Leaving on a Jet Plane by Laura J. Oliver

By the time you read this, I will have flown across the Atlantic to London, then after a brief layover, on to Amsterdam to visit friends on their boat, then back to London to spend a week with my daughter and her family. 

Nine suitcases line the walls of my bedroom like the Standing Stones at Stonehenge, waiting to see which is going to be recruited for this particular trip. I wish, like Claire in Outlander, I could just fall through them into a time warp and regain consciousness in a boutique hotel overlooking a flower-lined Amsterdam canal. 

I should be excited, but if I can’t be Claire (who lands in the arms of that hot Scot, Jamie, without even packing), I’m wishing for a Star Trek transporter. Just beam me over there—I’ll accept the risk that my scattered atoms never reassemble if I don’t have to get the inevitable extra screening at Security checkpoints, eat airplane food, and use public bathrooms for the next 24 hours.

I sound ungrateful. I’m not. I just know that traveling without a tour director is stressful work until you’re there, and then it’s all worth it. “Deep breaths,” a friend suggests. But right now, that sounds suspiciously like what they told me about having a baby. “Just breathe and it’s painless!”

“You’re sure? That’s a thing?” 

“And when they put that baby in your arms, you’ll forget every excruciating hour it took to get him here!”

Wait! What??? 

Yeah, travel is like that.

Tonight, when I board the plane, I’ll still wonder where and when flight attendants sleep. I have never caught one snoozing, and yet after they put the plane to bed on these overnight flights, they just disappear. And they always look suspiciously fresh and neat in the morning. It’s like trying to catch a robin sleeping, or a squirrel. They must tuck in, but have you ever witnessed such a thing?

I have never seen a flight attendant enter or leave a restroom, either. I’m beginning to think I’m the only one who has noticed they are not technically human.

I was once walking through the airport in San Francisco and about 20 flight attendants from the United Emirates passed en masse.  I have never seen more beautiful women.  They were immaculately dressed in tan and red uniforms, and each had a gauzy strip of white fabric that fell down from one side of her cap to be pinned at one shoulder like a princess. 

The hordes of travelers flooding the concourse stepped aside to let them pass with an almost audible intake of breath, then closed behind them, staring, as if at the sudden appearance of a double rainbow or a meteor shower. You could almost hear the slogging American public mouthing to each other, “Did you see that?”

The opposite effect was had on Virgin America, where the purple interior lighting of the plane’s cabin, black uniforms, and the pulsating electronic disco music made it seem as if our first priority as passengers was not to learn where the exits were, but to get our groove on. 

But I’m flying British Airways tonight. No disco, no whimsy, and the wine will be marginal. 

There is a myth about travel— a subliminal promise that the trip will change you and your life in some way—that you will return different, transformed, with even your relationships improved. But research shows that the greatest happiness associated with travel is, in reality, looking forward to it. The minute you reach your destination, your happiness level returns to what it was before you left. (Publishing a book is much the same phenomenon.) After the rush of excitement, you’re still you, and the dog needs to be walked. 

Once in a while, we look at our lives and think…more of same and then I die. I was probably 30 the first time I thought that. Travel disguises that reality. It interrupts that slow slog with all the exciting things we are doing, and we have the boarding passes to prove it. But does it change anything?

I no longer carry that subtle illusion. I have traveled enough to know I will come back still me, with every failing and lack firmly in place. The only thing new will be the memories I carry and whatever I bought to remind me of the young driver whose father was a Moroccan shepherd, whose parents married at 14, who spent an hour trying to find me at the airport in the rain, then gave me a list of Dutch foods to try. And the hotel clerk with the shiny ponytail and Dutch accent who tried to find this non-planner museum tickets on her phone, a girl I could have adopted for her cute-factor, let alone her cheerful helpfulness.

I won’t be different, but what I will get from this trip is enough. To see more of this beautiful world and the daughter I love, my firstborn, for whom there was a time I never dreamed the sun would rise even once without her being in my world, this world, this country, possibly right down the street. But instead, she lives where when I sit down to dinner each night, it is already tomorrow. 

Maybe travel’s most significant lesson is about letting go of all you can’t control—embracing the unknown on the pure faith that you will, in fact, reach your destination sooner or later, that you are good enough as you are.

Travel enriches the time between now and then—when this trip we call life is over.
We take with us the experience that the world is full of kindness in the form of strangers, that we are all more alike than different. You would not know that if you had never crossed a border. And now it’s time to return to a place you’ve never been.

Maybe it will be like going through Passport Control—you front up, a Trusted Traveler, hand over your identification, and explain you have nothing to declare. You came with nothing, and you are leaving with nothing. 

You’re just ready to come home.

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.