Continental

I’ve said it before, but before I actually left the States, going to England was one more obligation I had to fulfill in my schedule. There wasn’t much in the way of anticipation for it because I was doing so much day to day that I had no time to anticipate. I guess that’s a blessing in a way, because I had no expectations, England could be whatever it would be.

And it is. But we’ll get to that.

The city of Newark is why I agree that Pennsylvanians should line up on the banks of the Delaware holding large wooden poles and push New Jersey out into the Atlantic. Factories and highways and smoke, it’s not really a looker. And so flying out of there from Bucks County, with its lawns, or level downs, and flocks grazing the tender herb, were interpos'd - a Bucks County I would not see again for nine months, well, it was distressing. Paradise lost?

$90 a bag for each bag beyond the second one stowed in the plane might have been more distressing, since I had five bags to stow brimming with essentials - like my five drama anthologies, which cover about half of the reading I have to do for the major. One of the bags was a little tote thing, hardly worth $90, so that one’s being shipped. I’m developing a good beard now since that bag had my razor, but we’ll get to hair care issues as we continue.

Hugging my parents goodbye and then emptying my pockets into those security trays - no mean feet as I carry every essential I could need on the flight in my pockets, mainly pens and loose change - I squeezed through security and started to search out my terminal.

This I made a note of when I was in the airport: airports are the last wild frontier in America. They’re these expansive, dangerous, tender environments where almost anything, you think, could happen. Over there someone’s getting off a flight and hugging another group of people, a family united? What’s that guy doing over there skulking in the corner? Is he a pick pocket? Is he jerking off? There’re two guys walking close together in fashionable clothes, are they gay or just European? Oh look, a nun.

I actually ended up racing a nun on my way to terminal C 95 for Continental Airlines. We started off just walking and then I hopped up on a walking conveyor and speedily overtook her. I didn’t want to think “ha ha, where’s your Messiah now?” because I’m also a Christian, but I sort of did. I’ve always envied the dedication it takes to live an ascetic life, at least a litlte bit, and maybe it was just that coming out. Then I got off one conveyor and onto another conveyor, but I got stuck behind an Asian lady with a stroller and a baby. She was taking up a lot of room and not walking, and I didn’t want to try to force past her because I didn’t want to hurt the baby - I was lugging my book bag and my Orvis Brand Leather Carry On Travel Bag (bought at a 50% + 20% employee discount from the Orvis in Lahaska) - so I was stuck behind this lady. I looked to the walking lane to my left, and the nun was speeding by without even trying. Her and her inner peace. The Asian lady hopped off at the end of the conveyor and I quickly power walked around her and away to my terminal, just barely passing the nun as I left. I had won! But then I looked back and realized the nun was carrying only one carry on, a small pastel bag that completed her ensemble, and suddenly my book bag and my Orvis Brand Carry On Travel Bag (bought at a 50% + 20% employee discount from the Orvis in Lahaska) felt particularly heavy and particularly uncomforting. I got the sense she didn’t need to win that race to have me beat from the start.

There were also these three girls who were sitting nearby me at one point who, though I’m sure they’re perfectly nice people, reminded me of the three witches from Macbeth. Or harpies. One of the two. They kept giggling and I got the sense they were staring at me and not in the good way. Maybe it was just my paranoia about airports coming out, but I was glad when they weren’t there anymore. There were also a bunch of English people heading home that I sat nearby while waiting to get on the flight, mostly elderly. I overheard some talking, and apparently going to America right now is the thing to do if you’re a retiring middle-class Brit, because the exchange rate is so good from pounds to dollars that you go to New York and New England and just do everything you ever wanted to do. Most of them, from what I heard, had taken helicopter tours of Manhattan. A Welsh lady who I sat next to on the flight had taken a helicopter tour of Manhattan and Niagra Falls. Why the English find helicopter tours to be an extravagant adventure I don’t know. Maybe it’s the new equivalent of a safari. This was the first encounter of mine that taught me an important lesson of living in England: never question British logic, as it’s far too silly to ever get anything close to a serious answer.

My cell phone almost ran out of batteries before the plane boarded, so I shut it off so I’d have some energy left in case there was an emergency. My pre-flight and in-flight reading was mainly a play by William Nicholson called Shadowlands. The protagonist, a decided bachelor named C.S. Lewis (muthafuckahs!), meets his wife-to-be, Joy, and a soul-searching plot ensues, ending in a kind of hopeful tragedy. Very good play, very fitting. At times in the play, a large wardrobe is revealed in the back, and it opens up to reveal “THE OTHER WORLD,” which a character actually enters in and out of. Hard to do onstage, but resonant. We took off at about 9:30 p.m. maybe, and Newark was, thankfully, shrouded in darkness. I had a window seat, which is my version of an in-flight movie. Continental had this hoo-hah it would display on the TVs with our flight’s stats: our expected time, how far we’d traveled, how far we had left, and eventually a map with where our plane was. As we got further and further into the Atlantic and I started nodding off there were more and more clouds below us, and a full moon, and an open sky where I could always see the big dipper. Follow the drinking gourd…

I consider everything I’m going to write from now on in my journey as a message from the other side of a wardrobe. I keep getting the sense that when I fly back I’ll discover I haven’t been gone more than a split second and no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to get back to where I am right now. And I don’t know quite what to make of it.