Which circle of hell does air travel fall into?
S’s brother was late to pick us up to drive us to the airport because he had to wait for his mother to finish making us a week’s worth of egg salad sandwiches so we wouldn’t starve to death on the plane. Thanks to this mayonnaise-related delay, we arrived at the airport only two hours before our departure time, instead of the airline-recommended three. Miraculously, we still made it to our gate with over an hour to spare. The waiting area was the loudest airport waiting area I’ve ever been in and I’ve been to some damn loud airports over the years. It’s a little too festive in here, I said, scanning the horizon for a teenager-free zone. We retreated a far corner to a single row of seats hidden between the window and the back wall of the last gift shop before Cuba. We tucked into the bag of egg salad sandwiches so we wouldn’t have to carry them onto the plane with us. Pair by pair other child-less couples made their way our way. This will be us in Cuba, I said. Hunting for the quite spot. Hiding out way down at the very far end of the beach.
Our relative peace was abruptly disrupted when another couple sat down on our bench and the woman started talking to S. And kept on talking, and talking. Within minutes we knew her entire vacation itinerary and the full contents of her carry on luggage. A regular Talking Machine. S had to fake a nap to shut her up.
A small group of beer-bellied men gathered at the window in front of us, birds of a feather flocking to the sight of random runway machinery – baggage carts, food service trucks, snowploughs, wing de-icers, big shiny airplanes. You know how they tell you, I said to S, that if you have a fear of public speaking you should try and picture the audience in their underwear? Well it just occurred to me that we’re going to spend all week staring at these people in their bathing suits. S shuddered. We surveyed the waiting area. Not one hot bod in sight.
Most people’s first reaction to the words Air Transat is an involuntary hunching of shoulders. Yes, the seats are narrow. No, there’s no legroom. But why didn’t anyone warn us about the noise? For four hours we were subjected to a level of noise usually found only at Hungarian family reunions or at the back of the school bus on the last day of school before summer vacation. The two sugar-crazed pre-pubescent monsters sitting directly behind us produced a disproportionately high portion of this noise. They screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered non-stop, eight inches from the backs of our heads. They kicked at the backs of our seats while sitting and grabbed at the backs of our seats to stand. The father was in the row ahead of us. The mother and children yelled right through us to get to him. Only, nothing got to him. Not even the daggers shooting out of my eyes at him. He chatted amicably with everyone around him at the top of his lungs while, behind us, his kids fought with each other and called their mother nasty names and she screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered right along with them. The Freaks. We put in earplugs and could still hear them loud and clear.
I am not a praying person. What’s the point? If "There’s Probably No God" is writ large on the sides of Canadian busses, than there isn’t likely to be a God lurking in a small regional airport of a crumbling tropical communist dictatorship. But pray I did, that when the customs official was done flirting with me and all our visas were stamped and suitcases retrieved, we would not board the bus to our resort and find the Talking Machine or the Freaks headed out way. We were spared this torment, but our bus brought new tortures. A tour operator attempted to “animate” us in garbled French via a crackling loudspeaker as we embarked on an hour-long drive through utter darkness. A new Talking Machine sat three rows back. And a new family of Freaks screeched and hollered across the isle from us: Famille de Dan, we called them, as a man named Dan was clearly their ringleader. He regaled the whole bus with stories from his past trips to Cuba while we hurtled along. The bus’s headlights momentarily revealed, then concealed again, strange apparitions: families floating in florescent interiors; television screens glowing in door-less, roof-less roadside shacks; donkey carts waiting alongside Ladas at stop signs as we motored past; lone bicyclists materializing out of blackness and then disappearing again out on the open, pot-holed road; low branches scraping the bus roof; bats smacking the windshield.
Whichever circle of hell air travel falls into, hotel check-in is in there too. Luckily, by then we’d had plenty of practice at tuning out noise, hassle, assholes and the petty injustices that long line-ups breed. When all was signed and done we were quite done in, but there is no rest for the aggravated. We set out again immediately - along a maze of paved pathways through strange foliage-induced rustling sounds, up long flights of twisted stairs - in search of the bar. On a scale of one to hell, the bar was the airport, the airplane, the bus and the hotel lobby combined. Talking Machines and Freaks galore. The Famille de Dan had already staked out a table; they were yakking and boozing and smoking up a storm. There was no mint for a mojito, no tonic for a gin. We wound up with something martini-flavoured that came with ice cubes and a straw. Not the last straw, by any means; the first of the many hundreds of drinks we figured we’d have to drink in order to cope with our fellow tourists. Hell is not hellish because of the location. Hell is hell because of who else is there.
We set out walking again, to escape the bar, and make sure there really was a beach out there somewhere. By the time we sunk our feet in sand it was well past midnight. There were mysterious tire tracks leading we knew not where and a man lurking in the shadows. Security, we hoped. We couldn’t agree on which way north was. It didn’t help that the stars seemed to be all in the wrong places. The moon sent our shadows rushing headfirst, headlong into the Atlantic. A small heard of Quebequois could be heard, but mercifully not seen, skinny-dipping out on the reef.
Sometime hundreds of hours earlier in the morning, back in Montreal, I had packed a new translation of Don Quixote with high hopes of reading it here on this far beach. By bedtime I suspected Dante’s Inferno would have been more apropos.
. . . . .
Our relative peace was abruptly disrupted when another couple sat down on our bench and the woman started talking to S. And kept on talking, and talking. Within minutes we knew her entire vacation itinerary and the full contents of her carry on luggage. A regular Talking Machine. S had to fake a nap to shut her up.
A small group of beer-bellied men gathered at the window in front of us, birds of a feather flocking to the sight of random runway machinery – baggage carts, food service trucks, snowploughs, wing de-icers, big shiny airplanes. You know how they tell you, I said to S, that if you have a fear of public speaking you should try and picture the audience in their underwear? Well it just occurred to me that we’re going to spend all week staring at these people in their bathing suits. S shuddered. We surveyed the waiting area. Not one hot bod in sight.
Most people’s first reaction to the words Air Transat is an involuntary hunching of shoulders. Yes, the seats are narrow. No, there’s no legroom. But why didn’t anyone warn us about the noise? For four hours we were subjected to a level of noise usually found only at Hungarian family reunions or at the back of the school bus on the last day of school before summer vacation. The two sugar-crazed pre-pubescent monsters sitting directly behind us produced a disproportionately high portion of this noise. They screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered non-stop, eight inches from the backs of our heads. They kicked at the backs of our seats while sitting and grabbed at the backs of our seats to stand. The father was in the row ahead of us. The mother and children yelled right through us to get to him. Only, nothing got to him. Not even the daggers shooting out of my eyes at him. He chatted amicably with everyone around him at the top of his lungs while, behind us, his kids fought with each other and called their mother nasty names and she screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered right along with them. The Freaks. We put in earplugs and could still hear them loud and clear.
I am not a praying person. What’s the point? If "There’s Probably No God" is writ large on the sides of Canadian busses, than there isn’t likely to be a God lurking in a small regional airport of a crumbling tropical communist dictatorship. But pray I did, that when the customs official was done flirting with me and all our visas were stamped and suitcases retrieved, we would not board the bus to our resort and find the Talking Machine or the Freaks headed out way. We were spared this torment, but our bus brought new tortures. A tour operator attempted to “animate” us in garbled French via a crackling loudspeaker as we embarked on an hour-long drive through utter darkness. A new Talking Machine sat three rows back. And a new family of Freaks screeched and hollered across the isle from us: Famille de Dan, we called them, as a man named Dan was clearly their ringleader. He regaled the whole bus with stories from his past trips to Cuba while we hurtled along. The bus’s headlights momentarily revealed, then concealed again, strange apparitions: families floating in florescent interiors; television screens glowing in door-less, roof-less roadside shacks; donkey carts waiting alongside Ladas at stop signs as we motored past; lone bicyclists materializing out of blackness and then disappearing again out on the open, pot-holed road; low branches scraping the bus roof; bats smacking the windshield.
Whichever circle of hell air travel falls into, hotel check-in is in there too. Luckily, by then we’d had plenty of practice at tuning out noise, hassle, assholes and the petty injustices that long line-ups breed. When all was signed and done we were quite done in, but there is no rest for the aggravated. We set out again immediately - along a maze of paved pathways through strange foliage-induced rustling sounds, up long flights of twisted stairs - in search of the bar. On a scale of one to hell, the bar was the airport, the airplane, the bus and the hotel lobby combined. Talking Machines and Freaks galore. The Famille de Dan had already staked out a table; they were yakking and boozing and smoking up a storm. There was no mint for a mojito, no tonic for a gin. We wound up with something martini-flavoured that came with ice cubes and a straw. Not the last straw, by any means; the first of the many hundreds of drinks we figured we’d have to drink in order to cope with our fellow tourists. Hell is not hellish because of the location. Hell is hell because of who else is there.
We set out walking again, to escape the bar, and make sure there really was a beach out there somewhere. By the time we sunk our feet in sand it was well past midnight. There were mysterious tire tracks leading we knew not where and a man lurking in the shadows. Security, we hoped. We couldn’t agree on which way north was. It didn’t help that the stars seemed to be all in the wrong places. The moon sent our shadows rushing headfirst, headlong into the Atlantic. A small heard of Quebequois could be heard, but mercifully not seen, skinny-dipping out on the reef.
Sometime hundreds of hours earlier in the morning, back in Montreal, I had packed a new translation of Don Quixote with high hopes of reading it here on this far beach. By bedtime I suspected Dante’s Inferno would have been more apropos.
. . . . .
posted by J. R. Carpenter at
1:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home