December 22, 2012: Delhi or Splash

I sat in one of the last remaining chairs near the gate and dropped my backpack in front of me.  It thumped onto the carpet.  I stacked my duffel on top of it, slumped back into my chair, and rested my feet on the duffel.  Relaxing. The blue screen overhead asserted that my flight to Delhi was on time, but I was not inclined to believe it.  Only twenty-five minutes remained until the scheduled departure time and we weren’t boarding yet.  I blew my nose.  I was learning that on-time departures are not the United way—of the three United flights I’d had scheduled over the preceding two days, one had been cancelled, one had been delayed, and I’d had to miss the other because of delays elsewhere.  It appeared that I would be relaxing awhile longer.

I looked around.  The whole Newark airport had seemed crowded, but this end of the concourse was especially so.  People clustered around the entrance to the boarding line, waiting for the first boarding call.  Not a line, just a crowd of folks standing beside the retractable belt-ropes.  This was not nearly as intense, I warbed myself, as the crowds in India.  But it was a crowd of Indians.  People traveling to spend Christmas with family, most likely.

 The young woman next to me had set her rolling bag in front of her and was resting her boots on top of it.  Three-buckle brown boots with a moccasin toe, kind of a stylized version of upland bird hunting boots.  Like what J. Crew would sell if they marketed footwear for bird hunting.

“Kind of like having a portable ottoman,” I said, gesturing toward her rolling bag, having searched for something better to say and come up empty.

“Yes it is,” she said.

“Nice after a long day on your feet,” I said.

She agreed.  Her name was Puntab and she was traveling home for the holidays.  She was from a smaller city in southern India.  I told her that a buddy of mine was around Bangalore seeing his family, and that he and I would meet in a day or so in Jaipur to do a volunteer vacation.  Her town wasn’t too far from Bangalore, she said.  She tried to tell me where but I wasn’t getting it.  I handed her my iPhone so she could type the city name and pull up a map.

“So you’re doing a . . . volunteer vacation?” she asked as she typed.

“Yes, in Jaipur.”

 “What are you doing?”

“I’m not too sure,” I said.  “It has something to do with slums and children.  Slum children.  Apparently there’s a shelter there where the kids can have food and a place to stay, but it’s not in good repair.  So I think we’re going to be fixing it.  Something like that.”

“Like Habitat for Humanity?”

“Yeah, basically.  I think.  But the thing is, the needs of the program we’re a part of change all the time, so the program changes week to week.  One week it might be construction, and the next it might be handing out food, and the next it might involve medical supplies . . . you just don’t know.  I booked this trip two months ago, so it could’ve changed.  But I think it’s construction.  I hope so; I know something about that.”

She looked at me.  “So how does it work with the airfare?  Does the program cover it?”

“No I have to pay for that.“

“So why . . . ?”  she was starting to smile.

“I know, it’s a long way to go to volunteer.”

“So why not just give the money to the program and let them use it?”

The blue screen above admitted that the flight would be delayed.  I had to blow my nose again.  It was, I reflected, a reasonable question.

*                                  *                                  *

This trip was supposed to start yesterday.  I was jouncing along in a bus that would take me to the train that would take me to the Atlanta airport when I got an email from United announcing that it had cancelled my flight to Newark.  That was a problem, since my itinerary called for AtlantaàNewarkàDelhi and it was too late in the day to walk to Newark.   The email informed me that I would now be departing on the following day, traveling AtlantaàClevelandàNewarkàDelhi.  I did not want that delay.  But I kept cool.  When the bus stopped, I walked to a Burger King, found a seat behind a window (which happened to contain a very large sticker advertising curly fries), opened up my computer, and got on the phone with United.  There I remained for fifty-six minutes, waiting on hold, smelling curly fries, searching Travelocity, listening to an irritable lady yell over the intercom what order numbers were ready, and occasionally listening to someone in the Philippines read United’s disgruntled-customer script into the phone.  Fifty-six minutes, if you have never tried it, is a long time to smell curly fries and not eat any, particularly if you have skipped breakfast and do not have any pleasant tasks at hand to distract you.  But I was determined to eat healthy since I needed to get over my cold.  The image of luscious, anaconda-sized curly fries in the window in front of me did not help.  After much wrangling, the woman in the Phillipines offered me a flight later that day going from AtlantaàCharlotteàMunichàFrankfurtàDelhi.  I said I’d take it.  Then she took it back.  She said the best I could, after all, do was wait a day as United had originally announced.  I changed tacks and tried again.  Nothing.  Finally I boarded a bus home, leaving without curly fries or a new flight.

my Burger King office

No matter.  I used the day to tie up a few loose ends in Atlanta, watch a good movie, and get healthier.  Today my girlfriend Anne drove me to the airport where, after trying unsuccessfully to convince her that she should really see India and could probably fit in an overhead compartment, and giving her more kisses in public than she’s really comfortable with, I strode into the terminal refreshed.  The blue screens said my flight to Cleveland was on time.  I ran through the legs of my trip in my head.  I realized that I needed a hard-copy, printed voucher to get in the cab from Delhi to Jaipur.  Although I’d printed the voucher for yesterday’s trip, I had forgotten to print the updated one for today’s trip.  No problem—I had the email containing the voucher, and surely someone at the airport could print it for me.

The kind United representative at gate D8A said she could help.  She gave me an email address to which I could forward the voucher.  So I pulled up my email account to forward the voucher and there, like a mine waiting to be stepped on, was another email from United.  I opened it.  My flight from ClevelandàNewark was delayed, it said.  I would not catch the flight from NewarkàDelhi.

“Did you forward that email yet?” Anna asked me.  Customers were beginning to line up.

“Now I’ve got another problem,” I said.  I showed her the new email.

May the sun eternally shine on people like Anna.  She could have told me I was out of luck, or to visit United’s customer service, or to call the Phillipines again and I doubt she would have faced any personal repercussion.  I would have probably faced another day’s delay.  But she started digging on her computer.  She tried to book me on a later United flight from AtlantaàNewark (one that Travelocity showed as full), but that flight was also delayed.  In the end she found a Delta flight that would get me to Newark on time, and she booked me on it.

“But the thing about Delta,” she said, “is if you’re not at the gate right on time, they’re gone.”  She handed me a boarding pass.  I was gone.

Once Delta had delivered me to Newark, I returned to the task of getting my voucher printed.  I thought it would be easy.  It wasn’t.  I tried airline lounges, computer stores, currency-exchanges, and a duty-free shop.  I tried Concourse A, the main terminal, and Concourse C.  Folks either did not have a printer, did not have access to email, or did not give a damn.  I kept roaming.  Finally, on the seventh try, a kind woman in an airline lounge that I wasn’t supposed to enter printed the voucher from her personal email account.  And so, voucher in duffel, I walked to the end of the concourse, set my luggage on the carpet, and sat beside Puntab with my feet propped up.

*                                  *                                  *

My traveling mishaps are, of course, first-world problems.  I look forward to the Jaipur slums.  Replace “my flight was delayed” with “I have no home;” replace “I am getting over a cold” with “I have no access to any medical care;” replace “I prefer not to eat curly fries” with “I need food.”  The problems of the desperately poor are immediate and significant and addressing them gives one a sense of relevance—a sense of addressing something that matters.  These are basic, honest problems far removed from the nitshit problems described above.

I look forward to the Jaipur slums.  There is something quintessentially American about leaving behind the patterned nitshit of settled life and traveling to where circumstances are uncertain.  Virtually all modern Americans’ ancestors did just that.  The iconography of this gamble pervades Americana: it is Plymouth Rock, Ellis Island, Conestoga wagons emblazoned “California or bust,” Chinese immigrants wielding sledgehammers and railroad spikes, Latin Americans waiting outside Home Depot.

*                                  *                                  *

“Well that’s not really the choice,” I told Puntab.  “I guess I’m not that unselfish.  I was going to go somewhere.  It was a question of whether I took my backpack and wandered around in Central America or went to volunteer someplace.”

Puntab nodded.

“I know the airfare is worth more than five days of my work,” I said, “but I guess I’m hoping to get something out of it too.”  I fingered my boarding pass and wondered what lay ahead for me.  “I look forward to the Jaipur slums.”

United called my boarding zone.  I took my phone from Puntab, wished her happy holidays, and joined the cluster near the retractable belt-ropes for our flight across the Atlantic.

Delhi or splash.