The longest journey ever made in the history of humankind was the trip I took from my mother’s home in mid-Wisconsin to Digby, England, where I was living at the time with my wife and children, not the longest measured in ordinary miles or hours, but easily the longest measured on the Bizzare-O-Meter.
It started with the timing of the trip. Just before the Thanksgiving Day weekend I found I would have to make a trip to the States, stay there for three days, then return to Digby. No road trip destined to fall apart at every joint could have a more obvious great, big red flag if Steve Martin and John Candy were waving it.
I was in the Air Force at the time, stationed at a small base near Lincoln. Under normal circumstances I would have gone to the orderly room to submit a request to go on emergency leave. This being the Thanksgiving weekend, though, the orderly room wasn’t open, and even if it had been, there was no commander around to sign my papers, not even an emergency back-up commander. Instead, I called the NCOIC, the sergeant in charge of our unit.
“Just leave your request with me,” the sergeant said. “I’ll get him to sign it as soon as he comes back.”
It was the first time in ten years of service I’d ever heard anyone, let alone a sergeant, suggest something as out of the norm as leaving the unit without traveling papers. “You mean I can travel outside the country without leave papers?” I asked him, just to make sure I understood him.
“Oh, yeah,” he assured me, “as long as you’re permanent party, no problem.” He meant that, so long as I was assigned to a unit in the United Kingdom, I was okay. Taking him at his word, I went home to pack.
The trip to the States was mostly benign, I supposed because of the Thanksgiving weekend rush. All the airport personnel and all the flight crews had just one goal in mind: To get everyone in and out as quickly as possible. They did that seamlessly. Time passed in such an ordinary if boring way that the details of it have blurred into every other transatlantic flight I’ve ever taken.
It was the details of the trip back that have burned themselves into my memory forever. From the moment I arrived at O’Hare, things started to go suspiciously wrong; little things at first but growing incrementally weirder with each new iteration.
I had a few hours before I boarded my flight and I hadn’t eaten supper yet, so I figured I’d grab a bite in one of the restaurants at the terminal. Trouble was, I had only a few dollars in my wallet so I went in search of an ATM to reload with a few twenties, but the machine I found was broken. At this point I was not thinking this was a problem. I’m in O’Hare airport, the largest, sprawlingest airport in the midwest. I’ll find another ATM. Who wouldn’t be thinking that? But no matter how many times I walked the length of the terminal, I could find only one other ATM, and it was broken, too. What are the odds of that? I might have been able to accept that they were empty, but broken? Both of them? And how can an airport as large as O’Hare, which tens of thousands of people tramp through every day, have only two ATMs in any one terminal?
By scrounging through every pocket in my jacket and carry-on bag I could put together just enough money for a sandwich at one of the taverns. While I was wolfing it down I got to chatting with a guy on the next stool over who wanted to buy me a drink when he found out I was in the service. I don’t like to turn down hospitality, and besides, I didn’t have enough for a beer, so I accepted his generous offer. It was the one thing on the trip that went right, unless you take into account that he wanted to buy me a second round but the bartender was closing up and wouldn’t pour another no matter how much my new friend wheedled him.
My flight went non-stop from Chicago to London Heathrow, which typically lasts about twelve hours, a numbingly long time even if I managed to snag a bulkhead seat where I could stretch my legs. On this trip, however, I got stuck with a seat was so far back in the tail of the plane that the inner wall of the fuselage curled up under my feet. I have never been shoehorned into a more uncomfortable seat ever in my whole life. I could put my right foot flat on the floor and that was it. My left foot had to ride up the curve of the wall, or I could cross it over my right knee. When I was really desperate to find another position, I discovered that I could shove it under the seat ahead of me if I cranked my whole self around until I was facing the one o’clock position, but it was so awkward I managed to hold that pose for only ten or fifteen minutes before my hips started to complain about the crazy geometry.
The bad seating arrangement was made worse by the passive-aggressive guy in the seat next to me who waved his elbows around at the margins of his personal space all through the flight. He marked his territory as soon as he sat down by opening an issue of the Wall Street Journal and spreading it wide open in front of him, elbows out. Without a newspaper or a book of my own I could retaliate only by shifting back and forth in my seat to make myself as large as possible, if you can credibly make a stick figure look large. It turns out I can’t. The only notice he took of me was to mutter “Excuse me” each time he almost, but not quite, jabbed me in the nose with his elbow as he turned the pages.
When he finished reading the paper several hours after takeoff I had the crazy idea I might get some relief from his constant effort to enlarge his personal space as much as possible, but almost immediately after he folded the paper up and stashed it in the seatback pocket in front of him he opened his laptop and began to rap at the keys so energetically he was like a cartoon charcter come to life. He kept his elbows and wrists elevated, just like they taught him in typing class, and as he worked the keyboard he came so near to flapping his arms he looked as if he were trying to take flight. I might have gotten a good laugh out of it if I hadn’t been focusing every fiber of my being on flattening myself against the fuselage wall where his elbows wouldn’t be able to black my eyes.
After twelve hours of cramped seating and trying to avoid physical assault, the engines slowed and my ears popped, signalling that we had begun our descent somewhere over the coast of the United Kingdom. The captain confirmed this by switching on the public address system with a hollow pop and beginning what I anticipated would be the usual pre-landing litany of useless information about speed, altitude and temperature. He was about to say nothing of the sort.
“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, ” he greeted us. “As we begin our descent over the Welsh countryside, I’d like to take ten minutes of your time to inform you of a few special precautions we’ve taken for today’s landing at Heathrow.”
Precautions? Special precautions? That got everyone’s attention. What special precautions?
“These precautions are not the result of an emergency,” he continued, very casually, no emphasis at all on any word. The message seemed very unusual, even at this early stage, but his tone of voice was so measured as to imply that what he wanted to tell us was just in the way of making time-filling conversation, hardly worth mentioning at all. He was laying it on thick to make this to sound like the usual pre-landing babble, even if it patently wasn’t. “We’re not in any danger,” he assured us. “The plane is entirely under our control.”
Well. That was good to hear.
“Shortly after we departed Chicago,” he went on (slowly, casually), “we detected a leak in one of the hydraulic systems. The loss of fluid didn’t affect our ability to fly plane in any way, however, so we felt there was no reason not to continue our journey.”
Hm. We sprung a leak. In the hydraulic system. Sounds dire. But surely it was a small leak, so small that the pilot, an experienced professional with hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours of flying time, a man keenly aware that the lives of three hundred passengers were in his hands, reviewed all the data and the determined it did not affect his control of the aircraft as it flew thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Okay. It must have been a good call. We made it all the way to the coast of Wales, after all. But if it made no difference one way or another, why did he have to take “special precautions” and why was he telling us about them as we were descending to land?
No need to wonder; he was about to fill us in on all the details. Maybe too many.
“The leak occurred in the hydraulic system that raises and lowers the main landing gear,” he said. “Even though all the hydraulic fluid has drained from this system,” – wait, all of it? – “we will be able to extend our landing gear by simply opening the doors that hold them in. The landing gear will drop out of the bay of their own weight, and we’ll make sure they’re locked into place by rocking the wings just a bit. I’ll try to keep it to a gentle roll.”
So the work-around for the leaky hydraulic system, after the plane pees away all the fluid into the jet stream on a trans-Atlantic flight, is to let the landing gear simply fall out of the fuselage and trust that they’re going to get stuck in the open position. Well … Oh-kay! I’m sure the designers of the landing gear foresaw a situation just like this one and engineered all the bits and pieces so they’d properly click together of their own accord. And surely the pilot has done this before. He’s so calm about it. It’s purely routine to him. We can’t possibly be in any danger here.
“The hydraulic system also extends the flaps.”
Okay. I’ve flown quite a few times around the world in a lot of different airliners. I’m no worrywart when it comes to flying, but it was hard, at this point, not to see a domino effect going on here and thinking there might be almost no limit to the number of systems on the plane that might be affected by our leaky (leaked? Empty?) hydraulic system. But okay. I still had some faith, even though it was fossilizing into a resigned kind of faith, in the jumbo jet’s designers. If they built a set of landing gear that could be safely deployed after the hydraulic system that deploys them had been put out of commission by a leak, then surely they figured out a way to give the pilot full use of the flaps without hydraulic fluid.
“We need to use the flaps to land safely,” the pilot told us, “so each one of them has an electric motor to extend them in a situation like this, ” – there, see? – “but unfortunately the motors aren’t powerful enough to retract the flaps once they’re extended. After I put the flaps down we’ll be committed to making a landing because we can’t fly a circle around the airport with the flaps extended to try again. So, to make sure we can land on the first pass, the folks at Heathrow have closed a runway to every approaching plane but ours, and they’ve cleared all traffic from the air corridor we’re going to use on our approach to land.”
This just kept getting better and better. We had a runway all to ourselves. The traffic lane we were in had been cleared of all other aircraft. It was like getting special permission to use the HOV lane on the highway through Chicago. With nobody in our way, the pilot could just about stick one finger in the steering wheel, freeing his other arm to throw casually over the back of his seat, and ease us straight in for a smooth landing. I could almost convince myself that, for a no-fuss landing, losing all the hydraulic fluid was the best thing that could have happened to my flight.
Almost. There was just one more thing the pilot was fussing over:
“The affected hydraulic system also provided steering for the nose wheel and pressure to apply the brakes. When we land I’ll have to roll out straight ahead and keep on rolling until we lose all our momentum and come to a stop, probably somewhere near the end of the runway. It’s miles long, so we’re in no danger of running off the end. A tug will be waiting there to tow us to the terminal.”
This far down the laundry list of broken things on our big old jet airliner, adding no steering and no brakes didn’t make so much of a difference that it worried me much. I figured our chances of a successful landing were about even: Either we were going to crash and burn, or we weren’t.
The wheels came down with the usual bump-clunk and, just as he promised, the pilot did a slow, lazy wing-waggle, rolling the plane first to one side, then to the other. He must have been satisfied that the wheels were locked in place because he flew rock steady and straight as an arrow for miles and miles after that. There was no turbulance that I remember. I could hardly tell we were descending until the flaps whined down into place, causing the plane to nose over a bit.
Touchdown was smooth as silk. The plane’s wheels kissed the concrete so gently and with the tiniest of squeeks that I wasn’t sure when it had happened or even that we were on the ground until the rumble of the tires along the runway confirmed it. And even after the thrust reversers kicked in the plane didn’t go through the usual buck and weave it would have if he’d been able to jam on the brakes because, hey, no brakes!
After a long roll-out we came to a gentle stop near the end of the runway, where we added one more glitch to our list: The tug waiting for us had the wrong kind of hitch to pull our particular model 747, so we had to hang out there for half an hour or so while a replacement tug was called up and raced out to drag us out of the way. It took long enough that we lost our turn at the gate and had to be towed to a parking spot off in left field where a small fleet of buses converged on our plane to ferry us to the terminal.
It was late in the afternoon when the flight crew cracked the doors and we all began to climb down the truck-top stairways from the plane to the first few buses waiting for us on the tarmac. Each bus was standing room only by design; there were no seats, only those floor-to-ceiling stainless steel poles you find on subway trains. We climbed aboard for what we thought would be a fairly short trip – I could see the terminal; it was right over there! And yet somehow the ride went on forever. Honestly, I can’t remember that I’ve ever been on a bus ride that lasted so long without leaving the city limits. Even so, it wasn’t like the driver was taking his time. Actually, he seemed to be in quite a hurry to get somewhere. We ducked through one darkened tunnel after another, arched over roads jammed full of traffic, snapped around blind hairpin corners, all at high speed and always as if the driver was living out his wildest roller coaster fantasy. When he finally slowed down to approach a waiting jetway, we just about blew out the windows with our collective sigh of relief.
We stepped off the bus into a high-ceilinged waiting area roughly as big as an elementary school gym. A row of chest-high desks, each with a uniformed customs official standing behind it, made a barrier along the far wall between us and the exits. The upside of jumbo jets is that it’s become possible to move a whole lot of people from one country to another all at once. The downside, and it’s a doozy as far as I’m concerned, is that whenever one of them lands I end up in a stampede of three or four hundred people all headed for the customs desk.
And somewhere in Heathrow airport my darling wife was waiting for me, and had been for hours longer than she expected to be. All she knew was that our arrival had been delayed time and time again, and from experience I knew all too well there was no way to sit in an airport doing nothing for hours without getting tired, then desperately bored and finally cranky enough to want to kill somebody. And I would likely be the first person she spoke to. For exactly that reason I wanted to phone her to tell her what happened, let her know I was off the plane and headed her way, and arrange for a place to meet, and I wanted to do it as soon as possible, but every minute I stood at a payphone meant dozens, maybe hundreds of people were queueing up ahead of me to get through customs. It was a desperate situation to be in.
Our unusual situation had one bright spot, though: Just one bus at a time could mate with the jetway to offload, giving me five minutes or so before the next wave of passengers came in and the line to the customs desks grew longer. I found a payphone on one side of the room and dialed B’s cell phone number, holding my breath against the hope she’d remembered to charge the battery. She carried the cell with her everywhere she went for emergencies just like this one, but she’d always had a tiny bit of a problem remembering to plug it in when she got home. It was very often dead, particularly only when she needed it most. This time, though, it not only worked fine, she also answered my call on the first ring. “Where are you?” she asked as soon as I finished saying, “Hi, it’s me.”
“Customs,” I told her and, with one eye on the door to watch for the next bus, I gave her the short version of the leak and the landing and the wait and the roller coaster ride. “I’ve got to get in line before another bus pulls up,” I warned her, watching dozens more passengers stream in and form up in a queue to have their passports inspected and stamped. After a quick kiss-kiss smoojy-woojy I hung up and began the hour-long snake-dance through the maze of ropes in the center of the room until I finally stood at the front of the line for the next uniformed officer who waved at me.
“Welcome to the U.K.,” he greeted me brightly. “Passport, please?” I slipped it across the desk. “Thank you. You’re on active duty?” he asked, when he saw my military ID sticking out of the centerfold.
“That’s right,” I nodded.
“May I see a copy of your orders, please?”
“I’m not traveling on orders. I’m permanently assigned in the U.K.,” I explained, and gave him the name of my squadron and base of assignment.
“You’re on leave, then?” he asked.
“Emergency leave, yes.”
“All right, then, may I see your leave papers?”
“I don’t actually have any leave papers,” I confessed, and quickly tap-danced my way through the tune of trying to arrange emergency leave right before a significant American holiday that most British had never heard of. He understood my predicament but was unsure what do do about my lack of documentation and called his supervisor over to explain it him. As they both frowned at my passport unhappily I tried on as many pitifully helpless expressions as I could recall, and eventually they stamped my passport and let me through. I doubt making puppy dog eyes at them had any influence over their decision. It was more likely the case that they didn’t consider my infraction worth the hassle of making the phone calls and filling out all the paperwork to have me clapped in chains and hauled off to the clink.
And so ended the airborne portion of my travels. I made the long trek through the labyrinth of hallways connecting the many concourses of Heathrow to the baggage claim area where My Darling B had been waiting for hours on an uncomfortably misshapen pseudo-leather chair that only a thousand or so other people had put their feet on, most of them without shoes. She was delighted to see me, greeting me with hugs and kisses and other happiness while we waited for my suitcases to be vomited up by the stainless steel baggage mangler. The claim area was surprisingly close to the parking garage and she’d even managed to snag an empty spot on the bottom floor. We hit the road in good time with B at the wheel because my brains were wooly from jet lag and sleep deprivation. I never could get any shuteye on jet airliners, just the jerk and a snort kind of dozing that’s a lot of fun to watch other people do but agony when it’s happening to me.
Dusk was falling as we left Heathrow but the airport, urban London and the six-lane M25 motorway were all brightly lit by a tall picket line of sodium lights bathing everything on the road in sepia tone. We turned off the M25 to the M1, kept following the road north until we hooked up with the A1, also a well-lit divided highway. It probably wasn’t until we were in the neighborhood of Alconbury, were we knew the back roads well enough to make a few short cuts along country roads, that I noticed it became difficult to see when Barb dimmed the headlights for approaching drivers. The thought slowly crept into my head that the low beam on one of the bulbs was burned out. No way, I argued with myself. There is no way this many mechanical malfunctions could possibly gang up on me in a single day!
“Does it look like one of the headlights is out?” I tentatively asked B.
She flicked the lights from bright to dim a couple times. The high beams were fine, but now that she was switching back and forth it was obvious that the low beam on one side was gone. One whole side of the road faded into the deepening night when she dipped the lights. “How about that?” she said in a whad’ya know? tone of voice. “It worked fine yesterday.”
Weird as that coincidental snafu might have been, our cyclopean headlight problem was just the setup for the collosal fubar that was still coming. Turning through a roundabout, B ran over something in the road. The sharp turn around the island, together with the blind spot B had to deal with while she used the low beam, made it impossible for her to see whatever it was until she was almost on top of it, too late to avoid it. She swerved in the hopes of maybe straddling it, but a telltale bump-clunk under the car announced she hadn’t quite pulled it off. And right after that, the engine started to growl.
If you’ve never heard a car that’s lost its muffler, you’re in for a treat the first time it happens to you. You might be tootin’ along, one hand on the wheel and not a care in the world until you hit in a dip in the road deep enough to make your car bottom out or, like we did, you’ll straddle a rock or some other piece of junk and hear that sickening bump-clunk, and suddenly your car’s engine will be growling so loudly it sounds like it’s in the front seat with you. Honestly, we thought at first that whatever she’d hit had punched a hole in the floorboards, it was that loud. I was holding my feet up, wondering why I couldn’t feel the wind blowing up my pants legs, and B kept moving her knees from one side to the other, stealing a quick glance each time she did. When it came to me what was going on, I leaned over to get my mouth as close to B’s ear as possible and shouted: “We lost the muffler!”
“Should we stop?” she shouted back.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” I answered. “Keep on going!” She didn’t appear to be very happy about that answer, but there really wasn’t anything we could do about it. There wouldn’t be a garage anywhere along our route home that would be open at that hour, and I wouldn’t have volunteered to attempt a roadside repair, doing everything by touch while lying in the gravel as cars and trucks rushed by on the highway, even if the exhaust pipe were not hot enough to cook the meat of my hands all the way through faster than a microwave oven. I just wanted to go home, pop open a beer, lay back in a chair and flip the bird at the angry gods when this trip was finally over. If only it could be that easy.
On a stretch of back road that was just a half-hour’s drive from our house we came to a full stop behind a queue of three or four cars waiting at a signal light. Just beyond the light the opposite lane ended and an impressively deep trench took its place, snaking out of sight around a sharp corner. Road crews often dug up stretches of the road this way and, when they knocked off at the end of the day, they left automatic signal lights standing sentinel over the yawning holes. The light would change in a few minutes and we’d be on our way.
B glanced into her rear-view mirror as a car slowed to a stop behind us, and again as the headlights of the next approaching car appeared in the distance. She didn’t look away from him, though, because he didn’t slow down at all until he was way too close to stop safely. I was half-asleep when she said, “Oh, shit.”
I perked up. “What?”
She turned around just in time to see the car swerve into the open lane beside us, then swerve back toward us again when he saw oncoming traffic in the single lane beyond the red light. She reached desperately for the stick shift, I suppose to attempt to make room for him, and good on her, but he was moving way too fast. By the time her foot hit the clutch, he was a split-second away from our rear bumper.
And somehow he missed us. The car that had come to a stop behind us left just enough room for his car to squeak through and somehow, against all odds, he did exactly that, cutting the turn as hard as he could. Not only did he manage to not hit us, his car didn’t even give our car a peck on the cheek as it went by. He slid through the gap without making any contact at all with our car or with the car behind us. If you’d seen that in a movie, you wouldn’t believe it.
Even more unbelievable, the driver wasn’t hurt. He rolled his car over in the ditch beside the road, where it laid wheels-up and silent as if it had been there all day. After making sure that Barb was all right I jumped out to see if I could help. So did almost everybody else waiting in line, and we all stared open-mouthed when the guy climbed out through the window of his car, stood beside it for a moment with his hands on his hips and an expression that said, “Well, dammit! Now how am I going to get home?” Then he dug his cell phone out of his pocket, dialed a number, and climbed up out of the ditch to the road.
Our small crowd gathered around, repeatedly asking if he he was okay and watching as if it was obvious that he would collapse at any moment. He seemed a little shaken but there wasn’t a cut or bruise anywhere on him that we could see. In between dialing numbers on his cell phone he assured us he was all right and the crowd gradually broke up and drifted away when it became apparent he wasn’t about to fall down and die.
His cell phone was giving him quite a bit of trouble. “The battery’s going,” he said to no one in particular, sounding a bit lost.
B had joined us by this time. “Here, use mine,” she said, digging her phone out of her purse.
“It’s a long-distance call,” he apologized.
“Don’t worry about it,” she assured him, then turned and offered me the car keys. “Would you mind driving home from here?” I had to say yes because she was trembling as she would if she were in the final stage of hypothermia, seconds away from total collapse.
We waited by the side of the road for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, long enough to make sure the guy didn’t keel over while he was waiting for his friend to come give him a lift. He remained stubbornly upright and even his initial anxiety passed into a quiet sheepishness about the accident. When his friend arrived he thanked us again for the use of our cell phone, then we climbed into our respective cars and drove off, his friend’s car purring quietly, ours rumbling like a dragster. After that, the only thing I could think of that would have seemed more outrageous than what had already happened was that we might make it the rest of the way home without further incident. Amazingly, that’s just what happened.