(Host)As the busy summer travel season gets underway, Hinesburg writer and
commentator Bill Schubart is casting his satirical and somewhat
jaundiced eye on the process of modern air travel.
(Schubart)
After my wife stuffed a last minute contraband wheel of very ripe
Livarot cheese into her carry-on luggage, we entered the airport,
cleared security, and settled into our seats for the seven-hour flight
home from Paris.
Just in case you didn’t know, the word “travel”
comes from the French word travail, which means work or burden. The
etymology is apt.
A man of similar girth to my own dropped into
the aisle next to my wife and, after the plane taxied what seemed like
half way home, we were suddenly airborne.
The other passenger
compressing my wife was a seasoned and well-accessorized traveler. After
adjusting his Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and the font size on
his Kindle, he inflated his fur-bearing neck goiter, reclined his seat
onto the kneecaps of the passenger behind and began a noisy battle with
sleep apnea.
As the TV screen twelve inches from my face showed
an airplane icon over Ireland, the in-flight dinner service began.
First, however, we were offered the opportunity to open an airline
credit card account that ensured we would never again have to pay to
check our bags on this carrier, even though for our first fifty years of
travel we never had.
The offer not to charge us for something
previously free if we signed up for a credit card at usurious interest
rates left us first amused and then incensed. Sensing our reluctance,
the steward added that any over-priced duty-free goods we bought on the
plane would not be charged interest for the first month.
We were
then offered the choice of a $10.00 sandwich and a $4 bottle of Evian
water or a free plastic cup of tap water and our choice of a free
peanut, pretzel or animal cracker. I took the sandwich. The bun looked
like the 10-week old plaster cast removed from my daughter’s broken arm.
I separated the soggy breads to find a mysterious pink slab of
something, a carefully ironed leaf of lettuce and two pale pink tomato
slices varnished with now translucent imitation mayonnaise.
In
addition to the usual chorus of wheezing, gasping, hacking and sneezing,
a woman immediately behind us, sounding like she might be in the final
stages of ebola, was seized by a violent attack of coughing. This
apparently terrified the man next to her who unsuccessfully begged a
surly cabin steward to be reseated.
Finally, the pilot
announced our “final descent” as if we were about to cross the Styx, and
a chorus of toddlers began wailing like infant howler monkeys as the
pressure on tiny tympanic membranes mounted.
When we landed, an
earnest little US customs beagle dragged his beady-eyed handler over to
the carry-on bag that concealed the now very ripe cheese. As a
diversion, my cagey wife withdrew and surrendered a ripe banana to the
alert agriculture officer who seemed satisfied and left. But not her
canine counterpart who, wise to the ploy, kept looking back at my guilty
wife and maintaining a full body-wag as we left the terminal.