Trying to sleep on the plane. Amazing you can sit right next to someone in close quarters for ten hours and not say a word. Bisecting Canada and then Greenland. Always the longest slog, inching down over Iceland with the first day’s light. The bands of peach, yellow and blue back home over the mountains, some white and gray: the first snow on the foothills, the pale light of early winter. Dull, short days that start late and finish early.

Nick Drake sounds stoned out of his mind on these recordings, the early, skeletal Five Leaves Left sessions: “leaves” here, slang for cigarettes. Very faint, whispered words over the hush of the jet’s engines. They would be smoking on planes in his time, if he ever flew in one or had the money to, or got paid to go somewhere which I doubt he ever did.

No way to sleep and the seats are so close it’s like the TV monitor’s pressed in my face. I tried watching 2001: A Space Odyssey but couldn’t get past the apes. “The Dawn of Man.”

Almost comical watching everyone on the plane in the same position with their eye masks and pillows. It could be like some Greek myth torture scene that repeats itself, how close they get to nodding off before they twitch and wake again. And Drake keeps repeating the same song, “When the Day is Done.” It never is. But my phone says 23:41 and soon it will be all zeroes.

I have not flown Economy on an international flight in years and am aware of every centimeter now lost, wedged between plastic and metal. I am aware of my body and age, what I’ve done to it. All I’ve got is this phone and these headphones, some books I’m too tired to read and a piece of cheese from dinner I’m saving. It’s an evil trick when the flight attendant with her cart and smile comes by and asks, would you like some orange juice and sparkling wine? Evil because I sit right on the edge of Premium Economy so I’m not eligible but evil because she repeats the question a dozen times to each passenger like a kid’s toy and each time I have to rehearse in my head no, I would not. It doesn’t look good anyway. Troubled cure for a troubled mind.

With nothing to do or think about I replay small scenes from the day. Pressing a button in the grocery store aisle by a locked case so the clerk will open it (eye drops for Dawn). They lock the eye drops because there’s other medicine nearby I guess could get abused, like nasal spray. In another store pressing another button to get a jacket unlocked so I could try it on. Buying a shirt for Eberhard, I saw they had the same kind of jacket I’d given to Lily but it got stolen when she was at boarding school in Utah. I could buy a new one for myself and then give it to her in France. Picking out CDs for the drive in mom’s car from Germany to France. Getting my bag flagged by security at the airport for something suspicious: the CD wallet. Must look like a bomb, odd. And now on the screen our jet just passed Reykjavik and we’ve only got the UK to cross before it’s mainland Europe. Nick Drake still singing about Saturday’s sun.

The screen flashes information about what’s down below but it doesn’t give you enough time to read it. A volcanic caldera surrounded by collapsed lava tubes in the sea. Black lava columns. Legends about trolls and islands, Icelandic names I’m too tired to spell, 00:36. The Swedish Pentecostal Movement. Settlements, hamlets, abbeys. One of the largest glacier rivers in the country. A skerry adjacent to Rockall in the North Atlantic. A 13th century church, something called a glacier tongue. The destroyed cone of an extinct volcano. The Rockall trough, a deep-water bathymetric feature to the northwest of Scotland and Ireland. A turf church. Sub-glacial cauldrons. Sediment that surrounds the seamount.

When we land I’ve just got an hour to deplane, get through border control, and to my train. But it all goes so smoothly I can stop running, take my jacket off and use the bathroom, with time enough to look cool and casual even, to blend in. On the train it’s mid-afternoon already in CET and the same farmlands and power lines between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. I got a seat that’s looking forward without even trying.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir