Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 8: At long last, glorious beer in Salzburg and Munich.
Air travel digression: I wasn’t a very good flier 40 years ago. Given my lack of experience in the air (and by extension, with life itself), this was understandable.
Up until 1985 I’d made only two round-trip flights ever. The first one came as a young boy in a prop plane from Louisville to Detroit. We taxied and taxied, and famously I asked the adults if we’d be flying, or driving.
Alas, this did not foretell a career in standup comedy.
The second time was in 1978, to San Francisco and back via Dallas during Christmas season. It was unpleasant in the extreme, and I’d have benefitted from sedation.
My problem wasn’t an aversion to enclosed spaces, or disgust with the free-range Hare Krishna devotees who still roamed airports during those unenlightened times, but a fear of heights. This continues to plague me sporadically to this very day, even though I’ve gotten far better managing it.
Consequently, the prospect of leaving on a jet plane for Europe instigated a fair share of anxiety. Everything about the flight made me nervous, and worse yet, I’d gotten absolutely hammered in Chicago the night before the flight.
Boarding Icelandair for Luxembourg via Reykjavik to embark upon the long-awaited adventure of a lifetime, I was brutally hungover, debilitated and seemingly immune to the hair of the dog, constitutionally and existentially challenged, and with certain doom lurking just around the corner.
Was it too late to call the whole thing off? At least there was a bright side. I wasn’t seated in the smoking section, which in those days still existed to the rear of the plane.
Using the toilet meant cutting through a solid wall of cigarette smoke; obviously, one couldn’t just step outside the plane for a breath of fresh air. Later I realized that for an addict, being deprived of nicotine stood greatly to exacerbate the sort of irrational fears gripping me, with the added joys of withdrawal of the sort I’d mercifully never experience because I didn’t smoke cigarettes.
However, the Rubicon was ripe for crossing. After the usual pleasantries, instructions and delays, we took off and reached cruising altitude. The trip was inexorable and irreversible. Europe finally was coming,...Read more
