Notes on Travel

What if we all just - walked out of the airport?

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I felt a little weird flying Swiss Air; a friend of mine named Jane Depledge, someone who I hadn’t seen in many years but I really liked, and who I worked with right after college at a truly awful law firm in Rockefeller Center, she and her whole family died on a Swiss Air flight in 1998.

I wish she were still alive because I don’t think I’ve ever in my life laughed as hard as we laughed doing imitations of inanimate objects in a discovery document about a bad real estate deal. We could not stop imitating a broken toilet sitting in the corner of an otherwise empty bathroom with cracked drywall, we made bowls out of our arms then contorted our faces to take on the toilet’s shame at being broken, but also its terror at being alone in such an empty and ruined place. We kept taking turns slightly improving on our imitation of the toilet.

Jane and I laughed so hard that we were rolling on the floor of a conference room. Every time we stopped laughing one of us would strike the pose of the abject toilet again and we’d start all over. One of the partners, a hideous troll of a man, came in and yelled at us.

God, that place sucked. Jane actually became a lawyer, at a fancy firm. I only found out she died because on the street, a few days after the crash, I saw a huge photo of her on the cover of the Daily News or the Post, which I can’t find now, apparently Jane’s elderly neighbor in Carroll Gardens had gone running out to her cab as she left for the airport and begged her not to go, she’d had a sign that something terrible would happen. Jane, who was English and extremely sensible, had just laughed it off. I can see her giving the woman a one-armed hug, and her sharp eye teeth as she smiled and laughed, giving assurances. She had probably told her family at the airport and I’m sure they all chuckled about it and then got some tea and had measured, polite conversations in the terminal before they left. Jane was so well-behaved, polite, and reserved, which is one of the reasons our laughing episode was so funny. The plane lost power and took a long time to come down before it crashed into the ocean near Nova Scotia. It is impossible for me to imagine Jane in a situation like that. The aircraft struck the ocean at an estimated speed of 345 miles per hour, Wikipedia says.

I started writing this whole thing for another reason and got sidetracked by Jane, which is now the story, but here is the one I was going to write, in briefer form. After my short, smooth uneventful Swiss Air flight from Geneva landed at Heathrow early, at around 8 p.m. GMT, I disembarked with my handbag and a backpack and walked to immigration. I was spending the night at a hotel near the airport and getting on another flight in the morning for New York. There were a lot of people but not tons, maybe three hundred, maybe half of them from my flight and half from another, and we waited to use the passport scanning machines. The passport machines did not really work. They worked for about ten percent of the people; I was not one of them. The people working in immigration yelled at us for not doing it right and then for not standing in line right. At first one human passport checker was in a booth, and people were trickling through slowly, then for a whole forty-five minutes there was no one. We just stood there in this room that slowly filled with more and more people getting off flights. The machines were, as they had been, at diminished capacity, and we all just stood there getting more and more packed into the room. A woman in front of me started to film the scene and an immigration officer came over and made her delete it. “I hate cops,” I said to the woman, and she said, “I hate them too, I hate them so bloody much,” and a few people looked at us uncomfortably but a few smiled. Fury grew in me. I realized that the only thing keeping in what was probably now 1500 travelers were plexiglass doors and no more than four cops. How great, and how easy, would it have been for all of us to just press our way out? Then they manned the booths and we all left in an official manner. But we were in line for an hour and a half, some people were there for two hours or more. It seems like there is really no one minding the store in a lot of places. If at some point people just take it upon themselves to press their way out, I will not be surprised, but I will be excited.