine. Nothing to see below but clouds. I wondered why flying east to Europe is so often above clouds but the returns so often in clear air. The video monitor finally laid off the KLM advertisements--and why was KLM still trying to win over the only humans anywhere who are obviously already KLM customers? The video map showed us to be far south of the Hudson Bay track that the inbound flight from Amsterdam had taken. We were over New York! Why so different? Surely the shortest path in one direction must be the same as the shortest path on the return. But then...of course! Flights go west to the US with the best tailwind out of the east, therefore around the north side of any low-pressure areas with their counterclockwise winds (remember that north and easterly winds tend towards clear skies in the Northern Hemisphere). And they fly through rain and clouds when they fly east with the warm fronts' west tailwinds. This is of course not new knowledge:

Oh western winds, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down may rain.
Christ! That my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

A movie comes on almost immediately, some violent kind of mix of the Matrix and Spiderman and, improbably: Wait Until Dark. An athletic, martial arts expert, all-seeing, blind hero. I am not making this up. I try to follow the Dutch subtitles, and find myself eerily disoriented by the idea of a macho superhero menacing bad guys...in Dutch. I realize that I hadn't known who Ben Affleck was until now. I wished I still didn't know: I hate wasting cranial real estate. In compensation, the movie's image of the line of flaming pool tables was très cool. Movie underway, the flight attendant handed each of us an empty cup and a small KLM foil bag marked MIXED PEANUTS. Mixed peanuts? My disorientation is complete.

I came, I flew, I zonkered. Meaning: I did get an hour or two's sleep. Good omen. The flight was over before I expected it. So it's true that flying nonstop to Europe is far easier than with a connection, to which my Florida-Europe intereraries had always condemned me. For the first time in memory, control didn't ask how long I was staying, and this is the time I'm moving there! Duffel and laptop case at my feet, the suitcase rides down the conveyor, I pull it off, and...the big white box doesn't. The other passengers have left, except for the people next to me in the Chicago lines. I just know that last set of bags didn't make it from Security onto the plane. KLM's baggage desk, well they eventually confirm it. It is raining. The cab driver speaks neither English nor Dutch, but he did understand Modern Pointing, and we make Afrit 6: Gooimeer. We stop and I pay the 65-Euro cab fare. I check in and unpack--laptop and animals first!!!--like the efficient, amnesiac zombie that for the next few hours I must be.

Lunch in the desperately lonely hotel cafe is served by a gangly waiter whose only salutation seemed to be "Mister." Just as I would want to be corrected in Dutch, I want to tell him it's "Sir" not "Mister", that only 1950s movie stars say "Pilgrim" and "Mister." But I have no energy. This boy is tall, but his voice is high and his hands sort of swished. His hair is spiky, but he is incredibly thin, and when he asks, "So--did you enjoy your meal, Mister?" he was all too easy to imagine John Wayne's estranged, flaming-gay son.

Dutch cows are grazing at the end of the hotel hallway. I retreat behind the lock, grateful for a bit solitude after the jumbo-jet cabin, and I set the alarm for 3pm. I'll take a long walk as soon as it goes off.
 

It is only noon...not that I have any earthly idea what time it should be. But now it looks like the animals and I all made it. For the first time in 24 hours I don't have to anything to hurry through. My last thought is that just twelve hours ago I was racing in sock feet through a Chicago metal-detector portal. I sleep like the dead.