We carted our 3-d Mondriaan mobile of luggage out to the car park, where the Saab waited for us, a slate-blue station wagon with wide seats and a German engine peacefully asleep beneath the hood. Barring the occasional Porsche Cayenne, it was the biggest vehicle we would see for the next six weeks – but fitting in our pounds of lighting and camera gear was not going to be simple. Greg opened up the back and meditated on the available space

Let’s pull down the seats, he said.

We poked around, pressed numerous buttons, pulled several levers, but none of them succeeded in releasing the back seats.  Greg’s face was turning pink, the shine on his temples part frustration, part flop-sweat.  Mildly curious and concerned passed by, slowing their walk in case Greg succumbed to a fit of screaming or a heart attack.

I think I can do this with the seats up, he decided, and we began to arrange the pieces of luggage into the most compact form possible.

We’re going to do this every day for six weeks, Greg said, and we’re not going to get it right until the day we pack up for the airport.

But maybe we’ll figure out the back seat by the time we hit Austria (spoiler: we didn’t).

So where to? Asked Greg.

Our hotel is located in beautiful downtown Hoofddorp, I said, spreading out the map and studying the spaghetti loops of highway splattering out from Schiphol.

Hofe-dorp? Greg repeated.

I looked at the call sheet.  Hofed-dorp. It looks like an airport service town.

As long as we’re only there for one night.

Hoofddorp was a stone’s throw away, which simultaneously pleased and disappointed me.  It was nice to have a hotel close at hand, but the undergrad in me wanted to drive straight in to the middle of Amsterdam and find a walk-up sandwiched between a hash bar and a tranny brothel.

A NOTE ON HOTELS

Our company has one priority for hotel bookings, and it can be summarized thusly: what is cheap? I mean, really really cheap? We always have the option of seeking better accommodations on the road, but it’s usually not worth the extra effort, especially after a day of air travel. In a way this makes it remarkably easy to spot our designated hotel: drive to the general area, scan the skyline for something that’s clearly a hotel, then look for the crumbling shack next to it.  That is usually where our reservations lie.

Fortunately there is a countervailing principle that usually rescues us from the dregs, which is: what is the most convenient thing to book? Picture the poor production coordinator at her desk, tasked with finding hotels sprinkled across a country or a continent.  In these cases she will almost always find a reputable but affordable chain and attempt to stick with it wherever possible.  For this reason I often ended up feeling, as I jumped from one hotel to the next, as if I were stalking the trace of some family on a doomed road trip.

ANYWAY

Our hotel turned out to be a Best Western, which meant that we could expect a restaurant of passable meat, overpriced croquettes (Netherlands only) and recessed lighting.

What are croquettes? I asked.

The waiter, who had been entirely fluent in English up until that moment, furrowed his brow.  They are little… fried… things.

What are they made of?

A smirk suddenly creased his professional face. You don’t want to know, he said.

I ordered the Nasi Goreng, which is apparently piped into every restaurant in the Netherlands from a central utility somewhere.

After the meal we busied ourselves with arranging the film equipment in the blond-wood shoebox of a room we had been booked into.  My nerves were thrumming with the seven-hour shift in time, and my mouth had a bitter lactic tang.  I skipped through the TV channels and discovered that Dutch television shows subtitled English programs.  A season four episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was playing, and I started to watch the Dutch subtitles, trying to map the vowelly, trowelled-out words to the dialogue.  At one point a character enters a vaulted library and exclaims “You could hold the Nuremburg rally in here!”  I wasn’t sure exactly what the subitles were saying, but it definitely had nothing to do with Nuremburg.  It looked like casual TV references to the Nazis were verboden.

Tomorrow: Day 3  – the first interview.

*A prize to anyone who can tell me what episode of BtVS I was watching and which character made the strange Nazi crack.

I settled in across from Greg in the plastic seats of Terminal 4, packing my new books as carefully as possible into my shoulder bag, just in case the BMI flight to Amsterdam placed size restrictions on carry-on baggage. Each airline, though adhering to a set of standards that most companies can agree on, has its share of idiosyncrasies. One airline may charge extra for overweight baggage or ignore the difference altogether, but Qantas, for example, will refuse your luggage if it masses more than 32 kg. Air Singapore will let you use genuine cutlery or supply you with a glass of complimentary wine, while Continental, for example, sucks.

BMI will give you a free sandwich for sixty minute hop to Amsterdam.  I remember a long-ago time when airlines in Canada offered free food of any kind, but that was so far in the past that airplanes had not, strictly speaking, been invented.  I tried not to betray my shock to the attendant when she handed me the plastic-encased sandwich and serviette, lest I be identified as a rube. I wasn’t all that hungry, and I was even less hungry when I looked closely at the sandwich, but there was no way I was giving up on free airplane food.

The morning plane was crowded with business travelers and sleepy tourists.  The touristswere responsible for the vaguely yeasty scent gently circulating around the cabin.  With Greg’s blessing I took a window seat and unwrapped the sandwich as Britain dropped away and scooted eastward beneath us.  Beef, and some kind of paste that seemed part butter, part salt.  It tasted nostalgic.

There was almost no cloud cover for the entire flight, which I suspected was rare.  People in the seats ahead blinked and squeezed out protective tears against the sun.  I kept my eyes out the window and watched the Netherlands slide into view.

After the improvisational quality of Heathrow, Schiphol was a paragon of order.  Greg and I slid out of the plane and found ourselves once again in the endless queues and overpriced coffee shops of Inner Airport World.  The customs agent who went over our ragged carnet was stuffed inside a little glass box.  As he flipped through the document and scratched his salt-and-pepper beard, I pictured him slowly growing puffier and more monstrous, until portions of him were squeezing out of the grating, contained only by his polyester shirt.

Once past customs and immigration we found ourselves entering Outer Airport World, that thin rim of vehicle rental kiosks and drugstores designed to insulate passengers from the punishments of reality.  I needed to make a couple of phone calls, but the public phones were – and how can I put this? – in-fucking-comprehensible.  They were distributed plentifully, so I had many opportunities to walk up to them and not understand what the hell I was supposed to do.  Should I approach a stranger and ask them what to do? My understanding of Dutch was limited, but I was pretty sure that if I spoke plain English and threw in the occasional hooting vowel, the result would be enough like Dutch that I could get some assistance with the hulking red and silver sculptures that were, apparently, phones.

I stepped into a pharmacy.

Excuse me, I said, but I don’t know how to use these phones.

The cashier gave me the patient, stoic, slightly curious look that is part of the Dutch birthright.  They will only work with one of these phone cards, she explained, pointing to a rack of cards by the till.  I tried to pick one out, but sleeplessness was beginning to nibble at the edges of my brain again.

I walked back over to Greg, who had taken up his customary sitting position.

Any luck with the phones?

Screw it.  Let’s get our vehicle and find our hotel.

I was a bit nervous about renting a car.  My company generally made a point of using the worst vehicle rental service possible, especially when I was travelling overseas.  Often they would rent from a North American company that had a ‘relationship’ with a non-North American company, said relationship guaranteeing that they would take your money and not bother letting the other company know.  Whether there would be a car waiting for you on the other end of your flight was a matter of chance.

We were pleasantly surprised when the freshly painted and scrubbed women behind at the kiosk had our name in their computer.  They never stopped smiling, even when it turned out that the particular car we had requested – a minivan – was not available.  In fact, it seemed that they had no minivans at all, and the notion of renting a minivan only broadened their smiles.  I got the feeling that only North Americans wanted minivans.

We have a lot of luggage, I explained.  We need a large vehicle.

The woman picked at her keyboard for a moment.

We can rent you a Saab 95 Turbo, she said.  It is our largest car.  And we won’t charge you anything more.

I decided that this was a good omen.

Thank you, I said.

You should learn to say it in Dutch, she said.  And then she made a noise that started off reasonably but ended up sounding like getting kicked in the throat.

I tried it out:  Dank … huh-row?

Dank Hrwaarghhh, she clarified.

Thank you.

The embarrassing and pointless overseas phone call to my boss seemed to clear the fatigue toxins from my brain. As soon as I put the phone back in its cradle, clarity began to seep in once more, until I had a few lucid pools to splash through. My sense of the space lost its nightmarish blur as details began to solidify: the wasted faces of other travelers, a tangy American accent complaining to no particular person about the service ethic in British airports, the soft lozenges of light thrown down from windows admitting an English sunrise.

Instead of dwelling on the fact that I’d woken up the producer to tell her that the customs agent had a big nose, I decided to kill a bit of time by taking in the sights and sounds of Heathrow International Airport, Terminal 4.

Like most departure areas in Airport World, Terminal 4 is not designed with comfort in mind for the average traveler. Rows of hard plastic chairs face off against each other in the centre of traffic areas, where people pass back and forth in an agitated current. The overall effect is to make you feel as if you’re marooned on a fortuitous outcrop poking up from a deep and dangerous river. No one wants to sit in these seats.

Fortunately for the traveler, the walls have been liberally lined with stores. An airport franchise must be among the wettest dreams of retailers – hordes of sleep-deprived or otherwise disoriented people caught in that in-between zone, where dimly understood laws hem in movement, but nothing proscribes the exercise of one’s wallet, every hour of the day. Rents must be exorbitant.

Greg was easy to spot. He is one of the few people I know who can rest at ease in airport departure lounges, his hands folded in his lap and his eyes scanning the upper walls. His body, which is too big to meet those chairs comfortably, seems to mould itself without complaint to the chair’s shape. It as if he turns some inner dial to the end of the range and settles on that frequency, all silence, until the boarding call comes. It also helps that Greg is incredibly cheap and will not spend a cent of his own money – unless a pint of beer is involved, which I sense is quietly frowned upon in his household.

I waved as I passed him on the way to a WH Smith, which was part of my plan. Apart from a copy of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, I hadn’t packed any books. We were pushing the weight limit with our checked and carry-on baggage, so I’d decided beforehand to buy my reading material along the way. As I finished a novel, I would leave it in my hotel room for the next guests, whether they were fluent in English or not. This is my genius mind at work.

The store had a special on fiction – 3 paperbacks for 18 pounds – so I scanned and scanned. Mostly I just pulled out novel after novel to look at the different cover art. More than anything else, the unexpected illustrations on book covers told me that I had traveled overseas, that I was really here for six weeks, and that, short of a nervous breakdown, my entire path for those weeks was laid out in a neat black binder. I picked Perdido Street Station for its reassuring bulk, Middlesex for its alternate cover, and Yellow Dog, out of a (deeply misplaced) loyalty to Martin Amis.

Whenever you hear people talk about fatigue, they often say that it sneaks, steals or creeps up on you. In my case, fatigue stepped out of the crowd of morning travellers and whammied me with a cartoon mallet. One moment I was strolling down the corridor, keeping an eye on the signs; the next moment, everything started to slide upward. My inner ear screamed its warnings at my brain that I was tipping, tilting and slipping over, but my brain ignored them, focusing instead on keeping my feet galumphing forward. Help, I thought, there’s a war on between my internal parts, but nothing would come out of my mouth. Brain, don’t let the carnet slip out of my hand. You do this and we’ll sleep for forty-eight hours straight.

By the time I found Customs I was nearly delirious and barely able to force out a sentence, which did not endear me to the freckle-spattered young woman with a blond pageboy and a prominent nose who stood behind the partition. I kept focusing on the nose, which seemed just a hair too big for her face. It was one of those details that, once noticed, command all your attention.

— I have a carnet, I told the officer’s nose. But my luggage is still in transit to Amsterdam.

The officer’s nose flared in sympathy. There are few hard and fast rules in the world of carnets, chiefly because most customs agents aren’t clear on the rules. But here’s the numero uno rule: You must at the very least have the goods listed on the carnet in your possession. Most often Customs won’t bother to look at them, but if you show up with a form that says I have $30,000 of film and video gear but you have only a passport and a lint-covered wine gum in your pocket, you will not be taken at your word.

— Maybe you should wait until you land in Amsterdam and have Customs deal with it there, the officer suggested.

When your brain is plagued by swarms of sleep toxins, decision-making becomes torturous and fearful. Small matters turn into huge priorities, obvious actions become weighted down with trivia, and you might as well tie your brain in a bag and swing it into the Thames. It was not important, really, that I had to wait to get the carnet stamped in Amsterdam; without the equipment handy, it was the only available course of action. No big deal. I decided to call my producer back home, where it was at least two in the morning, and tell her all about it.

She picked up after five rings.

— Hello?

— Heather? It’s Aidan.

Over the thousands of miles of undersea cable, I could almost hear her brain creaking into action.

— Hello there. Is everything going well?

— I couldn’t get it to work, Heather.

— What?

— We’re in Heathrow. No luggage. Need to get. Carnet stamped. In Amsterdam.

— Okay.

— I guess I didn’t need to phone you up and tell you this right now.

— No, it’s fine. You can call whenever you think you need to.

— Heather?

— Yes?

— The customs officer had this big nose.

— You call when it’s important, Aidan.

She hung up, leaving me with the distinct impression that I had used up my one free nincompoop call exactly one day into a 41 day trip. As the post-punk kids on the corner say: Go me.

After taking us on a nice slow tour of the airport’s exterior, Flight 868, the seven-hour Pearson to Heathrow haul, ambled up to the gate at 6:25 a.m.  This was the most interminable part of the entire flight, the wait to unsnap our seatbelts and reach for our luggage.  A few tentative metallic sounds could be heard here and there in the cabin, the signal of the brave and independent few who risked unbuckling before the little seatbelt went out with a flat slideshow ‘ding’.  And then the sudden crush of everybody standing up all at once, affecting an air of nonchalance, as if they’re waiting for a light at a corner and not dying to get off a stuffy jet.

When the mild English September air from the sleeve began to filter in, we all realized how badly we smelled.  Sweat, breath, packets of peanuts and bottles of wine were exhaled with us as we walked up the sleeve that fed us into the body of the terminal.  One thing about Heathrow: the signage can be terrible, sometimes nothing more than a piece of paper with a “THIS WAY” helpfully Sharpied on by a construction worker, so the best thing to do is follow the mass of people.  One or two people can lose their way, but two hundred people have an unerring sense of direction and a steady momentum that detests resistance.  The mass of motor impulses and unconscious decisions, when distributed amongst a crowd, somehow knows which doors to ignore and what waits at the end of the line.

At the end of the line was the longest airport line-up I’d ever seen, with the exception of an early morning flight I once took from Vegas to Chicago.  Like all airport security and immigration lines, this one was folded into a wide deep space, so that progress actually involved shuffling back and forth parallel to the row of security gates, where the dull-eyed and dangerous airport employees, with their wands and scanners and lists of questions, waited to process us all for entry into Inner Airport World.

Have I told you that Airport World is divided into zones of influence?  By my count – for there may be yet more secret zones, dimensions rolled up inside visible space or concealed behind supply closet doors – there’s Adminstrative, Outer and Inner.  Administrative A.W., which only employees see, is the maze of beige corridors, fluorescent-lit offices and interrogation rooms that all bureaucracies share and which C.S. Lewis no doubt had in mind when he discussed hell in The Screwtape Letters.

Outer Airport World is the most exoteric, open to anyone who wanders in from the outside.  The prices are high and the air smells peculiar, but its parts are made up elements recognizable from daily life. Inner Airport World, especially at international airports, is made of alien materials that appear terrestrial on first glance.  Once inside, you are shielded from the country you are nominally passing through and entirely at its mercy.  We may have been in England when we passed through the security gates of Heathrow, but England did not know us.

We had a morning to kill.  The first task, according to the call sheet, was to get the carnet stamped.  In italicized bulky letters – ENTERING EUROPEAN UNION – GET CARNET STAMPED!!!  But no one had stamped our passports when we passed through security.  Our luggage had not been handed back to us for reprocessing.  We were in the most extreme regions of Inner A.W., where we had landed in a country but not been recognized.  England lay outside the tall windows of the departure lounge, but it may has well have been on a television screen.  There was a good chance that the carnet was not meant to be stamped at Heathrow International.

This was going to cause a minor shit storm back at the company, at least at some point in the next six months, when our collective carnet sins would come back to demand fees from us.  I had to say that I at least tried to get British Customs to plunk down a stamp.  So I stumbled sleep-deprived down the corridors, on goldenrod carpeting, past newsagents and sunglass shops.  Greg stayed behind, safe in a smooth plastic chair.

I sleep badly on planes.  Most passengers will tell you that they sleep badly on planes, but I’ve seen them at 3am in the taupe-shadowed darkness of the cabin, propped against each other like old paperbacks and snoring away to the rhythm  of the engines.  I prefer to sit in my cone of blue light, going over the same few passages in my book or trying to follow the thread of the movie playing on the little LED screen set into the back of my seat.  Every so often an attendant will pass by, sometimes giving me a quick smile to commiserate lightly in our shared wakefulness.

Greg gave me the window seat for the Toronto-Heathrow flight.  For Greg, who lives for the moments when the ground can be seen receding or approaching through an oval window on an airplane cabin, this was a generous act.  I had never seen London before, and he wanted me to see London at night.  There was a possibility that we would spend a few days in England at the end of the trip, but that was six weeks in the future, and besides, there were no pages in the binder under tabs 37-41.

London at 5 a.m. was endless and illuminated.  The plane flew at an impossibly correct altitude, just low enough to let me see the detail of the buildings but just high enough to feel as if we were crawling slowly over the city, as a magnifying planchette traces out a line of text on a page.  Clumps of skyscrapers, burning with light, passed underneath, only to be replaced with another clump.  Greg leaned over to get a look.  Do you see it? he said.  What do you see?

He wanted me to tell him that I could see Big Ben and Westminster Abbey and that ridiculous fucking ferris wheel.  I couldn’t even find a comparison to sum up what I was seeing, except to say that it seemed like huge outlined geometric shapes all pressing into each other and shaken by the river – shaken too slowly to see, but yawing back and forth nonetheless, as if one end of the Thames were being cracked like a whip.  Other cities are easier to take in at a glance: Los Angeles looks like a giant microchip, for instance; it looks frighteningly like the Machine City in The Matrix.  Manila from the air looks like a ball of dark yarn covered in red and white crumbs.  London looks like tectonic forces, which is hard to explain at five in the morning.

A few people had already woken up and were staring out the window at the city beneath.  The lights came on and we could hear the metal clanking of meal carts, then the maddening experience of waiting for the meal cart, with its steamed prepackaged breakfast food.  On a whim I’d requested the vegan option, which turned out to be either flavourless stir frys with tofu or, in the case of breakfast, the regular meal with everything interesting removed.  I picked at breakfast as the sky lightened and London began to speed faster beneath us, on its way to Heathrow.

Whoah?  Will we make it to Heathrow?  Or do we, um, die, or get rerouted to Leicestershire or something?  Will there even be an airport in Leicestershire if we fly there?  I can’t take the suspense, people: come back soon.

If you want to start from the start (the better to get a piece of my heart) go to the Travels Index.

Once firmly in the air, after the turbulence of penetrating layers of atmosphere had died down and the pale seatbelt logos had winked out, I reached under the seat (I always keep one piece of carry-on in the overhead rack, one beneath the seat) and pulled out my travel binder. I never examined the binder in depth until I was on my way to the first destination. This was not laziness (although there may have been a touch of arrogance or plain hubris in there somewhere); any trip longer than seven to ten days often contained so many complications that the binders were assembled and reassembled by researchers and coordinators up to the last possible moment. It was completely against company policy, and it was utterly typical. Interviewees and locations would call up and change their minds, demand money, suddenly remember that the shoot day, cleared a month before, happened to be some great-aunt’s birthday, and could we come by an hour later? Or the next day?

This binder wasn’t even complete. Days 20-41 existed only as tabs. Somewhere along the line the rest of the material, the call sheets, questions, crib sheets and maps would be faxed or couriered out to us, wherever we might be in the wilds of Western Europe. In the meantime, I had nineteen days to map out in my head, although experience had long ago shown me how useless this was. The shoot never matched the sheets properly, especially in foreign countries. At best they served as horns that you could grip as the shoot bucked wildly underneath you.

Hey Greg, I said. We’re going to interview a wooden shoemaker in Amsterdam.

Greg nodded. That sounds like fun, he said.

Greg had a way of deadpanning the word “fun” to make it sound more like “hell”.

He went back to flipping through a book on the Tarot. At some point in our travels Greg had started reading Tarot cards, which made a pleasant change from the inspirational Joel Osteen books he had brought along on earlier trips.

We were on our way to shoot multiple episodes for three different shows. Two of them were time fillers, short segments meant for children and families. The shows were called Very Odd Jobs and Big & Small, which summed up the content of each so exactly that the names functioned as airlocks sealing in the format. For VOJ, you found someone with a very odd job and followed him or her around with a camera, a sheet of questions and a ream of releases. For B&S, you did the exact same thing, but the subject of each segment was either the world’s largest something (bridge, stadium, monument) or smallest something (pachyderm, flowering plant, computer chip). It was my job to take semi-promising situations and wring enough story out of them for the editor back home.

Those shoots were time killers, usually scheduled in when interviewees for the real show were unavailable. Since Greg and I were on salary, every day spent idle was sucking up precious money from the company. Not that I minded; a day of inactivity on the road could shift from relaxation to anxiety-ridden boredom in an instant. Better to keep busy. The funny thing was that the time-killing assignments almost always ended up being ten times more arduous and twice as likely to reduce me to a state of tooth-grinding anger as our standard shoots.

The real show was Disasters of the Century, a half hour documentary series that runs so often on History Television in Canada that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s the only thing they air. Its production run is long over – I produced the final eight episodes (#s 40-47) in 2005 and 2006 – but its relentless reenactments at 9 frames per second (starring extras drawn from the ranks of the idle and unemployable) mixed with portentous narration (“But for the Johnson family, their new ocean front home is about to become a watery grave”) and interviews with half-deaf people in wheelchairs can still be seen pretty much any time you survey the middle distance of your basic cable package.

We landed at Pearson International Airport – or as our luggage tags tell us, YYZ* – around two o’ clock. This gave us three hours to wander around the terminals, looking for food, entertainment and internet access among the glass atria and public art of Airport World. The cheerful Wikipedia entry on YYZ will tell you that the worst disaster in the airport’s history happened on June 5, 1970, when a plane bound for California crashed shortly after takeoff in a nearby field. I’d been to the crash site the previous winter, where bits of fuselage and human bones were still slowly rising to the earth thirty-five years later. Someone had gathered bone and metal fragments into a little pile beneath a dead black tree that had reportedly been hit by the plane. The field had been sewn with soy as a nitrogen fixer, and the seed pods were easy to break between my cold fingers. Human bone, it turns out, takes on a weird greenish tinge after three decades.**

We ended up in a restaurant with framed photos of Second City alumni (Belushi, Radner, Ackroyd, de Silva etc.) plastered over dark faux brick walls. For some reason the image of a brick wall is inseparable from stand-up and sketch comedy. I’m at a loss to figure out why airport restaurants bother to adopt themes, names, a standard of décor, anything beyond tables, chairs and food. We’re not going anywhere. You could have a lineup of identical grey rooms cut into the corridors with names like “Tex-Mex Restaurant #2,” “Western Themed Grill” or “Fish Buffet” and it would make no difference to the experience. Most of the places, if titling were adopted honestly, would simply go by “Alcohol Refillery”.
By the time our comedy-themed entrées have arrived, Greg and I have shifted into our standard conversation mode, which is a hybrid of griping about the company we work for and a series of compressed lines and jokes that refer to our life on the road together. Lakota, said Greg, and we started snorting. Hey, that went pretty well, right? said Greg, and suddenly we were nearly weeping with laughter. People were glancing over by this point. Airport restaurants, even ones with giant black and white photos of John Belushi on the wall, are not for laughing; they’re for stuffing yourself with the house specialty (a burger) and numbing the unease of travel with beer. Greg and I didn’t care. We were gearing up, arming ourselves with a few guffaws for the six weeks ahead.

*YYZ is also the title of an instrumental Rush tune, which gives you all the benefits of Rush (smartly written and flawlessly executed rawk music) and none of the drawbacks (the mysterious high-atmosphere wails of Getty Lee). I mention this because I think the world needs a MIDI file of YYZ. Just putting that out there.

**Remind to tell you some time about the amateur historian that we interviewed for that disaster. It’s a small book all by itself.

A friend of mine asked me the other day if this story is my masterpiece, or the thing that I have to get out of my way before I write my masterpiece. Three pints of beer had lit the fire of honesty within me (because beer’s naturally inflammable, so the metaphor works, you see); I said, “It’s… um… the thing”.

Most international airports tuck their Customs Office away in hard-to-find corners, weird empty culs de sac or hidden hallways. You won’t find the office without careful instructions, and once you get there, the office is invariably a tiny room with a plexiglass grille separating you from the bored man in white shirtsleeves. There is no way of knowing how far Customs will be from your departure gate. There is no guarantee that Customs even exists in the same terminal.

Greg and I have walked into strange spaces in our history of foraging for Customs offices. Long empty hallways with all the ceiling tiles torn out, wires and ducts snaking everywhere like an abandoned set from Brazil; a huge room with a middle-aged Sikh man seated at one end behind a desk, whose sole function was to point at the sign that pointed to the exit; empty areas adorned with huge signs advising you that alarms will sound if you stop walking; clean white corridors branching rhizomatically into the null-space of Airport World, the extradimensional bubble blown into reality by the bureaucratic sighs of nation-states. Sometimes I imagine that there is only one airport, an endless building of conveyor belts and sunglasses stands that spills out into our world at certain points, and there’s a door somewhere that will take me into the in-between spaces. Not that I would want to meet the people who live and work there.

The Customs office at Local International* Airport is a nice fifteen minute walk from the terminal. It is well-defined, with its own flat-roofed one-story building set off by a modest parking lot. We pull up there first to get the carnet signed.

Strictly speaking, this is a cheat; we should be taking this to Customs in Toronto, which is our point of departure from
Canada. But the Customs people here know us and are forgiving of the atrocious drooping shabbiness of our carnet. We drag everything in from the van, on the chance that an overzealous noobie may decide to comb through it item by item.**

I’m doubly reassured by the familiar faces: over there are the two women with blonde frosting for hair; and back there is the man with the dark molded hair and the poreless peanut-coloured skin, like a giant Playmobil character. Mostly we are a source of amusement for the people at Local International Airport. “Where are you off to this time?” they ask. I give them a brief rundown of the itinerary. They agree that Europe is a wonderful place for a vacation. I agree too, except that I will not be on vacation. In fact, over the next six weeks I will be enjoying only six days off, most of which will be spent reassembling my tattered sanity from the nightmare of the previous week. I don’t go into this, because the frosted-hair woman is about to stamp my carnet with a giant device that looks like a cross between a giant hole punch and a giant nutcracker. To my relief, she stamps the correct page, tears off the right sheet and hands it back. First carnet hurdle conquered.

At the ticket counter comes the second ritual of departure (the first one was that carnet business, in case you skipped the last paragraph) – the luggage weigh-in at the check-in counter. This one pisses everyone off, from the people behind the counter to the lengthening line full of anxious passengers. First we lower the giant black case onto the scale. Only fifteen kilograms overweight. Then the silver lighting kit. A paltry ten kilos over. Now we have to open our personal luggage, which is already bursting with stuff, and redistribute twenty five kilograms of sharp, sometimes greasy, film gear. Smaller items – duct tape, voltage meter – we throw into my backpack. Greg drops the tripod head, heavy and compact enough to kill a man, into my clothing and pins an unlucky pair of boxers to the bottom of my case.

Then we try again. This time the black case, which is practically empty at this point, is only two kilos over the limit. We do it again. The head of the check-in queue crests and breaks. People are walking around and through our open luggage while ticket agents beckon politely. Greg’s cheeks and foreheads are turning red with embarrassment; he hates holding people up. When we first worked together he tried to get the luggage checked through when I wasn’t paying attention, but overweight baggage charges are a line item on the production budget. At this company, the line item rules over our personal feelings. Or any human feelings. By this point we’re slapping our suitcases closed and hauling them to the scale, but not before a guy in a red windbreaker notices that we’re checking in film gear. This starts the following conversation, which Greg and I have every single day when we’re working:

Rubbernecker: That’s some crazy luggage you got there.

Me/Greg: Sure is.

Rubbernecker: Wow (points to Betacam) that’s a pretty big camera.

Me/Greg: It’s not small.

Rubbernecker: What are you shooting? Are you finishing a shoot? Are you from Vancouver/Toronto/America? What kind of film stock does that [Beta] camera take? How much does it cost? Is it heavy? It must be heavy. If he’s the cameraman, are you the sound guy? Oh, you’re the unit director? Oh, you’re the field producer? You’re the interviewer? What are you again? Hey, I’ve seen that show [note: everyone in Canada has seen the show I work on]. So you’re with History? You’re with Discovery? I prefer History/Discovery/The Learning Channel to all the other channels. Yup, my TV set is permanently tuned to those channels. I just got a bundled package.

And always:

You must meet a lot of interesting people.

Here’s the weird thing about traveling with film gear in North America. Strangers will ask you, with a complete absence of guile, what we’re carrying in that huge black case covered in a million HEAVY/LOURDE stickers.*** For some reason the cases and the cameras (Greg has his Betacam with him at all times, I have the 16mm in a carry-on) give people the notion that we’re public property. Sometimes people insist that they’ve seen us on television before. In my case that’s marginally possible, but Greg stays on the viewfinder end of the industry. Only once or twice have I been short or abrupt with curious people, and I’m always amazed by their shocked expression when I’m not friendly or forthcoming. They don’t know we’re strangers.

Once the luggage is finally checked in we meet with June and Edna, who’ve been sitting in the Bon Voyage Cafeteria for the last half hour. We buy overpriced coffee and sandwiches wrapped in plastic, which marks the start of another weeks-long regime of overpriced coffee and sandwiches wrapped in plastic. I’m hoping that Western Europe, with its refined ways and clusterfuck medley of ancient cultures, can offer us exotic and tasty sandwiches. I have yet to find out that what it has to offer is a different brand of mineral water at every stop

I would like to halt the narrative for a moment to say: goddamnit. Godfuckingdamnit. I started this project to talk about kooky times in Europe. Don’t you want to read about kooky times in Europe? Because believe you me, they were kooky. Instead we’re 4300 words in to this thing (I checked) and we are not in Europe. We’re not even in the air. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I stop talking about a dinky international airport in the middle of the Canadian prairies? I think it’s time for another Dilaudid**** and a philosophical pause to examine why I’ve never seen any of my longer writing projects to completion.

Leaving is not something done all at once; instead you pass through a series of filters, until all that belongs to your home has been removed from you. At the security gate, Greg waves goodbye to June and Edna. I’ve never seen him kiss his wife in public. I turn and give them a quick wave of my own as I file into the security line. As usual, I seem to be holding too many items: coffee, boarding pass, carry-on bags, passport. Nobody else in line, with their pastel slacks and fanny packs, has my problem. When did all these people get so organized?

The security woman at the head of the scanner belt, with a hairstyle that was drizzled lovingly over her head that very morning, takes no interest as I transfer items from one hand to another in an attempt to shuffle the boarding pass and the passport into the best position. I try for a comic smile, one of those Hah-hah aren’t we humans funny creatures expressions, but her the set of her face doesn’t break. There must be a trick, I decide, a mental habit that allows security personnel to block out superfluous elements and allow in only the necessary items: a boarding pass, an opened passport, handfuls of change, sets of keys, belts, hats and boots. Or maybe my comic expressions look like stomach pain.

Once past the security gates we have entered the zone of impatience, restlessness and soothing colours that mark all departure lounges the world over. Even the most flight phobic of passengers are broken by the departure lounge; after five minutes you just want it done with, the sitting and checking of boarding passes, the middle-distance stare that allows you to stare directly into the eyes of another waiting passenger sitting across from you but not acknowledge the exchange. Greg tucks his body into one of the chairs and goes into waiting mode, which involves a resigned look and the tenting of fingertips. I consider pulling out the travel binder, but that will only slow me down when the flight is called. Greg and I have learned the many tricks of being among the first to board a plane. And here it is: when they call for pre-boarding, go up and get on. Explain that you have delicate equipment, either in your carry-on or as part of your anatomy, and they will allow you to pass by and make that long walk down the articulated sleeve. All other passengers will hate you, but that is a very small price for the unequaled feeling of walking down an empty airplane aisle and not tripping over senior citizens as you struggle to your seat.

My mother says that the sky appears so huge on the prairies because you don’t need to look up to see it. And now we are about to trade places with the standard order of things and join the inverted world of air travel, where the clouds sail beneath you and the cold hard dome of the sky skates along the roof of your plane. The plane rotates into place on the runway and begins to pick up speed, channeled into a straight line by the barrel walls of force pushing it along and upward. As we lift up, it is September 21st. We will not see home again until Halloween.

*International because NWA employs one squat ugly jet full of fatigue-soaked middle-aged flight attendants with skin problems to grudgingly haul its bulk through the air to Minneapolis International once per day, dumping its glazed passengers into an airport that forces you to walk a mile and a half to eat at the nearest Chilies franchise.

**Despite my dire descriptions of customs hassles, this only ever happened to me once, when we were staying overnight in San Fransisco on the way back from the Philippines. A friendly but methodical crowd of young men from the Department of Homeland Security checked every piece of equipment. We spent an hour or so helping them find serial numbers and entertaining them with anecdotes. The next day we flew home from San Fransisco, but not before the same DHS staff went through our stuff again. We didn’t bother with anecdotes that time.

***After a while I started answering “some guy who owes me money”. Usually this got a laugh, but when I went down to the Florida Keys, people just nodded and walked away. I should learn not to be small, olive-skinned and talking about stuffing people in suitcases in Florida.

****Back pain. Possible junkie cred.

At eight in the morning the offices were usually empty, with the exception of a couple of editors finishing the graveyard shift, trudging up and down the halls in sock feet and eating from cups of ichiban. The only other person in the building iwas Angela, the production coordinator, her eyes foggy with the early hour. Angela’s job was to get us to the airport and make sure we have all the equipment and paperwork necessary to get us through the next six weeks.

OUR EQUIPMENT

The equipment, all 200+ pounds of the stuff in two oversized, armoured and padded cases, was chiefly concerned with the production and manipulation of light. We had flags, blacks and hoods to block light. We had silks and bounces to diffuse and direct light. We had cookies and gobos to slice light into patterns that suggested venetian blinds, or cut it into mottles meant to emulate an unseen canopy. We had bits of fake greenery to cast shadows. One betacam, one DVcam, one 16mm Arri, one still camera to capture the light. Tapes and film stock to record it all.

Then the jumble of extension cords and electrical equipment, bags of clothespins, c-stands and tripods, convertors and adaptors, power supplies and battery packs, along with a light meter, a monitor, and tools for any bizarre situation. A mini-boom, two lapel mics. Then there were the lights themselves in a separate case: two 150 watts, two 300 watts, and a hulking 650 that would stun your eyes into submission if you happened to be looking at it when the switch was thrown. Greg had packed it all the night before, but we went over it again; a crew doing reenactment shooting might have come in during the night and cannibalized our gear.

We started loading the stuff into the van, piling our own luggage on top of the equipment. Our suitcases always ended up carrying around forty pounds of gear in order to avoid overweight baggage fees. It was part of a game played between our company and the airlines. The weight limit would drop; we would buy lighter equipment. The weight limit would drop again; we would find something even lighter. I could see the day coming when our gear would be reduced to a Polaroid camera and a notepad. We slammed the back door shut and climbed into the van.

The starting of the van marked my first moment of panic. This was the point when I was absolutely certain that I’d forgotten something crucial and obvious, like Beta tapes or my binder of interview questions, and we wouldn’t figure it out until the first shooting day. A few nights before I’d had a dream in which I’d forgotten everything, even Greg, and I’d tried to compensate by writing extensive notes, but my notes turned out to be indecipherable doodles when I returned. It was the dream equivalent of appearing in a play whose lines you had inexplicably forgotten to memorize.

What have I forgotten? I said to Angela. What have I forgotten? Shit. Shit!

What? Nothing.

Greg looked out the window. He was used to my panicky moments.

I knew that we had everything we needed, but to assuage the screaming lunatic inside me I checked my backpack for the two items that were my main responsibility: the binder and the carnet.

THE BINDER

My company didn’t have any folky proverbs, but if they did, one would definitely be “Better that a field producer lose his arm than his binder”. The trip binder contains absolutely everything I need to make the shoot work: call sheets, fact sheets, interview questions, maps and directions, names and numbers by the dozen, insurance forms and rental slips, appearance, material and location releases, broadcaster letters, you name it. There is nothing worse than losing the binder. I once left it on the floor in a hallway in a hotel at the end of the world in Newfoundland. We were an hour on the highway before I figured it out.

THE CARNET

The other folksy proverb would run something like “Better that a field producer lose his binder than our carnet”. The ATA carnet, pronounced kar-nay and short for the catchy carnet de passages en douanes, is an international document meant to expedite the temporary importation of professional goods through customs. Everything you’re carrying with you is listed carefully and exactly on your carnet, with serial numbers, country of origin and value.

The ostensible purpose of the carnet is to make the customs process relatively painless and smooth for all parties. In truth, the carnet is a shaggy, mangy monster of multicoloured sections (called feuilles for perversity’s sake) and detachable sheets that will, 9 times out of 10, produce audible grunts of hatred from customs officers the world over.

Here is the set of stocks that the carnet puts you in. There is a better than even chance that you are more familiar with the carnet than is the customs officer who has to fan through the lumpy document. Therefore you’re in a unique position to guide and advise the officer. You’re also in a unique position to get into a world of shit if you try to advise or guide the confused, bored, tired, or pissed-off official who’s holding your carnet.

If you’re lucky, the customs person will ask you what the hell he or she is supposed to do with it. If you’re unlucky, he or she will start writing in the wrong area of the document, or start asking questions that you can’t answer. Then you can expect to be there for an hour as a team of Customs officers crosschecks every piece of equipment you have against the list. That’s when you discover the slumbering bureaucratic beast that lives and grows in the gutters between sovereign states.

THE ITINERARY

Week 1 – The Netherlands

horrible disaster discussed: the North Sea Flood

plus: Bruno the klompenböer; the longest bicycle in the world; the biggest field hockey stick ever

Week 2 – south of France

horrible disaster discussed: the Malpasset Dam Failure

plus: no santons

Week 3 – Germany

horrible disaster discussed: The Oppau Explosion

plus: the world’s longest car; largest marsupial; biggest turtle; most ginormous cuckoo clock

Week 4 – western Austria

horrible disaster discussed: Blons Avalanche

plus: Head Sport ski factory; the world’s tiniest model trains that turned out not to be particularly small

Week 5 – horrible horrible Belgium

horrible disaster discussed: Meuse Valley Killer Fog

plus: a parade of lead-poisoned Walloons dead set on making my life miserable; world’s smallest blooming plant; manneken pis

Week 6 – England

horrible disaster discussed: Queen Mary Collision

plus: world’s biggest goddamn restaurant bill ever

Week 1, day 1 – 6:00-8:00 am

It’s a common experience among travelers to wake up and not know where they are. To open your eyes and have nothing match, no thought connect to thought, no wall or window or hotel art print meet up with anything in your mind. It’s like the first split second of a helicopter ride, when you realize that you are abruptly no longer touching ground and the entire machine feels like a rocking cradle in a thunderstorm.

That never once happened to me on the road. I would close my eyes each night with the following day mapped out in my head. As soon as I opened my eyes again, I was on. I was working, and all my job consisted of was following the map that had been prepared for me. That’s the first talent of a field producer. The second talent is not blowing up when the map turns out be completely wrong, when the day suddenly flips over and you’re traversing an unknown geography full of strange roads, missed appointments and a flat tire on the edge of some city a whole hemisphere from home.

It was only at home that I would experience that vertiginous moment of not knowing. Once or twice I panicked when I saw Schmutzie’s head or the curve of her shoulder emerging from the blankets. The trips demanded so much of me that it took a few days, maybe a week of being home, before my body realized it. It was expecting difference, an empty bed and a colour TV staring at me from across the room. Instead it woke to my real life, the one where I could sit around all day in my bathrobe (which I did). Those were the good times. The potato chip times.

The first day of a trip signals the end of chips. The first day of the Europe assignment came with a tiny garnish of blessing: I didn’t have to get up at three in the morning to catch a flight. By a strange confluence of geography and airline regulations, all flights that go anywhere interesting from the local airport leave at 6:00 am. You want to go to Montreal? Vancouver? New York? San Fransisco? Your flight will be departing at 6:00 am. On the other hand, if you want to fly to Amsterdam with stops in Toronto and Heathrow, 11:20 am will do just fine.

That doesn’t mean that you can set your alarm for ten. First you need to get up, go to the office, load up all the equipment, take it through Customs – of which more later – and make sure that you’re at the ticket counter at least an hour and a half before departure. Which meant that I could safely wake up at seven.

My eyes slid open at six. Schmutzie was already awake, joined palms between the pillow and her head, watching. She was watching me sleep. We tipped our bodies toward each other, snaked arms around each other’s backs, held on. We’d gone out for a drink the night before and I could smell the alcohol on our skin. Six weeks is a long time – too long to properly imagine. I felt as if were going to jail, or off to war, or maybe to an offshore rig. Any one of those jobs that take men away for whole seasons at a time. She left the apartment before me. I watched from the window.

At the last moment I decided to take the cowboy hat. Without going into too much detail right now, I suggest you do not travel through Europe in a cowboy hat, no matter how cool you think you are.

Greg pulled up at quarter to eight with his family. Greg always arrives with his family – his wife June drives the long maroon station wagon, while Edna, his mother-in-law, sits in the back like a pile of old sticks and rags with a wig on top. I never understood why Greg’s mother-in-law always accompanied him to the airport. Whenever I asked, he would say that she didn’t like to be alone. And that she liked car rides.

I stuffed myself into the velour depths of the backseat and said hello to Edna. A person with less experience would have looked at her, felt for a pulse and alerted the authorities, but I had gotten used to Edna’s queerly inanimate appearance. Once animated, she turned out to be voluble and entertaining, with a voice that seemed to pull every word across sandpaper. Her stillness, I think, was a carefully employed tactic, refined over decades, meant to annoy Greg. Here I am, her body would say, unmoving. Here I am until one of us dies. And I decline to die first.

This has been a long entry. I expected to be at the end of the day at this point, but I haven’t even gotten to the airport yet. Be patient – only a few more bits of necessary context and then we’re plunged into the thick of it.