Usually the series of flights from here to Nairobi or back follow a similar pattern for me. I get to the airport, buy a Rolling Stone magazine, get on the plane, sleep, get to the next airport (JFK, Heathrow or Amsterdam) sleepwalk through it, board the next plane, sleep, wake up, eat and so on ’til I’m “there,’ Nairobi or SF. It’s more like a waking dream sequence than anything else. A somnambulist’s holiday.

This trip back, which began at 6:00am, July 25 was different. I was the Jonah of air travel. Every plane I stepped onto was immediately pulled out of the departure rotation and benched for an hour of two. I had a twelve hour layover at JFK, 9:00pm to 9:00 am, so a train ride into the city to see friends was a no go. Instead it was short cab ride to Rockaway, where a week earlier Jeremy Blake, a brilliant young artist had calmly taken off his clothes on the beach and walked finally into the sea. I walked with less purpose and more hesitation into the smoke-infused corridors of the Comfort Inn and passed the night in the uneasy chill of conditioned air and a vending machine dinner.
But the biggest difference in this trip was that I stayed awake most of the time and I spoke with others. From Nairobi to Heathrow I sat next to a Kenyan woman who works for the African Union and now lives in South Africa, heading to her daughter’s graduation from law school. She has been a political activist most of her adult life and we spoke about the November elections in Kenya and Kibaki’s chances for reelection.

I met Bettina from Copenhagen at Heathrow when we shared a table in the crowded space for EAT, a takeaway restaurant there. She had a prepackaged sushi combo wrapped in cellophane on a dimpled black styrofoam tray. She heads up international clinical trials for a biotech firm for people with head and neck cancer. I almost choked on my prawn tom fun soup. We passed a very pleasant half hour and made only half joking plans for a future Nairobi rendezvous.

Waiting at gate 37, I met Susan, a State Department employee who has spent most of the last four years living in the green zone in Baghdad. She is back now, and still glowing from a week in Livorno where her boyfriend lives. Like many of us, she is in media res , but thinking about a posting in Afghanistan… where it’s safer. We stood in the aisle a good deal of the flight and I learned of a new generation of IED’s (improvised explosive devices) from Iran which pays little attention to armor plating as it’s searing its molten way though to the softer stuff inside, and the drinking habits of those with little to do and a lot to lose.

In my non-aisle seat, I’m flanked on the left by three early teen-aged Jewish lads, skull-capped, felt-hatted, prayer-shawled, frock-coated and forelocked, and to the right by a professor of Mexican history from Duke, his peacock-blue comb-up mohawk partially concealing a God-given monk’s tonsure.

The young guy next to me is a rocker; that is, he rocks, back and forth, a 60 degree travel, while reading a book in Hebrew with the smallest print I have ever seen. The uninventable oneness of it all is that he’s keeping perfect metronome time to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” that I’m listening to on my borrowed Bose headset. He tired and fell asleep on a down stroke just exactly as Pursuance/part 4 Psalm finished its heavenly ascent, his arms triangulated around the book, his springy forelocks bouncing lightly on the tray table.

I know I have been gone a while, and am much more up on events in Lebanon and Karachi than Washington, but I could have sworn that one of the flight attendants on the London/San Francisco leg was Karl Rove. Has it fallen out that way?

To close this picaresque segment, mercifully, a couple of travel tips –for free.

1. If you take rolling carry-on luggage, pack a canvas bag in it and before the plane takes off put all the stuff you really need in it and stash it under your seat. No more opening the overhead bin and tip toe wrasslin’ around trying to get your book or Airbourne or warm socks.

2. Order one of the special meals when you make your reservations. I suggest the kosher meal. The three guys next to me were hunched over nice, large pieces of salmon on a big tray, while I was pushing away little cubed beef bits and watery pasta.

Good to be back on the equatorial upside for a while,

David

Posted on August 14th, 2007 by david
Filed under: David's Journal