OPINION
Travel! God. Strange to even think about it in these past three years of the Great Closure and the time of Stay Home and the law of No Exit - the disease itself was spelled in screaming caps, as important and constant as UNESCO or CNN. Our lives were lower case. We hid in our homes and locked the door. The sky didn’t have any planes in it. One of the most haunting images of the Great Closure was the photograph of an airline fleet somewhere in the Nevada desert - I think it was Air New Zealand. No one had any use for them so they were left there like “colossal wrecks”, as Shelley wrote: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” But now we are Free to Leave. Last week I left New Zealand on an 11-hour flight to one of the world’s great island cities.
Travel! Everyone talks about how exciting it is to step on to another shore but no one ever talks about the strange melancholy of leaving, even just for a holiday or some kind of assignment. You sweep up your life, you make the beds and put away the dishes, and a stillness hangs in the air - the thought always occurs that you might never see it again. And then the drive to the airport, and the sight of the tides of the Waitematā and Manukau harbours, creeping in or out, tender little bowls of water reaching towards or away from the shores of your known life - that last hour of leaving is to experience momento mori in all its soft twilight.
Travel! I felt clumsy and vague at the airport. How do you do this thing? No one seemed to have any idea where to go. There’s safety and direction in a crowd but the airport was pretty much deserted. You could still sense the days of the Great Plague when they were so empty that wolves roamed the departure lounges; more recently, the international airport was evacuated during the summer floods. “The river rose all day, the river rose all night,” Randy Newman sang of Louisiana in 1927. “Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right.” No one was at the help desk. Eventually someone shuffled towards a set of ropes and formed the head of that greatest of all concepts in the civilised world: a queue.
Travel! It was all coming back to me. You stand in a queue, and then you stand in another queue. I stood in the first queue for 30 minutes, and stood in the second queue for 40 minutes - there was a hold-up at security, my hand luggage set off an alarm, got swabbed, and then set off another alarm. “Stand back from your luggage, sir. I’m calling in the dog team. Wait there.” It was quite a long wait. “The dog will be here soon, sir.” I ran through all the possibilities. “It could be anything, sir.” I wondered about faint traces of long-ago A-class drugs. “The machine is very sensitive, sir.” I thought about travelling to the nearest detainment centre, missing my flight, surrendering my passport, and crying. The dog arrived and expressed total indifference. “Have a nice trip, sir.”
