Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
head was all but in my lap. He was reading a comic book called
Tommy og Tigern
and he had the sort of
face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humour. My own seat was raked at a peculiar angle
that induced immediate and lasting neckache. It had a lever on its side, which I supposed might bring it
back to a more comfortable position, but I knew from long experience that if I touched it even tentatively the
seat would fly back and crush the kneecaps of the sweet little old lady sitting behind me, so I left it alone.
The woman beside me, who was obviously a veteran of these polar campaigns, unloaded quantities of
magazines, tissues, throat lozenges, ointments, unguents and fruit pastilles into the seat pocket in front of
her, then settled beneath a blanket and slept more or less continuously through the whole trip.
We bounced through a snowy half-light, out through the sprawling suburbs of Oslo and into the
countryside. The scattered villages and farmhouses looked trim and prosperous in the endless dusk. Every
house had Christmas lights burning cheerily in the windows. I quickly settled into that not unpleasant state of
mindlessness that tends to overcome me on long journeys, my head lolling loosely on my shoulders in the
manner of someone who has lost all control of his neck muscles and doesn't really mind.
My trip had begun. I was about to see Europe again.
The first time I came to Europe was in 1972, skinny, shy, alone. In those days the only cheap flights
were from New York to Luxembourg, with a refuelling stop en route at Keflavik Airport at Reykjavik. The
aeroplanes were old and engagingly past their prime - oxygen masks would sometimes drop unbidden
from their overheated storage compartments and dangle there until a stewardess with a hammer and a
mouthful of nails came along to put things right, and the door of the lavatory tended to swing open on you if
you didn't hold it shut with a foot, which brought a certain dimension of challenge to anything else you
planned to do in there - and they were achingly slow. It took a week and a half to reach Keflavik, a small
grey airport in the middle of a flat grey nowhere, and another week and a half to bounce on through the skies
to Luxembourg.
Everyone on the plane was a hippie, except the crew and two herring-factory executives in first class. It
was rather like being on a Greyhound bus on the way to a folk-singers' convention. People were forever
pulling out guitars and mandolins and bottles of Thunderbird wine and forging relationships with their
seatmates that were clearly going to lead to lots of energetic sex on a succession of Mediterranean
beaches.
In the long, exciting weeks preceding the flight I had sustained myself, I confess, with a series of
bedroom-ceiling fantasies that generally involved finding myself seated next to a panting young beauty
being sent by her father against her wishes to the Lausanne Institute for Nymphomaniacal Disorders, who
would turn to me somewhere over mid-Atlantic and say, 'Forgive me, but would it be all right if I sat on your
face for a while?' In the event, my seatmate turned out to be an acned stringbean with Buddy Holly glasses
and a line-up of ball-point pens clipped into a protective plastic case in his shirt pocket. The plastic case
said
GRUBER'S TRU-VALU HARDWARE, FLAGELLATION, OKLAHOMA. IF WE DON'T GOT IT, YOU DON'T NEED
IT,
or something like that. He had boils on his neck which looked like bullet wounds that had never quite
healed and smelled oppressively of Vicks VapoRub.
He spent most of the flight reading holy scripture, moving both sets of fingertips across each line of text
as he read and voicing the words just loud enough for me to hear them as a fervid whisper in my right ear. I
feared the worst. I don't know why religious zealots have this compulsion to try to convert everyone who
passes before them - I don't go around trying to make them into St Louis Cardinals fans, for Christ's sake -
and yet they never fail to try.
Nowadays when accosted I explain to them that anyone wearing white socks with Hush Puppies and a
badge saying
HI! I'M GUS!
probably couldn't talk me into getting out of a burning car, much less into making
a lifelong commitment to a deity, and ask them to send someone more intelligent and with a better dress
sense next time, but back then I was too meek to do anything but listen politely and utter non-committal
'Hmmmm's' to their suggestions that Jesus could turn my life around. Somewhere over the Atlantic, as I was
sitting taking stock of my 200 cubic centimetres of personal space, as one does on a long plane flight, I
spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it.
When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow.
'Have you found Jesus?' he said suddenly.
