Departure

I. Terminal D

Terminal D at the Portland airport lends itself to the suspicion that someone took the word “terminal” too seriously. It is here that the shops end, the patterns in the carpet end and white courtesy phones end. Someone began the project of installing self-flushing toilets in the bathrooms of the Portland airport, but that project ended before it reached Terminal D. Terminal D ends bluntly where a flat, beige wall divides the ceiling and floor. Embedded in the wall are gates D14 and D15.

Light shines through the translucent skylights of Terminal D, suggesting to those gathered beneath them the world just behind them. The light is like the fake, green cartoon hills that line the perimeter of Disneynland’s Toon Town. The hills suggest an extension of the world found within. They represent a place that the children who visit the park will never see and a place that adults know is Los Angeles.

Unlike these children dreaming of the land behind the hills, the ticketed passengers of Lufthansa flight 469 will penetrate Gate D14 and see the world beyond.

II. Rolf

Sitting next to me on my flight to Frankfurt was a German student named Rolf. No, I shouldn’t start that way because that is not where the story begins.

“It’s the funniest thing,” the European-looking boy said to me with a slightly panicked tone of voice. One hand was digging deeply in the pocket of his denim jacket, while the other was grabbing at his hair. “Have you seen an iPod Shuffle? It’s the funniest thing. I just had it.” He kept saying that. It’s the funniest thing.

I leapt up to help him look for it, checking the same seats over and over again. Where on a plane is there to lose something? Eventually, Rolf found it and an air of calm settled over him as we each settled into our neighboring seats.

“What are you doing in Frankfurt?” Rolf asked.
“Well, I’m transferring to my flight to Paris,” I said. “So, not much.” We both laughed.

You are taking a risk when you forge a relationship with the person sitting next to you on a plane. The risk is not that you will be rejected, rather that you will be accepted and be that person’s conversation buddy for the duration of the flight. Thus, I was wary of Rolf’s friendly advances, answering his questions without asking any of my own.

My reticence did not discourage Rolf from divulging information about himself. I learned that he had taken an internship in aerodynamic design and had been living in Southeast Portland for the last six months. During that time he had fixed up an old Audi with some friends. During that time he had also fallen in love with the Seattle Seahawks. (Later, when he showed me pictures of the car on his computer, he made sure to point out the Seahawks decal that spanned the hood.) Rolf had taken a road trip throughout the West coast in his fixed-up car. He loved San Francisco. I told him that I was from San Jose and that it was near San Francisco. Because of his penchant for aerodynamics, I asked if he had been through Sunnyvalve to visit NASA. He said no and that he was sorry he missed it. “It’s not really the type of place that you miss," I thought.

In addition to picture of his car, Rolf showed me photo documentation of an evening in which a friend who was a plane mechanic took him on along while he opened up and fixed planes. He showed me the mechanism responsible for the brakes on the landing gear, the cargo hold, the cockpit. One picture was of bundles and bundles of wires. “Just one broken wire and you have to undo all of these,” Rolf said, as if to convince me of the importance and intricacy of a plane's interior. As a current passenger, I needed no convincing.

Rolf spoke English fluently, but his accent bore the cadences of his native German. Everything seemed to pour out as one word. He tried to teach me some German expressions and laughed as what came out sounded more like a cough than a language.

Frankfort was not Rolf's final destination either. He was to transfer to a different flight to Stutgart. When he asked me what time my flight to Paris departed was when I realized that I would have only twenty minutes between landing and boarding. He looked at me and said plainly, “You’re fucked.”

The plane's landing marked the ostensible end of our brief friendship. We joined the rest of the passengers in the frenzy to gather carry on luggage. I realized that I was at the point that most discourages me from reaching out to strangers. How, when it comes time, do you take that reach back? At the time I needed not have an answer because soon as Rolf pointed out that the way to the back exit was all clear, I dashed out without so much as a goodbye..

III. First Law of Travel

You will either have an excess of time to endure before boarding your flight, watching others with less time panic, or you will be the one panicking.

I disembarked from the plane to discover that I wouldn’t just have to find my way through the foreign airport to my next flight in twenty minutes. First, I would have to take a bus there. The bus took me to the labyrinth that is the Frankfurt airport. As soon as my feet hit the ground, they were running. They carried me past the first row of ticket counters, up stairs, through a crowd. I ran on one of those moving, flat escalator platforms that I had until recently thought to be useless technology. I ran down more stairs to find myself at the end of a security line. As I caught my breath in line a feeling of helplessness descended upon me. After five or ten minutes in line my bags came out of the X-ray and tears poured down my face unselfconsciously. A guard asked me about something in my bag and I showed her my water bottle. “Ok?” I asked. Before she nodded I was already running again. I followed the signs to A-24 through a hallway and around a corner. A 1-42 this way. Is 24 between 1 and 42? I asked myself. I ran down five flights of stairs only to come to a landing where I would have to take an elevator up two levels. Then came the long black-lit tunnel. By the time I got to then end of the tunnel I wasn’t running anymore. I was sprinting. I went past A 30, A 28, A 26, to get to A 24 where I was the last passenger to board the flight.

By the time I got aboard the flight I was exhausted and breathing heavily. The other passengers on the flight were German businessmen in crisp suits. I was sweaty and wrinkled in comparison and also pissed. I felt like I should have gotten better service. I felt American.