Trip Diary - One: At The Edge Of The Continent
“I remember traffic jams, motor boys and girls with tans, nearly was and almost rans. I remember this.”
At 5:30am on November 19th 2004, I’m lying in bed in the darkness of my room, staring at the bright green digits on the front of my VCR. I’m a long way from sleep and have been for more than an hour. In fifteen minutes, the alarm on my mobile phone will go off. When that happens, all the speculation will end. Sure, I’m only getting up to finish my packing, have a shave and a shower, and organise myself, but those are means to an end, and that end is travelling to California. This is it. No more thinking and dreaming and writing. I’m going. There is no backing out or turning around.
Such thoughts are enough to drive me from my bed and into the shower. I need to wake myself up and get down to practicalities. If I let myself stay in that mental place, I really will get scared, maybe scared enough to back out. Happily, travel has many stupid rules and I have many stupid insecurities. For example, I want to pack my washing stuff in my rucksack because I’m about to travel for something like eighteen hours and I’ll be needing to freshen up before I meet Jenn. As much as I’m sure she’ll like me, looking and smelling like I’ve just been trapped in a cramped space with a bunch of fat tourists is not how I envisage my person at our first meeting. All well and good, only I can’t take a razor onto the plane. I can be clean and shiny, I can smell like the first day of spring, but the stubble can’t be helped.
Thinking about sharp objects gets me thinking about my pens. Are they okay? Will I be dragged away by swarthy customs men as I scream helplessly about being a writer while the other passengers shake their heads sadly and look at the ground? I understand that this is a ridiculous thought, but then I also remember that scene from The Running Man where Arnie stabs that guy in the back with a biro. Then I remember what state Mr. Schwarzenegger is now Governator of and this somehow gives my weird fantasy validation. For perhaps thirty seconds, I actually consider not taking my pens onto the plane.
This is how ridiculous and meticulous I am in my packing. Everything in its right place and nothing that would give anybody any excuse to delay or stop my journey onto that plane. My one concession to instinct is every bit as silly. When checking my main bag, I come across a condom squashed in the deepest corner of a pocket. Unable to remember where it’s from and how it got there, I throw it aside and get on with my packing. A few minutes later, smiling to myself and feeling good about things for the first time in a while, I put it back. It’s not that I plan to use it or think that it will magically get me laid, nothing so crude. It’s just a feeling I get when I replace it, like finding a penny or walking around a ladder. I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in taking a little confidence from unexpected quarters.
My stepdad drives me to the train station. We talk, but my eyes and ears are elsewhere. I’m memorising the morning, committing it to the writer-place inside my head, hanging verbs and adjectives and nouns on the sky and the people and the cars. On the train, it strikes me that I’m seeing this morning journey as if for the first time, the familiar rendered in strange new colours by the anticipation and fear in my stomach. The inside of my mouth tastes like cigarettes and toothpaste and copper. My hands shake so much that when I try to scrawl what I’m thinking into my notepad, it comes out in a series of jagged, disconnected lines that make no sense. I can’t even write.
It takes me longer than I’d guessed to reach Heathrow, but I’d left myself a huge margin of error and arrive some three hours before my plane is due to leave. Check-in and customs are quick and without drama, and I have plenty of time to wander around the departure lounge, where I purchase the new Jimmy Eat World and the last Tanya Donnelly along with a cheddar and ham sandwich I eat while watching the departure board and listening to Rancid at an incredible volume on my walkman. This, you understand, to make me concentrate on the music instead of getting impatient and worrying.
Of course, I’m about to embark on a very long trip in an environment where cigarettes are forbidden, so before I make my way up to the gate, I drop in on the smoking lounge, where I plan to get through as many cigarettes as time allows. This preoccupies me far more than the music had, as the smoking area is at the end of a long corridor, well away from the main lounge. It’s dimly lit and quiet, its inhabitants getting their fix almost surreptitiously, hunched over glowing cherries and looking only at the floor or the screens above. I take my place amongst the lepers, mentally renaming this place in their honour and unable to keep the smile from my face. It’s an anti-smoking ad if ever I saw one, a group of people exiled and ashamed in a room where the level of comfort is a step down from the rest of the airport. Go ahead and smoke, it seems to say, but do it in here. And never forget that the interior decoration and atmosphere in this place was inspired by your lungs. Welcome to the Leper Lounge.
Though the plane is due to take off at twelve o’clock, it doesn’t even get a gate until twenty minutes beforehand. By the time I’ve made my way there, it’s clear that there’s going to be a delay. There are surprisingly few passengers, but the annoyance is clear on the faces of all as the time stretches out. Five minutes, then ten, then twenty. At almost one o’clock, they tell us that there’s a problem with the plane, that they’re running tests and we should be ready to go shortly.
“That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,” says a woman standing beside me.
I turn and see that she’s addressing her travelling companion. They’re both smiling.
“I’ve always wanted to fly five-thousand miles on a plane that might be broken,” I say.
“Gallows humour,” he says, and we all manage a laugh, if not a conversation.
By half-past-one we’re on the plane, and by the time two o’clock rolls around, we’re finally sitting pretty at the end of the runway. My worries about wanting a window seat but hating being trapped beside other people have turned to joy. Not only do I have my window seat, I have it in a row by myself. The plane is no more than half-full, the passengers spread out and comfortable. It’s another good omen, and it sustains me through the part of flying I hate the most: take-off.
I quite enjoy travelling by air. I have the same fears as most about high velocity death from the sky, but on the whole, the experience takes my breath away. There’s something about being so high up and moving at such a speed that strikes me as unreal. To watch the world getting smaller beneath you, to see the clouds below instead of above, to understand the patterns of road and path and building, then of town and city, that appeals to the way my mind works. Flying gives me a sense of something larger that I can never quite grasp, a sense of the world around me that extends beyond the usual petty concerns. Before I get to that point, though, I have to get through the heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed terror of sudden and massive acceleration. It drives you back into your seat, amazes and frightens you all at the same time. Before you have time to even process how fast you’re moving, the plane is tilting back, its nose lifting into the air. There is a brief feeling of weightlessness that is so horribly wrong that it makes you feel sick, and then you’re no longer on the ground, and it starts to be okay.
All good on Virgin Atlantic flight VS007. I’m a little annoyed that it’s cloudy. After ten minutes or so, I can no longer enjoy the view from the window. But the in-flight entertainment is a hell of a lot more sophisticated than I’d been expecting, offering everything from movies and TV shows to music and even some basic videogames. I explore my movie options and decide to take the lighter route. I really don’t need anything deep and meaningful at this point. A wise selection, as it turns out. Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy is much funnier than it has any right to be. Stupid, senseless, and very silly. Just what I needed. Personal favourite quote: “Go back to your home on Whore Island!”
After that, a surprisingly good dinner leaves me tired enough to stretch out across my seats and go to sleep. I wake up with seven hours of the flight left, change position, then go back to sleep. I wake up again with four hours left. This time I sit up and watch the first few minutes of Shaolin Soccer, about half of Spiderman 2, and a very funny episode of Scrubs. I’m feeling fatigued at this point, and my concentration is nowhere. It’s hard to tell if I’m tired because I haven’t had enough sleep or because I’ve had too much. In the end, I lie down and doze off again, mostly because I’m too bored to do anything else.
I wake up and look at the screen I’ve left tracking my journey. There is just over an hour to go and the map says we’re over Utah. At some point, one of the stewardesses has pulled the plastic shade down over my window. I sit up, blinking the sleep out of my eyes and processing just how wasted I feel. Between time zones, there are no specifics, and it’s hard to know just exactly what time it is. The map shows us passing into –8 territory, which means I’m now on California time and it’s technically a little after half-past four in the afternoon on the 19th November. My body and brain insist that this is not the case, that it’s now the 20th. This is the first and most confusing part of jetlag. It’s not the worst, that comes later, but it is the most disorienting.
Expecting nothing but the thick layer of cloud that was an ever-present before I went to sleep, I push up the shade to see if I can get a look at America. What I find steals my breath.
“Holy shit,” I whisper. For the first time it’s real. I mean, I knew I was doing it, but it didn’t feel like something that was really happening until I pulled up that shade and saw the mountains rising up from an endless, rocky wasteland spreading for miles in all directions.
Sunset over Utah or California or wherever the hell this is, some formidable terrain silhouetted against a backdrop of deep ochre and orange so intense that I have to narrow my tired eyes against its glare. This is my first sighting of America, and while it means less than the first time I lay eyes on Jennifer or even the incredible vista I’ll see on Interstate 15, on a long, sloping curve leading gently down towards the town of Baker, I feel as though this vision is burned on my retinas for all time.
Now that it has me, California just won’t quit. From the mountains to the towns and cities, we descend with the night. I watch the lights of civilisation flicker into life, first in isolated pockets, then in ever-growing masses. I have my nose pressed to the cool glass like a child, eyes wide and fascinated as a dream rolls by beneath me, as we drop towards the ground and I can make out individual roads, then baseball and football fields. I blink again, this time because I have a lump in my throat and tears are pricking my eyes. I did this. I took a chance on something or nothing, and even if it turns out to be the latter, I was here. I was on a plane falling lazily down towards Los Angeles as the day faded into darkness and the night awoke with pinpricks of light that became a conflagration of life that was an affirmation of everything I’d dreamed of. I was here.
“Sir?”
I drag my face from the window and see a steward looking down on me. I wonder what he must see and what he must think. I feel exhausted, sitting here with my morning hair and my slept-in clothes and my disoriented brain. My vision is swimming with stillborn tears and I’m pressing my lips tightly together, trying to keep them from quivering.
“You need to put your seatbelt on, sir,” he says, and gives me his mechanical steward smile.
Right. We’re landing. Seatbelt. Practicality. I’m meeting Jennifer in just a few minutes time. I’ve been overwhelmed before I’ve even reached the evening’s main event. I see visions of myself ending tonight on my knees someplace, staring up at the sky and crying my eyes out. Need to get a grip on myself.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I ask the steward.
He purses his lips.
“I’m meeting a girl,” I say.
This finally draws a genuine smile from the man, and he nods. “Better make it quick,” he says.
Five minutes later I’m back in my seat, feeling composed and about as ready as I’ll ever be. We’re into the final descent now, and the pain in my ears is stealing most of my attention. I’m still gazing out of the window, but that initial awe is receding. I’m thinking less of what I’m doing and more of why I’m doing it. I’m thinking of the girl that’s waiting for me, of how this is going to go. It’s funny, really. I’ve had a year, maybe more, of feeling numb and empty. Now every emotion is like a landslide. Fatigue washes over me like a tide and I actually have to force my eyes open. The plane touches down, slows every bit as massively as it accelerated. The captain makes his final speech and we taxi to the terminal. I grab the back of the seat in front of me and drag myself to my feet, reaching up for my bags. I join the line of shuffling passengers.
This is it, I think to myself. Oh, fuck me, this is it. Here we go.
At 5:30am on November 19th 2004, I’m lying in bed in the darkness of my room, staring at the bright green digits on the front of my VCR. I’m a long way from sleep and have been for more than an hour. In fifteen minutes, the alarm on my mobile phone will go off. When that happens, all the speculation will end. Sure, I’m only getting up to finish my packing, have a shave and a shower, and organise myself, but those are means to an end, and that end is travelling to California. This is it. No more thinking and dreaming and writing. I’m going. There is no backing out or turning around.
Such thoughts are enough to drive me from my bed and into the shower. I need to wake myself up and get down to practicalities. If I let myself stay in that mental place, I really will get scared, maybe scared enough to back out. Happily, travel has many stupid rules and I have many stupid insecurities. For example, I want to pack my washing stuff in my rucksack because I’m about to travel for something like eighteen hours and I’ll be needing to freshen up before I meet Jenn. As much as I’m sure she’ll like me, looking and smelling like I’ve just been trapped in a cramped space with a bunch of fat tourists is not how I envisage my person at our first meeting. All well and good, only I can’t take a razor onto the plane. I can be clean and shiny, I can smell like the first day of spring, but the stubble can’t be helped.
Thinking about sharp objects gets me thinking about my pens. Are they okay? Will I be dragged away by swarthy customs men as I scream helplessly about being a writer while the other passengers shake their heads sadly and look at the ground? I understand that this is a ridiculous thought, but then I also remember that scene from The Running Man where Arnie stabs that guy in the back with a biro. Then I remember what state Mr. Schwarzenegger is now Governator of and this somehow gives my weird fantasy validation. For perhaps thirty seconds, I actually consider not taking my pens onto the plane.
This is how ridiculous and meticulous I am in my packing. Everything in its right place and nothing that would give anybody any excuse to delay or stop my journey onto that plane. My one concession to instinct is every bit as silly. When checking my main bag, I come across a condom squashed in the deepest corner of a pocket. Unable to remember where it’s from and how it got there, I throw it aside and get on with my packing. A few minutes later, smiling to myself and feeling good about things for the first time in a while, I put it back. It’s not that I plan to use it or think that it will magically get me laid, nothing so crude. It’s just a feeling I get when I replace it, like finding a penny or walking around a ladder. I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in taking a little confidence from unexpected quarters.
My stepdad drives me to the train station. We talk, but my eyes and ears are elsewhere. I’m memorising the morning, committing it to the writer-place inside my head, hanging verbs and adjectives and nouns on the sky and the people and the cars. On the train, it strikes me that I’m seeing this morning journey as if for the first time, the familiar rendered in strange new colours by the anticipation and fear in my stomach. The inside of my mouth tastes like cigarettes and toothpaste and copper. My hands shake so much that when I try to scrawl what I’m thinking into my notepad, it comes out in a series of jagged, disconnected lines that make no sense. I can’t even write.
It takes me longer than I’d guessed to reach Heathrow, but I’d left myself a huge margin of error and arrive some three hours before my plane is due to leave. Check-in and customs are quick and without drama, and I have plenty of time to wander around the departure lounge, where I purchase the new Jimmy Eat World and the last Tanya Donnelly along with a cheddar and ham sandwich I eat while watching the departure board and listening to Rancid at an incredible volume on my walkman. This, you understand, to make me concentrate on the music instead of getting impatient and worrying.
Of course, I’m about to embark on a very long trip in an environment where cigarettes are forbidden, so before I make my way up to the gate, I drop in on the smoking lounge, where I plan to get through as many cigarettes as time allows. This preoccupies me far more than the music had, as the smoking area is at the end of a long corridor, well away from the main lounge. It’s dimly lit and quiet, its inhabitants getting their fix almost surreptitiously, hunched over glowing cherries and looking only at the floor or the screens above. I take my place amongst the lepers, mentally renaming this place in their honour and unable to keep the smile from my face. It’s an anti-smoking ad if ever I saw one, a group of people exiled and ashamed in a room where the level of comfort is a step down from the rest of the airport. Go ahead and smoke, it seems to say, but do it in here. And never forget that the interior decoration and atmosphere in this place was inspired by your lungs. Welcome to the Leper Lounge.
Though the plane is due to take off at twelve o’clock, it doesn’t even get a gate until twenty minutes beforehand. By the time I’ve made my way there, it’s clear that there’s going to be a delay. There are surprisingly few passengers, but the annoyance is clear on the faces of all as the time stretches out. Five minutes, then ten, then twenty. At almost one o’clock, they tell us that there’s a problem with the plane, that they’re running tests and we should be ready to go shortly.
“That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,” says a woman standing beside me.
I turn and see that she’s addressing her travelling companion. They’re both smiling.
“I’ve always wanted to fly five-thousand miles on a plane that might be broken,” I say.
“Gallows humour,” he says, and we all manage a laugh, if not a conversation.
By half-past-one we’re on the plane, and by the time two o’clock rolls around, we’re finally sitting pretty at the end of the runway. My worries about wanting a window seat but hating being trapped beside other people have turned to joy. Not only do I have my window seat, I have it in a row by myself. The plane is no more than half-full, the passengers spread out and comfortable. It’s another good omen, and it sustains me through the part of flying I hate the most: take-off.
I quite enjoy travelling by air. I have the same fears as most about high velocity death from the sky, but on the whole, the experience takes my breath away. There’s something about being so high up and moving at such a speed that strikes me as unreal. To watch the world getting smaller beneath you, to see the clouds below instead of above, to understand the patterns of road and path and building, then of town and city, that appeals to the way my mind works. Flying gives me a sense of something larger that I can never quite grasp, a sense of the world around me that extends beyond the usual petty concerns. Before I get to that point, though, I have to get through the heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed terror of sudden and massive acceleration. It drives you back into your seat, amazes and frightens you all at the same time. Before you have time to even process how fast you’re moving, the plane is tilting back, its nose lifting into the air. There is a brief feeling of weightlessness that is so horribly wrong that it makes you feel sick, and then you’re no longer on the ground, and it starts to be okay.
All good on Virgin Atlantic flight VS007. I’m a little annoyed that it’s cloudy. After ten minutes or so, I can no longer enjoy the view from the window. But the in-flight entertainment is a hell of a lot more sophisticated than I’d been expecting, offering everything from movies and TV shows to music and even some basic videogames. I explore my movie options and decide to take the lighter route. I really don’t need anything deep and meaningful at this point. A wise selection, as it turns out. Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy is much funnier than it has any right to be. Stupid, senseless, and very silly. Just what I needed. Personal favourite quote: “Go back to your home on Whore Island!”
After that, a surprisingly good dinner leaves me tired enough to stretch out across my seats and go to sleep. I wake up with seven hours of the flight left, change position, then go back to sleep. I wake up again with four hours left. This time I sit up and watch the first few minutes of Shaolin Soccer, about half of Spiderman 2, and a very funny episode of Scrubs. I’m feeling fatigued at this point, and my concentration is nowhere. It’s hard to tell if I’m tired because I haven’t had enough sleep or because I’ve had too much. In the end, I lie down and doze off again, mostly because I’m too bored to do anything else.
I wake up and look at the screen I’ve left tracking my journey. There is just over an hour to go and the map says we’re over Utah. At some point, one of the stewardesses has pulled the plastic shade down over my window. I sit up, blinking the sleep out of my eyes and processing just how wasted I feel. Between time zones, there are no specifics, and it’s hard to know just exactly what time it is. The map shows us passing into –8 territory, which means I’m now on California time and it’s technically a little after half-past four in the afternoon on the 19th November. My body and brain insist that this is not the case, that it’s now the 20th. This is the first and most confusing part of jetlag. It’s not the worst, that comes later, but it is the most disorienting.
Expecting nothing but the thick layer of cloud that was an ever-present before I went to sleep, I push up the shade to see if I can get a look at America. What I find steals my breath.
“Holy shit,” I whisper. For the first time it’s real. I mean, I knew I was doing it, but it didn’t feel like something that was really happening until I pulled up that shade and saw the mountains rising up from an endless, rocky wasteland spreading for miles in all directions.
Sunset over Utah or California or wherever the hell this is, some formidable terrain silhouetted against a backdrop of deep ochre and orange so intense that I have to narrow my tired eyes against its glare. This is my first sighting of America, and while it means less than the first time I lay eyes on Jennifer or even the incredible vista I’ll see on Interstate 15, on a long, sloping curve leading gently down towards the town of Baker, I feel as though this vision is burned on my retinas for all time.
Now that it has me, California just won’t quit. From the mountains to the towns and cities, we descend with the night. I watch the lights of civilisation flicker into life, first in isolated pockets, then in ever-growing masses. I have my nose pressed to the cool glass like a child, eyes wide and fascinated as a dream rolls by beneath me, as we drop towards the ground and I can make out individual roads, then baseball and football fields. I blink again, this time because I have a lump in my throat and tears are pricking my eyes. I did this. I took a chance on something or nothing, and even if it turns out to be the latter, I was here. I was on a plane falling lazily down towards Los Angeles as the day faded into darkness and the night awoke with pinpricks of light that became a conflagration of life that was an affirmation of everything I’d dreamed of. I was here.
“Sir?”
I drag my face from the window and see a steward looking down on me. I wonder what he must see and what he must think. I feel exhausted, sitting here with my morning hair and my slept-in clothes and my disoriented brain. My vision is swimming with stillborn tears and I’m pressing my lips tightly together, trying to keep them from quivering.
“You need to put your seatbelt on, sir,” he says, and gives me his mechanical steward smile.
Right. We’re landing. Seatbelt. Practicality. I’m meeting Jennifer in just a few minutes time. I’ve been overwhelmed before I’ve even reached the evening’s main event. I see visions of myself ending tonight on my knees someplace, staring up at the sky and crying my eyes out. Need to get a grip on myself.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I ask the steward.
He purses his lips.
“I’m meeting a girl,” I say.
This finally draws a genuine smile from the man, and he nods. “Better make it quick,” he says.
Five minutes later I’m back in my seat, feeling composed and about as ready as I’ll ever be. We’re into the final descent now, and the pain in my ears is stealing most of my attention. I’m still gazing out of the window, but that initial awe is receding. I’m thinking less of what I’m doing and more of why I’m doing it. I’m thinking of the girl that’s waiting for me, of how this is going to go. It’s funny, really. I’ve had a year, maybe more, of feeling numb and empty. Now every emotion is like a landslide. Fatigue washes over me like a tide and I actually have to force my eyes open. The plane touches down, slows every bit as massively as it accelerated. The captain makes his final speech and we taxi to the terminal. I grab the back of the seat in front of me and drag myself to my feet, reaching up for my bags. I join the line of shuffling passengers.
This is it, I think to myself. Oh, fuck me, this is it. Here we go.
posted by Michael at 9:03 PM
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