I slept “rough” last night…no,
not out in a field somewhere, but on a row of seats in Bangkok’s Suvanabhumi
Airport. My flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok had engine trouble and so we were
all put on a later plane that didn’t get into Bangkok until nearly 1 a.m. There
was no point in going into town or even in trying to find a hotel near the
airport, I reckoned.
And so I joined the motley
crew of schedule-refugees who scatter themselves every night on benches around the
airport to try to get some rest as they wait for late late planes or early
ones, or just for an airline counter to open so they can rearrange a missed
flight.
I am starting this post just
before 8 in themorning on Sunday, as I sit in the plane that’s supposed to get
me to Chiang Mai in just over an hour. I can’t wait.
In the meantime I want to
write down a little about the airport at night. The lights are bright and the
air AC-cool, but I covered my face with a layer of dark silk scarf, wrapped the
rest of me in my shawl, put my head on my camera bag, tucked my other hand-carry
behind my knees, and felt quite comfortably camped. After hours of sitting on
the long flight to HongKong, and more sitting in HongKong as the plane issues
delayed us, my feet and ankles were swollen. Lying flat was heavenly, even if
the seats were bumpy and there were people all around. And I was not worried by
passers-by: The rest of the airport felt at a remove because my bench of seats was
behind a post, away from the fray. The announcements of flights, very few after
1:30 a.m., were in soft woman’s-Thai. It is musical, doesn’t grate, and makes
an agreeable background to thoughts and dreams…
The bench-seats’ sleep was
like an extension of the sleeps I’d had on my flights, with periods of
day-dreaming that slipped imperceptibly into oblivion and then back out. There
were a number of men trying to sleep on other benches of seats near me. Some of
them snored or snuffled occasionally, but the sounds were somehow muted in the
background noise of fans and ventilation and whatever else it takes to keep an
airport functioning.
As I emerged sometime after
4.30 in the morning from my longest deepest bench-sleep, about 45 minutes, the
soundscape began changing. (It made me think that it would be interesting to do
a 24 hour recording of the airport sounds, as it would of the sounds in other
24-hour environments such as hospitals.) There was a growing murmur and then
chatter of voices, mostly women’s voices, accompanied by a light clack-clack-clack
of heels as the first of the morning airline workers hurried along to their
posts, all soft-voiced and full of morning energy. They must have to leave home
at 4 am at the latest to reach the far-from-town airport for their early shift.
And then came men and women cleaners pushing rolling carts and replacing
lightbulbs and starting to mop and sweep. clean.
From there the day really
began, as others like me who had spent the night, stretched, yawned, made their
way to the washrooms to get cleaned up, and began purposefully walking to their
gates.
The transfer staff guy at
the THAI domestic desk was spectacularly clear, composed, and efficient. I met
up there with another straggler/refugee from the HongKong flight delays who was
also going to Chiang Mai, a pleasant young English guy who was on holiday from
teaching English in Korea. And so we proceeded together to formally enter
Thailand (having spent the night in the international departures area), then
find our gate and put in more waiting time until our flight.
As I reflected on the
streams of people in the airports, coming and going, each person with a life
story and hopes and fears and ambitions, I felt disoriented, almost drunk at
the scale of humanity, and its complexity. We normally deal with the scale
problem by generalising and by turning individuals into a kind of amorphous object in our heads (the words crowd or multitude
are very anonymous after all), a creature rather than a huge number of
fellow-humans. But in that time of being caught out of the normal expected flow
of the trip and spending hours in a kind of no-man’s-land, I had time to take
stock.
My conclusions about my
normal assumptions were not pretty. I was obliged to acknowledge to myself that
my humanity and empathy and general noticing and caring reflexes all get put on
the back burner when I am in airports and negotiating the crowds and the
queues. It’s as if the soullessness of these large anonymous “functional”
modern spaces turns each me into an automaton, renders me somewhat soulless.
Maybe this doesn’t happen
to you. But I assume, from the looks on people’s faces and the way they move,
that it happens to many others.
My version of it is that, apart
from the moments when I am held up in an orderly queue such as the airport
security line, or the passport control line (some of those moments are great
opportunities for noticing the variety of people – I think especially of the
lines in Istanbul Airport), I am always navigating my way through space,
threading my way through the crowd, without seeing the people at all. They all
become obstacles in my path. I am thinking only of myself and where I want to
get to.
I imagine that is true of
many people.
And why? Why not take it
easy, slow down and stroll? Why do I rush? It’s a reflex from way back, I
suppose. It’s about ambition and getting there, wherever “there” is, before the
line gets too long, or in case I miss something or get left out of an
opportunity. But someone has to be last. And why shouldn’t I be content to take
my turn at the back of the line? Why this impulse to speed things up?
Maybe it’s only North
Americans and Europeans who behave like this? I wonder. But not really. Perhaps
it’s a matter of temperament?
All I know is that after my
enforcedly slow overnight “connection” in Bangkok, I have come to realise that
my travel habits and patterns need need a thoughtful makeover. I’ll let you
know how it goes, after my next long trip, which will be the flight sequence
back to Toronto in late February.
Meantime I am breathing in
the cool dry-season air of Chiang Mai, seeing friends, eating rice, and wearing
sandals as I walk down the street. It’s a fun change after the minus 35
windchill days of early January in Toronto.
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