Leave the Path

I’ve kind of been regretting making this post, in part because it’s probably going to be my last, and in part because there’s a lot to say and I’m not sure I even remember all of it.  Yesterday I watched my first sunrise in Ankara, on the way to the airport, and we watched the sunset from the plane as we hopped from NY to Raleigh. The time between the two events was more than 20 hours. It was a long, long day.

We woke at 4:00 AM Ankara time and hopped into the car.  Hakan drove the Passat, and Volkan brought his Golf so that both brothers, both parents, both suitcases and both carry-ons, as well as both travelers, would make it to the airport.  We didn’t talk much on the way.  It was too early, and too sad.  Even at the airport, I didn’t know what to say.  I said thank you, but it didn’t seem like enough.  We said goodbye, but it didn’t seem real.  Even with the sun painting bright colors on the sky, and with another family waiting for us on the other side of the Atlantic, it seemed grim to be leaving.  We did it, though, hugged, walked, and passed the security point.

Then, while we were waiting for the plane, something cool happened.  A young guy came up and introduced himself as a friend of Volkan’s from school who was also flying to Istanbul, in order to catch a flight to Chicago.  I think his name was Uzgur or something similar.  He knew our names and even had heard about this blog.  We mostly just said the basic traveler niceties (Where are you from? Where do you live?  How do you like it?   Why are you traveling?) but it was a good diversion from feeling sad about leaving.  He seemed like a nice guy. We lost track of him somewhere in Istanbul, though, and I honestly can’t remember if we said goodbye.  (All of yesterday is sort of a blur.)

At the Istanbul airport, Emre and I looked at the duty free shops for last-minute gifts and then sat down for a snack at a café.  We were munching away on French-fries and Efes when a high-school-aged guy came up and said hi.  This guy is the second-cousin of our friend Berk from Chapel Hill, and he’d seen pictures of us before.  He was actually on his way to the states to visit family and to look at schools.  I’d known he was coming because Berk had asked me about places to take him in NC, but it was a huge coincidence that he was, in fact, on the same flight to New York!  Talk about a small world.  He hung out with Emre and me until the trans-Atlantic flight, and we talked about what he would be doing in the States.  In a way, seeing someone excited about going there made me more enthusiastic to be returning.  We sat apart from one another on the plane, and didn’t talk until we were stateside.

The crossing was long.  Really long.  Ten hours is long enough that one, or even ten or thirty minutes isn’t even substantial by comparison; it seems like time doesn’t pass and the flight will go on forever.  I always think “Oh, well I’ll just take a book.”  But it’s not satisfying to read; it’s not like sitting on the couch for ten hours.  Planes are noisy and bumpy and there are other people and a movie going.  There’s not quite enough stimulation to be interesting, but too much to concentrate on anything else.  I did sleep a few hours, and Emre slept much more than me, and every time we woke up, we were still over ocean.  Mostly I just sat.  I watched the movies for a while.  (They were really bad, especially the new Steve Martin version of The Pink Panther.  I think some of my soul may have leaked out during that film.)  I got bored, and grumpy.  Sometimes I woke up Emre, accidentally or intentionally, but he didn’t like it.  I sat some more.

Finally, we reached New York, and as we landed, it looked almost like we might run into the ocean.  We had four hours before our next flight, so we exited last.  We found our bags and carried them through customs.  We re-deposited them for the connecting flight.  The staff were unpleasant, as I have come to expect from JFK, giving conflicting requests and getting frustrated with the foreign travelers for not understanding.  Emre and I looked at perfume in the duty-free, but in sort of a daze, and we didn’t get anything. We sat in a pub watching the World Cup game for a while, and we re-found Berk’s cousin (I unfortunately don’t recall his name) in time to grab a quick dinner of pizza and burgers.  Eventually, we all said goodbye, as he caught a plane to Florida to visit friends before coming to NC, and we boarded the little plane to RDU.

We didn’t pass much security to get on (they didn’t even want to see our IDs) and the plane was tiny after the trans-Atlantic jet.  We sat in the very back, and it seemed very crowded and closed.  In the seat across from us was a blond, blue-eyed guy with a big beard and a cap doing prayers in Arabic.  Maybe it was the tiredness, or the closed-in feeling of the plane, or the inherit nervousness of watching the sun set.  Or maybe it was the way that this guy seemed so very nervous about being on the plane.  Whatever the reason, I got it into my head somehow that he seemed like a terrorist.  It’s kind of embarrassing now, and I knew that it was silly, then, as well, but once I got the idea, I couldn’t shake it.  I started getting more and more anxious.  I tried to talk to Emre about it (in Turk-Anglo-French so that no one would understand us) but he was really sleepy and kept dozing off.  Finally, he understood that I was upset and what was wrong with me.  He was totally unfazed.  He told me that it is totally normal for Muslims to do these prayers before a flight.  He also tried to tell me that no one who was actually a terrorist would actually look like that, because they’d raise suspicions at security points.  What he said helped, but I was still nervous.  And I felt horrible, even in that moment, for panicking about this.  The power of terrorism lies not in being able to kill all of the people who appose you, but in being able to scare people into respecting you with relatively little force.  I knew that, in all probability, this guy was just a nice college kid who converted to an interesting religion and had a fear of flying.  If I’d been able to convince myself to talk to him, we might have even had some things in common.  But, because I have very vivid images of what happens when there’s a bomb on a plane, and because “very nervous young Muslim man traveling alone on a plane in NY” fits a per-conception that I have of who a terrorist would be, I was scared.  I didn’t want to be afraid, of course, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.It was unfair to him to make this association, and I hate that I did exactly what actual terrorists would want:  I was anxious when there was no actual cause. 

Once we got into the air, it was better.  The guy who scared me started talking to the girl in the seat next to him, who I noticed carried a rosary in her hand, even though she’d been reading absent-mindedly as we took off.  He had a Southern accent, and he sounded calm enough after take-off.  We had some turbulence, but the 2-hour flight seemed short after the Atlantic crossing.

After landing, we had no trouble finding our bags and hiring a taxi.  We rode all the way back to our apartment, exchanging only a few words with the driver.  We dragged our bags upstairs, brushed our teeth, and collapsed on the bed.  I slept very well and woke up at an appropriate time.  I have been running errands today, and I’m not really even that tired.  Maybe I’m going to escape jet-lag this time.

So that’s it.  This adventure is over.  Back to paying bills and washing laundry and turning in paperwork for this and that.  John Stewart Mills suggested that the happiest life is made up of alternating excitement and tranquility.  I’ve had my excitement, and it should be rewarding, now, to have a few uneventful days.