Cincinnati

In the end, it was a scramble.  Dinner scheduled with two friends whom I would rather have seen individually...this sent me rolling out of my hotel at 8 p.m. toward Millbank Spice, the local curry house.  It's a strange part of London, the area around the Houses of Parliament, the Embankment, and rather dead at night.  Or, from another perspective, rather quiet.  Indian restaurants are thin on the ground.  Restaurants are thin on the ground.  And Millbank Spice proved to have an 8 inch step from the sidewalk.  Two waiters and a passerby lifted me inside.  And then the food lifted me, chapatis, vindaloos, onion badghis.  Goodbye, London.

The wake-up call came at 5:25 a.m., as scheduled.  Like everything else in this hotel for the able-bodied, there was a catch.  Lest the guest fall back asleep, there were two follow-on calls.  A splendid idea, unless you are quadriplegic and in the bathroom.  Because failure to answer means additional calls, and as the situation escalates, the calls are not of the automated variety, but live human ones from the front desk.  I caught one call.  I missed the next.  More phone ringing, me repeatedly trying to steer my American electric wheelchair like a Sherman tank in this tiny British hotel room from toilet to phone.  Missing the call, resuming bathroom activity, back and forth like a quadriplegic Marx Brothers film.  And on top of it all, the underlying and essential paranoia of travel.  Do I have my passport?  Enough money for the cab?  And did I remember the wheelchair battery charger?

And there's always a last-minute hitch.  Sorry, the 6:30 cabbie in front of the hotel told me, no ramps.  It wasn't his cab, he said.  I gave him the American fisheye, knowing there are EU rules about cabs and wheelchair access.  And knowing how much London taxi drivers hate the slow, revenue-sapping process of opening the boot, extending collapsible aluminum rails from cab to curb.  But that's what the next cabbie did.  In fact, at Victoria Station he parked his cab and wandered inside in search of help.  Early on a Saturday morning London rail stations aren't exactly bursting with porters.  Dumped at the curb with my bags, I would have been stuck.  Leaving my luggage to search for a porter would have been unthinkable.  But my cabbie had a handle on the situation, which lent a certain perspective to the unfolding day.  

Traveling and complaining is generally un-advisable, much like driving and holding a mobile phone to your ear or walking and sharpening a butcher knife.  First, too much is going on, and complaining only distracts from the purpose.  Second, your complaints are aimed at a moving target, for that's what travel is, movement.  Third, travel karma is complex, just as a trip is straightforward, but a journey is convoluted.  So the cab driver who won't pick up your wheelchair, being a British national, his life impelled by forces that are likely pre-Saxon, that noncompliant cabbie is out of reach.  And yelling at him and demanding your rights in a foreign country, however gratifying, will only spiral back at you in ways that are impossible to predict and likely dangerous.  Let it go.  Because the next cabbie may be like this one, the man who at this sparkling hour of the morning is emerging from the dusky light of the station with a porter pushing a baggage cart.

The British complain bitterly about their present rail system, and doubtless they have a point, but to an American all that's important is that they have one.  In fact, train travel is up in Britain.  It's way up.  The numbers were soaring before the current fuel squeeze, and petrol prices will only drive them higher, one assumes.  The Gatwick Express to London's airport in Surrey waited with its doors open.  I rolled aboard, and it rolled away.  No need to buy a ticket beforehand.  Just hand the conductor your credit card.  All which had been accomplished by the time we rumbled over the Thames rail bridge, and I bought myself a tea and two chocolate biscuits.  We picked up speed, and we picked up more speed while the timeless South London maze of tracks and Victorian brick viaducts, level upon level, bounced beside us.  Weeds, sprouting among the gravel, bundles of sooty cables running alongside the track, the no man's land of trains.  We were going fast enough, probably about 90 miles an hour, so that the station names were impossible to read in the blur, except for the large print on the largest platform.  South Croydon.  Almost there.  But not before a few final moments of English countryside, tiny ponds dotting the rolling downs.  And then we were there, which being an airport, was a vast nowhere.

As for what followed, what can one say of an experience so anonymous and miraculous?  Intercontinental travel, traversing eight time zones in a matter of hours, is nothing to sneeze at.  Like dentistry, a long flight should be accomplished quickly and with maximum anesthesia.  Virgin Airways does a good job of this, flying nonstop from London to San Francisco with an endless supply of movies on demand.  But if you book your ticket at the last minute on Air France, you have to count on something else.  Cincinnati.  And on this particular 767, a bulkhead seat without a window.  Nothing to look at but a wall and a crude video map showing, if you are prepared to believe it, that straight beneath your tray table and your chicken parmigiana and your flotation seat cushion lies Greenland.

In the customs hall at Cincinnati airport the chatty middle-aged guy who had pushed me from the plane in a manual wheelchair finally pushed me a bit too far.  I didn't so much mind being asked my name.  Paul, like the apostle?  But now we were into the wheelchair recovery thing, and I was in no mood.  My electric wheelchair was neatly parked beneath a sign for Oversize Baggage.  No dangling wires, no smashed wheels, everything looking intact.  Except that it didn't turn on.  A waiting baggage handler assured me that everything was fine, she had reattached the control cable, no prob.  Unfortunately, no power.  The control lights did not come on.

"Well, now, Paul, you got some kind of battery back in there?"  This from the pusher.

"We need an airline official," I said.

"Battery must be in here."  He held up my rucksack with the charger.

"An airline official," I said, making no eye contact, all coldness and impatience.

"OK," he said, scurrying off.  I was in a mood to see someone scurry.  I had had enough wheelchair problems.  It's just that my problems weren't his.  I knew this too.  There had been a moment on the London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel with the view by the Thames.  Something had happened...mild, predictable, yet sobering.  As the rotating Eye descends, passengers are invited to stand on a mark by the plexiglass wall.  A camera mounted on the passing superstructure flashes and takes photos of tourists as they drift by.  Once you're off the wheel and making for the exit, your color photo stands ready for purchase behind a counter.  Sure enough, there we were, Sandy and me.  Well, Sandy and part of me.  My cousin stood fully visible, but my face was blocked by an I-beam, revealing not much more than my wheelchair and torso.  In a perverse way, I regret not purchasing the photo.  It encapsulated all my fears...being overlooked, faceless, a wheelchair and not a person.    

Here in Cincinnati, in the easy-going Midwest, it did not take long for someone from the airline to appear.  I asked the guy to examine the battery connection.  He unplugged things, plugged them in again, and with a beep from the control joystick, the chair was back in action.  The wheelchair pusher now became the baggage schlepper, helping me get through customs, then back through security.  Making our way to the gate for San Francisco, the skies turned from blue to gray to black.  Rain fell in pelting sheets, even making the nearby planes invisible.  Things were stormy and could change quickly, and I gave the pusher a big tip for putting up with me.

"Let me tell you one thing, Paul."  I braced myself for some personal advice on attitude.

"See, Paul, they've got this aisle chair.  Wouldn't have to walk to your seat."

This was a stupid idea for someone whose feet were already swelling like elephantiasis and needed every possible opportunity for exercise.

"That's a great idea," I said.  "Goodbye."