A few moments from the long hours have remained vivid in my mind. O’Hare Airport in Chicago was, as ever, congested and busy. I had to make my way from one concourse to another, via an underground passage—a huge dim passage with stairs and escalators and a long neon sculpture consisting of angles and bars overhanging it. They lit up in a pattern of colour changing through the spectrum. It moved in an unpredictable rhythm, darkening now and then, always in the same direction, and I wondered if it was responding to the sounds of people talking or suitcases rolling below it.
I had time at O’Hare to buy a coffee and muffin and found a seat in the crowd. Television screens hung everywhere, but for the most part people were reading or chatting or working on their companion machnines—until the moment when the news broadcast a few sentences from President Obama about the start of the school year. Suddenly almost everyone around me was staring at the screens and listening closely—it was moving to see them galvanized into attention by his voice, and the kind of longing hope on faces.
The airport in LA was surprisingly empty when I clambered off the plane, where I’d been very comfortable in the last seat in the very last row, a blank seat beside me. I prowled along the corridor and back to stretch my legs and check out what was there, looking for a place to have some supper. I settled on a bar, The Karl Strauss Brewery—not that they brewed there, I’m sure—and ordered a Red Trolley Ale which was astonishingly good for an American beer and a Chinese chicken salad, and found myself watching a baseball game on the televisions screens (the inescapable leitmotif of travel these days). LA was playing the D-backs from Arizona who are one of the youngest teams in the league, so I suppose no surprise that many of their players looked to be about 22. Arizona was ahead and outplaying the Dodgers. I remember rooting for the Dodgers several generations ago when I was in grade 8, and our home room teacher in Winnipeg brought a television into the classroom for the World Series …
After writing my blog note from Melbourne I sagged into my seat and finished reading the Michaels book—still time to wait, but the room was filling up with other passengers talking in accented voices and hard to understand. I put on my iPod and played some Charles Lloyd, and realized suddenly that I was very tired—and a long long way from home. So I was very happy to see Irene’s familiar face waiting for me beside the luggage belt when I came down the escalator into arrivals at the Hobart airport.
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