SPACE AND TIME
This is the first time I have flown directly from the United States to Sri Lanka. In all the many times that I have come to
Sri Lanka I have been leading a group and I scheduled the flights so that I and the people I am with could have ten hours in some European city-Amsterdam, London, Zurich, Paris-to stretch our legs and experience a new city. So this time I was wondering if my 86 year old body would hold up over the 24 hours of flying, if I would ache all over and not be able to sleep and arrive a wreck.
To help prevent that, I got prescriptions for Ambien (for long flights) and Albrazalom for short flights. Asheville to Atlanta was a short 40 minutes, up and down. My goal in Atlanta was to get a promise that I would get a cart or wheelchair in Amsterdam to get me to the next flight to Mumbai, since I would have only an hour and less if the plane was late. I was promised a wheel chair and even instructed to get on the flight to Amsterdam with those who couldn‘t walk, giving me time before anyone else got on the flight, to get situated. I had a middle seat between a Liberian US Navy contractor going to Dubai (which we are just flying over as I write this) and a Dutch woman who spoke perfect English. When the plane took off I took half an Ambien, expecting to instantly be as conked out as I was the first time I took Ambien years earlier a little before my flight and in a complete fog almost missed the flight. This time nothing happened. I had expected to sleep through dinner but, when still wide awake when dinner was being served, ate it instead. And then for what seemed like a long time I sat quietly with my eyes closed. But then, suddenly, was woken up for the 3 a.m. breakfast that airlines like to serve you.
There was no wheel chair or cart for me in Amsterdam but another anxious couple also going to Mumbai, with a husband that couldn‘t walk, were offered an empty wheel chair which the wife offered to push and off they went, me following behind, trying to keep up with her. It wasn‘t far and we got there just as the Mumbai flight was starting to board.
At this point I was quite rested. I got to know an Indian couple seated beside me until they were evicted to another part of the plane for seating themselves using the boarding pass of their previous flight. And then a very pleasant Dutch women on her way to do yoga in Goa took the aisle seat leaving an empty seat between us. Soon after we took off we got another meal. But already I was beginning to become spaced out. We had made a six hour time jump overnight and I was not sure if I was eating breakfast or lunch. But soon after we ate I began to feel sleepy because I had missed three or four hours of night sleep already. So from Amsterdam to Dubai, six hours, without aid of a sleeping pill I slept very comfortably. I was lucky enough to have a window seat. I glanced out a couple of times, as we must have been passing at midday over the Alps and the Mediterrean and other interesting places. But all I saw was clouds. And then it began to get dark I began to have a very weird floating sensation. The high ceilinged plane surrounded me like a cocoon, immersing me in a whooshing sound. We were suspended in space. I did wonder for a little while how much fuel this behometh of a plane needed to stay suspended for hours and hours. And then I began it give in to the odd sensation of being outside time and space. A screen in front of me told me the time in Los
Angeles, Amsterdam and Delhi, but none of them seemed relevant. Time, measured by hunger and sleeptimes, had vanished.
All time seem relative and insubstantial and aribitrary. Right now I am eating a breakfast calzone for no other reason than that we are about to get to Mumbai at 1 a.m. and the flight crew uses a meal to wake everyone up. But my body doesn‘t know if it is breakfast, lunch or supper time and feels a little insulted to be stuffed with food at no time at all. I have the same feeling about where we are. The screen in front of me has a image of a plane above a digital map of the Gulf of Oman. But I don‘t have the feeling of being anywhere at all.
When my missionary family returned to India after the Second World War our trip required a three day train ride in a Pullman car from Hartford to Seattle and then a three week boat trip on an Army troop ship, returning to India to pick up more returning American troops, bunks two feet apart and three high, aptly named the Marine Jumper, as it wallowed over the huge waves, making all of us sick most of the time. We certainly knew where we were as the pin moved on the large map of the Pacific a half inch each day and we knew what time it was on each endless day as we waited for mealtimes, the only entertainment.
But this 24 hour trip, much of it asleep or snoozing, floating, disconnected from time and space, in limbo, has been, without even being able to measure it, an almost instant and even pleasant passage.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 