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Monday
April 21, 2008
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Europe's busiest airport, Paris' Charles De Gaulle Int'l is much the dump--dirty, stuffy, overcrowded gates,
inadequate seating (both in number and comfort), poor flow, bad acoustics, netting stretched across a
crumbling ceiling, few flight information boards, and no clocks. I have a 10-hour layover en route from
Seattle to Prague. At first I'd thought to go into town, but there's no place to stow my 2 heavy carry-ons,
it's a 90-minute one-way trip, and it's raining. I find a basement shop which sells beer cheap (70 cents for
.5 litre can of Van Pur, the PBR of Europe), walk great distances to find a vacant seat, and settle in for
my 4th or 5th reading of Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, which was my old teacher Lou Asekoff's favorite
Vonnegut and 14 years later I now see why--it's poetic and affecting. My reading is periodically diverted
by loud banging on empty watercooler jugs and shrill whistleblowing--airport cleaning staff is demanding
more dignity and better wages. They march around the airport all day; protest is its own fulltime job. In
an American airport they'd be tazed and arrested as either terrorists or just a nuisance. An older Vonnegut
story in a posthumous volume just released describes Americans as potentially rowdy but not ruthless. From
what I've seen at Seattle protests and given how America treats its poor and afflicted, I'd say that much
has changed. I am not impatient for the time to pass. I sneak little naps curled up on cruel chairs and
wake up with numb arm and leg. After 10 hours of this, AF2482 flight to Prague begins to board and I think,
"Almost there!" as I picture myself snuggling into my seat. Instead, they take us down a narrow winding
stair and we board a bus. "This is a strange plane," I think, "where are the wings?" If I were in America I
would share this wit, but the people around me speak French or Czech (as do I, un peu) but I'm not sure I
could deliver the joke with the proper grammar or inflection to be funny in the way intended. The bus doesn't
move. After 45 minutes, we're marched back to the gate; there's a problem with the plane, we must wait. The
Czech people there take it in stride. I hear one say (in Czech), "So, where is some bar?" I once glanced at
a book by some guru (it might have been Eckhart Tolle) who said one key to composure is continually wearing
a little half-smile, somewhere between frown and grin. It relaxes the face and the spirit, invites rather
than resists. Fake it till you make it, emotions conform to physical states. I inventory my fellow passengers.
About half wear frowns and scowls, the expressions of a violated sense of entitlement. Seeing such bitterness
on exhibit makes it easy to side with the smilers. I blow Euro 4,50 on a can of Heineken and join the party.
After a few more false starts and missteps, we repeat our earlier stairs-to-bus performance and are bussed
across the tarmac. One last delay gives occasion for more joking and laughter before we finally mount the
mobile staircase into the plane. Seatback upright, belt fastened, we roar down the runway and I'm asleep
before the wheels leave the ground.
Connecting Flights:
CDG
Titan
Vonnegut
Armageddon
Protest
Eckhart
