The story of a rather convoluted journey I made in 2003 from Manchester to Winnipeg, Canada
It was just 9.30 am when, pushing a trolley loaded with a packed rucksack and two crammed suitcases, I found the four Air Canada departure desks serving the flight from Manchester to Toronto. Just then a man standing nearby asked to see my tickets and passport. After inspecting them, he motioned me to the end of one of the four queues. You’re always in the queue that moves the slowest, right? I was certain mine did. In confirmation of that observation, I noted that several passengers who’d arrived after me were moving up their queues faster than I was. But I summoned patience and awaited my turn. After what seemed an age I stepped up to the departure desk and presented my ticket to a woman seated there. To my infinite surprise she ignored my proffered ticket and instead told me coolly that the flight was full. Pardon? Was I hearing this right?
“But I have a ticket,” I protested, waving the one I’d paid £722 for at the Thomas Cook Travel Agency office in Chorley.
“I’m sorry but your ticket is only guaranteed if it’s booked with the airline,” she rattled off mechanically.
“But other people who arrived after me got on the flight,” I objected.
She frowned. “That shouldn’t happen,” she muttered.
The company shouldn't permit it! I mused. But what was going to happen now? Would there be another flight to Toronto that day? Or would I have to come back again tomorrow?
The woman then left her desk and asked me and a couple of other rejects to follow her. The couple, returning to Canada after a holiday apparently, set off after her, carrying their bags, and I followed, pushing my trolley. She led us to a second desk manned by another woman and left us there. I protested again to the new official that I had a ticket, but uselessly. She would see what other arrangements could be made for me. Then she turned her gaze on a computer screen while my fellow rejects and I exchanged expressions of exasperation.
Now a middle-aged man lugging a suitcase strode up to the desk and began fuming at the woman busied in a search of her computer. He’d just come up from Gatwick, he said, to make this connection, and now he was denied it.
“What compensation am I going to get for this?” he demanded to know.
The woman said she didn't know but told him he would receive some compensation.
“Where?... How?” he asked.
He now seemed more interested in the compensation than in getting to his destination.
She suggested he apply at the Air Canada desk in Toronto.
After another futile attempt to protest he fell back from the desk and she returned to me. First she filled out a form attesting that I’d been denied boarding to my flight and passed it to me. Next she said I had an option to be put on standby for a British Midlands flight to Washington, D.C. at 12:45 pm, where I could make a connection to Toronto and go on to Winnipeg from there. The reason why I would be on standby, she explained, was that although the flight was fully booked, there might be a place on it for me if I waited till boarding had finished.
Failing that she could put me on a later flight to Heathrow and from there I could get a flight to Toronto. The problem with that option, I surmised, was that the flight would not arrive in Toronto until midnight and I would be obliged to pass the night there (albeit at Air Canada’s expense) and then fly to Winnipeg in the morning. Well, I wanted to avoid such complications. It would be better to get the travelling done all in one day, I reasoned, and staying in a hotel on your own for the night is not a lot of fun. I said I would try the Washington option.
She emerged from behind her desk then and apologised for the inconvenience to me, explaining that unfortunately all flights were overbooked. The system usually worked (for whom? I wondered) as there were always people who failed to turn up for their flights, but sometimes these things happened. Then she escorted me to the Bmi departures desk where a fellow again inspected my passport and documents.
“Have you been to America before?” he wanted to know.”
“Yes,” I said, “several times.”
“And you’re a British citizen?”
“Yes, also a Canadian citizen.”
“Could I see your Canadian passport?” he asked.
“I haven’t got one,” I said, "but I have Canadian citizenship papers – not with me, but I have a copy.”
“Could I see it?”
I opened my rucksack once more and produced the scanned copy of my Certificate of Canadian Citizenship. He took it and disappeared, returning several moments later to hand it back. When I got to the desk my bags were checked in and I was told to come back at noon. I went off then to while away an hour or so and returned just in time to see the last couple of passengers check in.
When I stepped up to the desk and handed my passport and paperwork to the woman seated there, she busied herself for some moments while I waited in some trepidation. Then she handed me a boarding pass and gave me a gate number. It was just 12:15 pm when I rushed off thrilled for my flight to the good ole US of A.
Since I found myself allocated a place in the middle section of seats when I got on board, I enjoyed no view of the outside world. Thus I was fascinated to find that the aircraft, an Airbus A330, was equipped with screens allowing passengers the option of viewing the scene below the plane or the one before it.
I watched with fascination as the runway fell behind, the city sank beneath and the clouds came down from on high. Some eight hours later I saw a pale domain of green fields emerging under a sky abounding in white cloud and a geometric shape composed of runways developing in the distance. Larger and closer loomed the graphic form until a wide stretch of concrete paving lined with coloured markings rose from below unstoppably and an array of massive black tyres bounced on the ground. At that the fuselage shook as the engines screamed their protest at the application of the brakes
Washington Dulles International Airport
Inside the terminal a handful of passengers swanked through a taped-off area in the reception hall marked ‘U.S. Citizens’ while hundreds of others shuffled past a sign marked ‘Aliens’ into a maze of tapes where a great snaking queue was forming that filled most of the hall. However it moved more slowly than any snake. And my connecting flight to Toronto was due to leave in an hour and a half. I passed the time by studying a sample of my fellow aliens, those ahead and those behind, but I can honestly assert that I detected no trace of bug-eyes or antennae in a single one of them.
Later a nasally voice from somewhere ahead carped: “You must make sure your landing cards are filled out!”
Now we'd been handed landing cards on the aircraft, but apparently some passengers had neglected to fill their's in. Time moved on while I worried some more about whether I would catch my connecting flight, and then an official with a face of grief came half-way down the hall and bellowed:
“You must fill out your landing cards correctly or else there will be a delay!”
Definitely a hoarding personality type, I mused, with an attachment to punishment.
“All sections must be filled in,” he warned, and then told us what to write on parts of the card where it was far from clear what should be written – at least to aliens.
The slow shuttle along the cordon of tapes brought me to a pillar posted with a printed notice in three languages. The English version read: ‘NON-U.S. CITIZENS’, not thoughtfully expressed perhaps, but I was more interested in the Spanish version, as that language had for some years been an object of study for me. In fact as part of my studies I once learned that the U.S. has a Spanish-speaking population larger than the entire population of Canada. Anyway, the Spanish version of the notice read: ‘NO UN CITANO AMERICANO.’
“Is that Spanish?” I asked a young fellow ahead of me in the queue ahead who was also goggling at the notice for lack of anything better to do.
At that he produced a pen, crossed out the ‘NO’ and wrote it again after ‘CITANO’ so that the notice now read ‘UN CITANO NO AMERICANO’. But I had a fancy it was still wrong. Surely the ‘UN’ was superfluous. Should I cross it out? I desisted, for who knows what punishment these humourless officials might visit upon an alien daring enough to deface these hallowed halls. Maybe they would pack you off to Guantanamo Bay and put you in a cage.
Hallowed? Too true! For now, in company with my fellow passengers, I was asked to remove my shoes, as though we were Arabs entering a mosque. But here the ritual seemed devised solely to serve the purpose of cleansing passengers for connecting flights. Since that time, of course, America has exported this particular liturgy to the world, but at that time I'd never before heard of such a thing.
Later, back in England, I asked my friend, Dave, who’d also recently travelled to America if he’d had to remove his shoes in Chicago for his connecting flight to Denver. No, he said, but he too had been delayed because every passenger on the flight had had to have his or her suitcase handles swabbed for traces of explosives!
With my shoes returned to my feet, I left the scene of these pious proceedings and entered the baggage retrieval hall, where hundreds flocked around trains of circling baggage. There a question levelled at someone tending an information desk brought the response that my baggage had been checked through to Toronto. Now all I had to do was to find my way to the departure desk of the connecting flight, a feet I achieved with several minutes to spare before boarding began.
The flight, which had attracted a mere handful of passengers, was notable only for the suicidal look of boredom staining the face of its sole flight attendant as he dispensed drinks and snacks to the eleven passengers, and also for the brief glimpse I got from my window of the purple evening below and a white fringe that spanned a wide river. It was, I realised, Niagara Falls.
Niagara Falls
The aircraft landed in Toronto at 7:00 pm local time.
Toronto Pearson International Airport
The task now was to retrieve my luggage and transfer it to the Winnipeg flight, due to leave at 7:55 pm. I disembarked, followed fellow passengers into the terminal and found the baggage carousel. Luckily my two suitcases were circling round already. I dragged them off, one at a time, planted them on the floor, and then scoured the place for a trolley. Spying one parked by a wall, I strolled over and grasped its handle. However, when I tried to pull it away, it refused to move. The reason was that its right front wheel was trapped in a little cavity in the floor. A notice cautioned that it would cost a dollar to free it.
Well, as a matter of fact I had four hundred and fifty Canadian dollars cash in my rucksack, but I possessed not a single dollar coin, or loonie, as Canadians have dubbed this piece of money, after the loon, an aquatic bird found in many parts of North America and pictured on the coin.
- The loonie and the loon
As I had no time to change any cash, it was impossible to free the contraption from its shackle. And time was running out on my flight to Manitoba.
Clearly I was condemned to a session of donkey work. I grasped the handles of my suitcases, and, with rucksack still strapped to my back, rushed off to find my flight. Minutes later I came upon a wide walkway and a sign over its entry that read: ‘Connecting Flights 8 minutes.’ I set off along it, glancing through a window on my right at the expanded wings and smooth fuselages of a series of idol aircraft and at the scattered groups of people on my left lounging in seats. Moments later, two or three passengers burdened with bags overtook me and shot ahead. Were they going for the same flight as me? Maybe I’d better put on some speed. I was almost running now in desperation to catch my connecting flight, and trembling a little with the thought that less than two years ago I had suffered a heart attack.
At last I found the luggage check-in desk for the Winnipeg flight and after disposing of my bags and getting directions to the passenger check-in gate, I rushed down a long corridor to the end, where I climbed an escalator and passed along another corridor to find myself facing the passenger check-in desk. I’d made it in time.
The two and a half hour flight was unremarkable except for the view it offered from miles high of the giant Lake Huron,
Lake Huron
as well as a similar view of the even more gigantic Lake Superior, and then later a glimpse of what I took to be the western edge of the vast and rambling waterways of the Lake of the Woods sprawling in the dusk.
Lake of the Woods, Western Ontario
Darkness had not completely fallen yet owing to the delay caused by our advance towards the setting sun, and I charmed myself with meditations on the adventure that awaited me next week when my brother and I with two friends would embark on a fishing expedition into that vast wilderness and camp on a tiny island in another lake, lost now in the gathering gloom.
I landed in Winnipeg at 9:30 pm local time, just three hours after the planned arrival time of my initial schedule.
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Portage Avenue, Winnipeg
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