I admit it’s ironic. I’m trapped in an airport, the place you go to escape.
I’ve been stuck in DFW for eleven hours. Best case scenario, I leave in fifty-five minutes. Worst case scenario, I could be here for days. The perils of holiday weekend standby travel....
I've flown a lot. I owned a travel agency for twelve years and visited all seven continents, more than a hundred countries, all fifty United States. I've sipped champagne in First Class above the Atlantic, zipped from New York to London in three hours aboard the Concorde, and I've been whisked around America in a private Lear jet. I've shared planes with Muhammad Ali, Rod Stewart, and Richard Branson, though not all at the same time.
Once a guy died right in front of me in Jakarta airport, less than ten feet away. In the lounge of the Indonesian airline Garuda International, an overweight middle-aged businessman sat opposite me and fell asleep while I read. After maybe fifteen minutes an American traveler stood, walked over, and ever so gently pushed him on the shoulder. He toppled sideways onto his seat, almost in slow motion, like a lovingly felled tree. Peaceful. Graceful.
The American screamed for help, and Indonesian staff ran over and poked and prodded at the body while the Yank yelled, "Stay away from him! Don't touch him!" At the gate they announced my flight to London was delayed, "for technical reasons." I imagine finding and removing a dead passenger's suitcase from the cavernous underbelly of a 747 would be pretty technical.
However my most vivid airport memory involves another day I was trapped for hours. But that time I escaped.
I need to be busy on vacation. Lying on a beach and chill-laxing drives me nuts. I have to go somewhere, see something, do stuff. I'm a pain in the arse to travel with.
In 1999 I flew to the Canary Islands, a few rocky Spanish outcrops off North West Africa, to stay at a friend's vacation place. I lasted three days. After a day exploring the nearby pretty Moorish architecture and charming fishing village, and a day driving around the island in a rented car, I was bored and ready to go home, but my return flight was four days away and my agency in Northern Ireland was closed for Easter.
So a local travel office booked me on the national airline Iberia from the Canaries to Madrid and onward to London. I would worry about the final hop to Belfast when I got there.
The flight to the Spanish capital was routine and I “de-planed” as we say today and waited for the connection. More than a decade later I still recall that despite the spring sunshine, parts of the airport seemed dark and deserted. Turned out the vast majority of Iberia staff were striking.
One after another, flights cancelled and tumbled like dominoes across the board as hoards of angry travelers descended on customer services desks. Mine cancelled too and I was rebooked on a flight hours later. But I lurked by the desk. I knew that my new plane was never leaving the tarmac. When the last passenger had been placated and departed, I asked in pigeon Spanish with a conspiratorial travel professional smile, if my flight was really going. A guilty look and the minutest shake of the head later, I had my confirmation.
So hang around for hours on the slim chance I get on one of the few flights to somewhere in the UK or Ireland, or cut my losses and find a hotel? I dandered off and wandered aimlessly. Back then at many European airports sliding glass doors enclosed the international departure gates, and 100 yards ahead passengers crowded around one.
Inside at the gate the sign read “Gatwick,” London's second airport. There was movement. Activity. Passengers boarding a bus to take them out to their plane. A flight neither posted on the departure board nor announced over the P.A.
The Spanish gate agent was shouting at the gathered Brits. "This plane full. Full. Only First Class." An Englishman yelled, "But I must get back! I must get back!" while an elderly woman shrilled, "I'll pay for First Class, I'll pay." It stopped short of pushing and shoving, but being caged for hours was fraying the nerves of even the most stoic English air travelers.
Then the gate agent asked in Spanish, "Anyone traveling without checked luggage?" I had a suitcase in transit but I wasn't going to let that stop me. I shouted, "Si Senor!" and barged my way through the throng as he forced open the door to let me in.
You ever see that famous photograph of the last helicopter to leave the American embassy in Saigon? The soldiers are punching terrified and desperate Asians off it as it departs amidst scrambling hands and refugees clambering to get aboard. That snapshot is in my head every time I think back to this. Only with little old English ladies instead of abandoned Vietnamese.
I snatched a boarding pass reading something like Pablo Hernandez or Julio Iglesias from the Iberia employee and ran to the bus. Seconds later it sped off like a prison break.
I would be arriving too late to connect to Belfast so while boarding I called a friend in London and asked him to pick me up at Gatwick. On touchdown I even had the cheek to indignantly complain that the airline had lost my luggage. They delivered my suitcase to my home in Northern Ireland two days later.
I've been an international air traveler for more than four decades since my parents took me to Spain as a baby in 1970, so it‘s bizarre that this is the experience I recall so clearly. But the world changed on September 11, 2001, and I may be the last ever pasty-skinned Irishman to rush through a crowd, grab a Spaniard's travel documentation—and escape.
Stephen Rea is the author of Finn McCool's Football Club: The Birth, Death and Resurrection of a Pub Soccer Team in the City of the Dead. You can visit his website at www.stephen-rea.com.