Home Stretch

While I found many of Paul Theroux's observations in "The Old Patagonian Express" to be dismal, his thoughts on airplane travel are right on:

"...The airplane passenger is a time traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated or, in any case, warped; he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright --from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above it empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see....Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that airplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armor."

Okay, so maybe not the lovers part, but what's true about air travel is the way space and time are distorted. In an airplane, a day can last more than 24 hours, and a few steps can radically change our position on the globe.

"What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally strange, and finally to the outlandish."

Rather than experiencing this natural progression, we're stuck jumping between opposite ends of the spectrum. Instead of linking origin and destination with meaning, the intervening time spent traveling is completely surreal and meaningless.

I left Guadalajara at 7:30 am on Friday and arrived home at 9:30 the next day. The intervening 25 hours (with time difference) is mostly a blur; the journey was discontinuous, spent mostly waiting in padded seats in various locations in air and on land. What I remember most are a few especially surreal moments, which I had the foresight to scrawl down on the back of a Borders receipt.

1. While waiting in the tiny commuter jet terminal in Guadalajara, I spotted a family with a small boy, probably about 5 or 6. He had just discovered a bug crawling around on the terminal floor, and apparently mom thought it would be a good distraction while they waited. She plucked a paper cup from a small self-serve coffee bar and filled it with sugar. Then she placed the bug in it and handed the cup back to her son. He fiddled with his new toy, torturing the bug, but with a certain respect. I snuck a glance at the mom and she smiled back at me.

2. In Phoenix, I sat down at a row of chairs that was completely empty. Three minutes later the seats were occupied by a dad his two loud, spoiled sons who kept playing with their backpacks. I slumped in my seat, trying to finish the Theroux book, and soon the family was gone, replaced by a middle-aged couple. Then a man, some kind of airline employee, came and started staring at the woman. She started to get uncomfortable until he said, "Sorry, I'm just counting the seats." The couple and I looked at each other in bewilderment. This man's job was apparently to count how many seats in the airport were currently occupied. He was nice about it, though, and seemed confident that his job was important in the grand scheme of things.

3. Back in RDU, I boarded the Triangle Transit Authority bus which (I hoped) would take me the rest of the way home. I had never taken the bus before, but it made a climactic end for my 6-week sojourn. I got on the bus and asked the driver if this was the right bus to go to Durham. He said yes, but that we would have to travel out of the way before we got to the station where I would have to transfer to another bus. At Terminal C a man got on, dark-skinned, but either Carribean or African. From then on, at each successive stop, where nobody got on or off, the bus driver pulled to a stop, released the microphone from its holder, and announced the name of the stop, repeating it once for clarity. "Briar Creek, Briak Creek," he mumbled in that way that only public transportation employees can. The funny thing was, with only two of us in the bus, his announcements were purely symbolic, but he clung to them either out of rigor or routine. I laughed to myself that things here in the U.S. were perhaps just as strange and inexplicable as they seemed in Mexico.

4. When I finally debarked from the (second) Triangle bus, I still was about a mile and a half from my house. I shouldered my giant backpack and buckled the waistbelt for support. This was the first time in the whole trip I had really had to do some serious backpacking. I draped my messenger back around my neck, and in one free hand carried the bag of children's books I had purchased on Wednesday. I crossed under the Durham Freeway and made it to Club Blvd., which left pretty much a straight shot to my house.

As I walked, I surveyed the countryside in awe. Things were clean, there were no potholes in the road, and none of the houses were surrounded by walls, certainly not ones with broken glass sticking up from the top. Everything was green...here people put trash in its place, and toilet paper in the toilet. They drink out of the faucet, and don't put a plastic bag over a plate before they serve your food. All these small differences left me more paralyzed than anything. I was unable to judge whether things were better or worse here; they were just...too surreal.

I reached Oval Park where a few months before Joel, Michael, and I played pick-up basketball with a group of black guys. Today, however, there was a circle of about seven older people doing some kind of yoga or tai chi on the black top. They had their arms outstreched, with their hands erect perpendicular. Their knees partially-bent, they swayed in unison, somehow moving as one entity, or trying at least. I shook my head. This was getting really weird.

I rounded the corner on to my street, Englewood Avenue, and, with only a block left, I contemplated the last leg of my journey. I had traveled in a taxi, four planes, two buses, and now finally on foot. I could see my house and my car after a dip in the road, and thought it strange that I was actually about to walk on to my own porch. I was sweating and the red from the plastic bag was bleeding onto my hand. I switched it to the other hand but that same thing happened.

Finally I stood before the house, unsure of my next move. I looked around at my strange surroundings --how completely surreal to have finally made a complete circle. I took off my backpack and fished out the house key, which for so long had been hanging completely meaninglessly from the key chain. It fit perfectly in the lock, and as I turned it, the key regained its meaning.