Breathless in the Bardo of Air Travel

I landed at Oakland airport on Friday night only five hours late, arriving from Denver, not on my original itinerary. There were small indications of trouble on that plane from the outset - a fat man in a loud aloha shirt who kept bawling inanities, a problem with one of the two toilets, the one at the front. We were told it was out of action, then - as lines grew long and twitchy at the back - that we could use it on condition we did not do "number 2" because of low water pressure. "Don't make me go in there and check what you did," said the humorist in the cabin crew.

    Three hours into the flight a small, elderly woman stood in the open door of the defective toilet gesturing for help. She was having trouble breathing. The flight attendants swung into action, clearing a seat at the front for her across the aisle from me, working with inhalers and oxygen tanks, parsing her limited English and her dozen boxes of pills to try to understand her medical condition. The lady was very scared. When her lips turned blue the decision was made to divert our flight to Denver.

    The EMTs were on the spot and wheeled the breathless woman away. We were promised a quick turnaround but - wait. Our plane was considered overweight because we hadn't burned enough fuel in our shortened flight; the mechanics were worried we had stressed the frame. And that toilet needed to be fixed.

    After a period of confusion we were given a new plane but no departure time. Snow was coming down hard and the clock was ticking on how long the crew would be allowed to remain on duty before a mandatory 8 hour break.

    After we boarded the new plane. we spent an awful hour on the tarmac de-icing and getting conflicting information. The blowhard in the aloha shirt kept yelling, "We'll be grounded! We'll never leave Denver!" He followed up these shouts with manic laughter. I finally leaned over and requested that he stop these predictions; they weren't funny any more. He wasn't happy with me but two minutes after he stopped announcing we would be grounded the captain came on the intercom to tell us we had been cleared for takeoff. After we got airborne, we were informed from the cabin that we had been "two minutes" away from being told we could not leave Denver that night.

    Not as eerie as another of my adventures in the Bardo of Air Travel, titles "What to Do When You Might Be Dead in Denver" that I included in my collection Mysterious Realities. But eerie enough. I had a new rowmate on the new plane, and we were sharing the empty seat between us - the only empty seat on the plane - to hold books and bottled water. When I put down my in-flight reading, a late collection of the strange stories of Jorge Luis Borges titled The Book of Sand, she laid what looked like a copy of a chapter from an academic book across it.

    I asked, "How do you think your text is getting along with Borges?" She had never heard of Borges, one of my favorite writers, so I had to explain how, in jeweled short-form fantasy, the Argentine writer takes us into the largest questions about reality. She now disclosed that her text - on personality cults and institutions in Latin America - was homework for a paper she is writing for a master's program. Argentina, Borges's country, is one of the case studies. And the political history of Latin America can be as fantastic as his stories.

    The conversation took another unlikely and synchronistic turn. My rowmate told me she had met the woman who developed a way to calm cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse by keeping them moving on a serpentine path. My mind was thrown back to a visit I made to a ranch in Mato Grosso decades ago before Temple Grandin’s work was widely known. I watched cows being driven up zigzag ramps to the platform where a slaughterer waited to crown them with a sledgehammer. I described this to my rowmate.
    The death blow might now be delivered in a different way, but – we agreed –the approach was similar. Like snaking round and round to get on a ride at Disneyworld. Or waiting in line to get on an airplane that might or might not follow its flight plan.

Image: Serpentine chute for cattle on the way to slaughter

A seat in the fox's pub

From my travel journal:

I land at Washington's Dulles airport late, on a little prop plane that is not the one I was scheduled to take, after one of the bumpiest rides I have ever experienced outside a war zone. 
    I have time before my connecting flight, and I am starving. The only halfway decent sit-down restaurant on my concourse is jam-packed. But wait: a woman is getting up from the bar. A young man helps her to disentangle her luggage. I thank her for providing me with a seat at the right moment. "You'll enjoy this young man," she tells me.
    The young man at the bar is behaving oddly, hopping back and forth between the now vacant seat and the one he was sitting on. He finally decides I may have his previous seat. Clearly there is going to be some kind of engagement here. His baby-blue eyes float up out of a pale and desperate face. "I know you are an elder." 
    He asks me to guess his age. I do. Now he is almost beseeching. "What can you tell me about life?"
    "Never leave home without your sense of humor."
    "I know. But I get so intense, so aggressive. Like, if someone bumps the back of my seat -" he bumps the back of my seat to make his point ["-I want to get up and get in that guy's face."
     "I'll tell you something else I have learned about life," I remark after he hits the back of my seat a second time. "We always have the freedom to choose our attitude."
     He stops banging my seat. "Oh my God, you're right. It's amazing you just sit down next to me and say that."
     He pushes his face close to mine as if he needs to be petted. I am trying to think who he reminds me of. Got it. He resembles Smeagol, the Gollem in Lord of the Rings. The absence of hair on his head is the least notable point of resemblance.
     He wants something from me I can't yet fathom.
     But as he goes on talking, questioning, I begin to sense its shape. He talks about his military Virginia family, his estrangement from his dad. It is clear this has left a deep wound. My guess is that his father has not been able to accept that his son is gay.
     I tell him that, I too, come from a military family and that I was estranged from my father until three years before his death, when we became the best of friends. I tell the young man that if it were my life, I would make it my game to make all well with my dad while he is still in the world.
    "You're giving me goosebumps." He shows me. His whole arm is chicken skin.
    "Truth comes with goosebumps."   
    He is crying now. "You come into the bar, you take a seat, and you tell me the most important things I've ever been told. I asked for an elder, and you came."
     "Here's something else I've learned. The world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters. It's a kind of magic."
     "Is that what you are? A magician? You got me crying at the bar for chrissake."
    "Well that lady who gave me her seat did give you a good review."
    He wants to pay for my burger and beer. Of course I won't let him. He asks for a hug. I do give him that. 
    As usual, when plans get scrambled the Trickster comes into play. There is more than what we understand as chance going on on in chance encounters. And sometimes they take place for the benefit of someone else. 

Paw-Note

Mr Fox wants me to add that this scene was played out in a pub called The Firkin and Fox. Of course.



A version of this story appears in my new book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity. Published by New World Library.

When sidewalk tarot gives you a card you don't want

Prague

One of my everyday games is to look at whatever turns up in the street as a tarot card being played to me by the world. Sometimes I have a question in my mind. Most often I am simply open to what the world gives me. Anything may count as a card in sidewalk tarot. Sometimes you feel you are getting a specific message. Sometimes the game is more about recognizing patterns of connection.
    While a tarot deck has 78 cards, the number of cards the world can give you is limitless. The cards in a deck are numbered and ordered in suits and kinds - number cards, court cards, major arcana. You can look up their meanings in a book. Cards in sidewalk tarot - unless they are literally spilled cards from a deck - do not have assigned places in a system, and you'll have to figure out meanings and connections for yourself. This makes the game very interesting indeed.    When you play sidewalk tarot, as with a tarot deck, you may not like the card you draw. Let me tell you how that worked out for me on Tuesday, in the midst of one of my odysseys of airline story.
    Prequel: I was due to leave on Monday on the first leg of a long journey to Prague, where I am teaching at Maitrea this week. This gave me a very definite deadline for delivery of my new book, Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life. I made my deadline, sending the book to my editor before dawn on Monday. A few hours later, I learned that my flight had been cancelled, due to snow storms in the Northeast, where I live.
     I got on the phone and managed to rebook my flights. I was now scheduled to leave 24 hours later, on Tuesday on a revised itinerary. I would travel via Washington's Dulles airport, as before, but would go on to Prague via Munich instead of Brussels. I was not enthralled by the historical echo in "going on to Prague via Munich", but I was grateful to have snagged the last available seat and resigned myself to enjoying a snow day befor taking off.
     On Tuesday morning, I took care of a few chores, and walked to the bank. Walking back, I came upon an upturned shopping cart, directly in my path. Uh-oh.
     I noted that it was a cart from Price Chopper. Put that together with the fact that I was returning from the bank, and I had little doubt that the upturned cart might be connected to a possible tumble in my modest "shopping cart" of investments. When I got home and checked stock market prices, I saw that this was correct. A stock that I owned had taken a major tumble.
    I was uneasily conscious that when we talk about something upsetting an apple cart we might be talking about any kind of plan or situation at all. I hoped that the cautionary message in the spilled cart would not relate to my travels - or anything else - in addition to the investment spill.
    My first flight on Tuesday got to Dulles a couple of minutes early. So far so good. We boarded on time, and seemed to be taking off on time when suddenly the plane halted its run along the tarmac. Monitors went dead, reading lights went out. Electrical problems, we were told. An hour later, we were told that everything was "fixed" and we were airborne. We were somewhere east of Boston, heading towards open water, when the plane turned around. The captain informed us that the electrical problems had not been fixed after all. We had bee re-routed to a different airport, Newark, and he would let us know what would happen next when we go there.
     Relatively good news on the ground. They had found us another plane. While we waited at the departure gate in Newark for re-boarding, I struck up a delightful conversation with an academic who agreed with me that the trick in life is to find your pleasure in your work so you never have to distinguish them. He also proved to be a considerable expert on German beers.
    We out on the runway again five hours after our original scheduled departure. We set on that runway at Newark for ninety minutes. We were given no information for nearly all that time. Eventually the captain said something incomprehensible about a "passenger discrepancy." A couple of irate passengers confronted flight attendants who had no more information than we did.
    I had a row to myself, and diverted myself with my in-flight reading, Jaroslav Hašek's grand comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk,, an immense, rambling satire about the incompetence of those in authority and a mode of passive resistance through irony, feigned idiocy and parody. I decided after ninety minutes that the Švejk approach could not go on indefinitely, or else we might never take off on that plane just as Hašek never finished his novel.
   So I went to the forward galley and had a quiet word with the flight attendants. They were very good people, as frustrated as we passengers were with the lack of communication from the cabin and the authorities at the airport. One of the flight attendants decided to take action. She leaped into it, clarifying that the "passenger discrepancy" involved a triviality - a baby car seat occupting a vacant passenger seat. Now she was on the phone to the boss, laying out crisply and briskly what was wrong about holding up the flight over such a minor issue, and what was especially wrong about leaving everyone outside the pilots'cabin in the dark.
     Two minutes later, the captain told us we were on our way, number three for takeoff.
    "Congratulations," I told the feisty flight attendant. "You did it."
    "It was probably just a coincidence."
    "It is very rare, in my experience, for anything to be just a coincidence."
    I explained that I had delivered a new book that is all about coincidence the previous day, and that my book The Three "Only" Things opens with an account of five chance encounters on airplane trips. After cabin service, when the lights were dimmed, the flight attendant curled up for a bit with the copy of The Three "Only" Things that I loaned her.
    As we disembarked at Munich, over six hours late, she promised, "I will never say, 'It's only a coincidence' again."
    At Munich airport, when I was getting a new boarding card for my new connection to Prague, a Lufthansa agent told me he knew all about the history of my flight from Dulles, which was the talk of the ground crew. "You know," he said, "when something goes as wrong as that, you always have a story."
    "Thank you for saying that. I agree completely. It's one of my keys to survival.


This is why Upset Shopping Cart enters my personal guide to sidewalk tarot as a challenging card. The sequence of upsets reminds me that for every challenge there is an opportunity, at least the opportunity to make a new story.

When I did not ask for adventure

When people ask what they should bring to my workshops, I tell them to bring their sense of humor (of course) and their openness to adventure. I find, in general, that these are also vital prerequisites for travel.
    I'm generally relaxed when my travel plans get screwed up because the Trickster comes into play and an unexpected story begins to unfold. I open one of my books (The Three "Only" Things) with five tales of extraordinary encounters that came about because I missed connections and found myself on itineraries I did not plan, on the "wrong" planes.
    It's been said that unless something goes wrong, you don't have a story. I have often quoted this with appreciation, and have even been known to say that I'll put up with just about anything that happens on the road as long as it has story value.
    I stopped talking this way prior to my recent return journey from Brazil. I had been spooked by a strange series of misadventures and long delays in flying back from Europe in mid-October, after being driven part-way off a cliff by a fox-cursed demon driver on a mountain in Romania. I was trying to keep up with the progress of Hurricane Sandy, with only sketchy wi-fi access. So I announced to my host, at Florianopolis airport last week, "I don't want any adventures on this trip. I'll be very happy to get home safely without a new story."
    Check-in was a breeze, first at Florianopolis, then at busy São Paulo Guarulhos airport. The flights left on time, and the news was that, while New York City was a mess, Sandy had barely touched my home area 150 miles north, and my home airport was open. I relaxed in my seat for the ten-hour red-eye flight from São Paulo to Atlanta, the middle leg of my journey.
     A man with a subcontinental accent excused himself to take the window seat next to me. As soon as he had settled into his seat, he turned to me and announced, "I had an adventure."
     Three days earlier, he told me, he had a major heart attack in São Paulo. He recognized the symptoms - chest pain, numbness in the left arm - because he had had a heart attack before. The hotel arranged to get him into a hospital with an excellent cardiac unit. After tests, the surgeon inserted three stents; he pulled up his right sleeve to show me where the tubes had gone in. He was able to leave the hospital the previous night, and here he was, taking a long overnight flight to Atlanta en route to his home in Arizona.
     I was amazed by the speed and smoothness with which this man had apparently got through his crisis. He explained that there had been a bit of a problem. The São Paulo hospital required cash up front; 1,000 reis (about $500) to get in the door, $30,000 for the whole procedure. Fortunately for him, the company he works for had wired the money. "And if you had not been able to produce $30,000?" "Then I would be dead."
     What was he doing in Brazil? He told me he is a veterinarian who specializes in chickens. He advises on how to reduce disease risks among poultry.
      I asked the chicken doctor, "What effect has this knock on the heart had on you? Will it change you in any way?"
      He allowed that he might pay more attention to diet and exercise. But his response went much deeper. "I think I'll have more compassion now, because people have been kind to me. I'll spend more time with my nine-year-old daughter."
      He thought a bit and added, "I'll probably find myself asking, in the face of many choices, what really matters."
      I did not ask for an adventure on that trip, but I got one seated beside me.
      My final flight, from Atlanta to Albany NY, landed early. 
     

São Paulo Guarulhos airport photo by Rafael Matsunaga.

The ghost at Chopin airport

Frederic Chopin airport, Warsaw, October 11-12

I know everyone in the crowd at the Polish Airlines service desk at Warsaw's Chopin airport: the tub-shaped, jowly man in the orange T-shirt with a Coca-Cola label, just in from Kiev; the shaven-headed Russian with pale bad eyes; the busty Ukrainian woman who got too much attention from the Polish guards at the security check, the petite Ottawa lawyer with her Romanian mother who lends me her cell phone, the friendly Canadians hoping to get home to Toronto tonight. I have been with all these people before. We are all in the same jam, waiting to find out how we will get to our destinations since our flight to Toronto was cancelled without explanation.
     Wait a minute. If I know all these people, that means I must have dreamed this scene even if I forgot the dream before waking events caught up with it. Can I pull something back from the forgotten dream that could help me navigate this situation? Help is needed, because the clerks at the LOT service counter are moving at geological speed. The sun will be down very soon, and it looks like no one is getting out of Warsaw today.
     The long wait and lack of announcements are making a tall man in a red-and-white Canadian football jacket quite agitated. "I am Polish!" he exclaims. "Though I have lived in Canada for over twenty years. I apologize to everyone for how Polish Airlines is handling this!" He demands to see a supervisor. His color is dangerously high, a real hypertensive sunburn. He declares that he doesn't want to have a heart attack so he'll take a break from the line to have a smoke and a Stolichnaya.
     I know him too. And now it dawns on me that I have retained something of the dream in which he (and perhaps all the others) appeared. I told this dream to my Romanian friend, Ana Maria, over breakfast in Bucharest early that same day, before boarding my flight to Warsaw. In my dream, I met "Zbigniew Brzezinski", dressed in what I thought was a red-and-white "folkloric" outfit. He talked about taking low-dose aspirin for heart health. He urged me to go on an assignment to Washington, D.C. I could not understand, on waking, why I had dreamed of Brzezinski, a Polish-American in the Carter Administration and an expert on foreign policy, or why he was giving me a D.C. assignment. Now it seems that "Brzezinski" was a tag applied by my inner editor to a figure who is not Polish-American but Polish-Canadian, and whose "folkloric" garb is a football jacket.
     I am still mulling this when I finally get to the counter and am handed a new itinerary. I have been re-booked on a LOT flight to Frankfurt at 6:30 a.m., in order to catch an Air Canada flight to Toronto, where I will pick up the same final flight to my little home airport that was in my original itinerary. Traveling home to Albany, N.Y. via Toronto looks crazier than it did when I made my original arrangements. Going from Bucharest to Warsaw to Toronto on Polish Airlines was a relatively cheap option; there was a long overnight layover before I could catch my final flight to Albany, but I had planned to rest up at a nice Toronto airport hotel and get home fresh. There is something troubling about the new plan,  but I decide to go with it.

     The waiting game goes on and on, with more glacial lines, at other desks, for hotel vouchers, taxi vouchers, food vouchers. Here comes "Brzezinski" again, declaring there is no point now - it's already 9:00 p.m. - in going to a hotel. He will stay at the airport overnight. This sounds rational to me, and after all it is a dream character speaking. So I spurn the hotel offer, re-check my bag, and stay up all night at Chopin airport.
     One by one, the metal grilles come down at the duty-free stores and the restaurant chairs are stacked on the tables. I run into a store just before it is sealed for the night and buy myself water and toothpaste.
     And Chopin airport becomes limbo. People who are stuck in transit because they don’t have documents that allow them to enter Poland are stretched out on seats, on display stands, or looping round and round in front of the deserted departure gates.
 

   By 2:00 a.m., I have the crawling sensation that I am in a dark and fantastic tale, like the one I just read on the plane. Before I left Romania, my friend took me on a quick tour of used bookstores in downtown Bucharest, in search of English language editions of the fiction of Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of religion and shamanism who also wrote superior novels and tales of fantasy. I found an old collection of Romanian Fantastic Tales published in Bucharest in 1981 that includes Eliade's wondrously creepy story "Gypsies". It's about a man who strays from his regular travel schedule, is lured into a house of witches, and finds himself lost in a nest of separate realities from which he is unable to return to the time or the people he previously knew; he may or may not be dead in his regular world.
    By 4:00 a.m, the airport restaurants have reopened, and I breakfast on strong coffee, and warm rolls. I get on the 6:30 a.m. flight without incident, climb over an immensely fat man to my window seat, and watch the drifting fog as we taxi out onto the runway. Where everything stops. In cracked English, over a crackling intercom, the pilot announces that the authorities have closed the airport due to the fog. Forty-five minutes later, Toronto-bound passengers are asked to leave the plane; they'll be given another flight option since they will miss their connection. I am about to join the rush to the door when I remember that I'm not actually going to Toronto. I'm going to Albany. I check with the crew that my bag will stay on the plane. "Everything fine. Your bag stay in Warsaw." "No, my bag goes with me to Frankfurt."
    We get to Frankfurt three hours late, and my heart sinks at the idea of having to stand in line at another LOT desk. I look out at a sea of people and vast banks of airline desks, without a ticket, boarding pass or a working itinerary, just a baggage claim check. Where is the dream guidance I need?
     I hear a dog barking. A familiar bark. He sounds just like my little schnauzer. I track the bark to a crate where a schnauzer is challenging the outside world while his owner is doing the paperwork required to have him approved for air transport. The sign at the desk reads "Additional Services" and it is a United desk.
     I suddenly understand what "Brzezinski" was telling me in my dream. I need to go home via Washington D.C., not Toronto. Dulles is a United hub, and I often change planes there traveling to and from my home airport.
     When I get my turn at the Additional Services desk, the German clerk is quite helpful. Yes, United has a flight to Washington D.C., leaving at 5:00 p.m. that will allow me to make a connection that will get me home tonight. But my ticket has been written to LOT and I will need to persuade them to let me switch airlines. It takes a real scout to find the obscure LOT desk at that immense airport. I don't have immediate confidence in the Polish Airlines clerk because she types like me, with two fingers, and is still bent on sending me to Toronto. But when I give her details of the 5:00 p.m. flight to Washington D.C., she arranges the change, and gives me a voucher that buys me a pretty good wiener schnitzel as I wait at an airport bistro.
    Oh yes, when Ana Maria and I swapped dreams in Bucharest, the previous morning, she told me she had dreamed that I was delayed for six hours at airports. That proved to be a significant under-estimate, but was certainly an example of how we dream the future for others as well as ourselves.