Traveling in the Age of Trump

We arrive at Charles de Gaulle Airport three hours early. It takes a while to navigate from the subway to American Airlines. As you walk the seeming miles from the metro to AA counter, you pass through the middle eastern and African airline counters. Dashikis, hijabs, Saudi scarves… it’s like a marketplace and I am surprised there is not a camel or two and a few souks along the way.

American Airlines with filled with Americans. It is a shock to be in Little America after two weeks in Germany and France. We end up in line with people from Cheyenne. I went to high school with his sister. Of course.

We stand in a long line for almost two hours to reach the kiosks that print baggage tickets. I have misplaced my ticket info, so rummage through my bag to find the sheet while Madora attempts to log in. Because her ticket is under Daleygreen but her passport is Daley-Green, the system melts. I find my info and log in while Madora gets help. We are now taking up two machines. The line grows. We finally convince the machines to cough up our baggage tags and now we inch into another line. Sort of intermingled with the first line. Just for maximum confusion. We are waiting to drop our bags and get our seats, since the baggage kiosk declined to assign us seats.

Two agents pull aside Americans, traveling on American passports and heading back to America, to interview them about their activities while overseas. Occasionally, an agent will wade into the crowd and change the barriers around. One man gets separated from his group. When he protests, the agent tells him “our supervisor tell us to move ze cords. I do not know why. It Is to escrew wit the people.” Well, not the last sentence, but that was the general gist.

A half hour has passed. The agents begin to suggest that people going to Chicago move a bit more quickly. They open another mystery line and the first agent tells me I don’t need to be in that line. The second one tells me that of course I should be. I am beginning to get sweaty and hot and irritated. Madora promises me caffeine and chocolate if I can keep my sense of humor. I overhear the interviewing agent tell the people in front of us that the interview must be in French or they can’t leave. I tell Madora that this may be an issue because the only French phrase I know involves sex. Madora suggests I try it and see what happens.

Before we can get questioned, we are shunted into another line and almost immediately to the ticket clerk. Madora doesn’t show up in his system. I do. As a standby passenger. I am not amused and explain in no uncertain terms that I am not standby and have never been standby. He pounds on his keyboard for a few moments and comes up with a boarding pass and tells me to run since it is now 11:25 and my plane is boarding. I refuse.

He goes back to his keyboard and tries to print a boarding pass for Madora. The computer deletes her from the system. I explain in no uncertain terms that we will be travelling together and that I have no intention of leaving my sixteen-year-old daughter alone in France. Before I can reach over the counter and spark an international incident, he is able to find her in the system and print a boarding pass.

We now have to weave about half a football field through people in various states of distress, find the exit from the American Airline hellhole, and run back towards the gate entrance, past the line that is even longer and more desperate.

But first, we must go through passport control. Since our flight is boarding, we are pointed towards the express lane. The border agent is on her cellphone, having, from the tone of voice and the laughing, a personal conversation. It gives us time to have a great conversation with an American who works in Paris and does a great deal of travel. According to him, the questioning of American citizens started four months ago and is not a French thing, but an American one.

I try attracting someone’s attention, but am ignored in the finest French fashion. We finally approach border control and hand over our passports. Mine won’t scan. So, using one hand, the other too busy holding her rhinestone encrusted phone to her ear, she begins to re-arraign the computer peripherals with one hand. I suggest that she hang up her phone and do her job. Madora grabs my arm. She shoves our passports over the counter, but here’s the thing. Not once did she look up at us or make eye contact. We could have exchanged passports with the man behind us for all this woman would have known.

We then shoot through security. I will say that the French have security down to an art form. But it is now 11:45. I attempt to run, but I can feel my knee and ankle protesting and realize that I am doing more damage to both unhappy joints. I send Madora ahead with instructions to stand in the airline door until I get there and limp along as fast as I can. When I arrive at the gate, it is blocked off, so I ask where to board. “Oh,” I am told, “you aren’t boarding yet. Go sit down and we will call you.”

I am now pouring sweat, out of breath, angry, and in considerable pain. I feel my sarcastic, and generally repressed, personality start to boil up. I decide to find a bathroom and limp off. There is another line. Of course.

On my return, I find that the plane is now boarding. Madora is in group seven. I have no group on my boarding pass and after a few moments, she divulges that she had been called to the counter to get a new pass but that I hadn’t. The agent is announcing that only the groups that she has called will be allowed to board and the rest will be sent back to baggage hell. I go up to the counter and tell them I am happy to board with my group, but I have no group number. “Yes, madame, zat is because you are on ze standby.”

All Paris comes to a screeching halt. A few pigeons fly up in startlement. Even the dead in the catacombs can hear my reply.

In seconds, I have a boarding pass, a seat, and a group number. I am also in a complete and utterly furious sarcastic mood. My good personality is begging with my bad one to let it be in control. It’s a pretty interesting conversation.

Madora is ahead of me in line and when her boarding pass is scanned, the lights turn red. She is sent to a little gated off area to be questioned by security. “That is my sixteen-year-old daughter. I go nowhere without her and she speaks to no one without me.” I explain to the boarding agent. “Oh, oui, madame. You must answer ze security questions as well.” Now, we are both in the little square of purgatory. I know that my answers and attitude can make this go more easily. I also know that I am very very irritated. I remind myself that I need to reserve my irritation for the right people, not the French people who are only following orders. Just like at Dachau.

A very short French woman with a big smile questions us.

“You are togezer?’

“Yes.” Teeth gritting to keep civil.

“What is your relationship to each other?”

Three answers occur to me immediately. 1) she’s my daughter; 2) occasionally rocky but generally really good; and 3) oh, she’s a street kid I picked up in Prague. I open my mouth is the hope that my brain will provide the answer I want, but I am not really certain what is going to come out. Fortunately, my brain chooses option one, but it is close.

“Ok, so I talk to you togezer.” (Yes, you most certainly will.) When did you come here?” She asks Madora. Madora begins her answer, complete with extraneous and agonizingly precise detail. She is so ingenuously adorable that I can barely stand it.

At length, the agent turns to me. “And you?”

“I came on the 16^th, I think. I went to Marseilles to ride horses.”

“Ah, horses. You like to ride ze horses?” My brain produces several possible answers.

“Why yes, yes I do. (Otherwise I spent an insane amount of money to be hot, sweaty, and sore on the back of a big, stupid animal.) And then we met up and we have been traveling together ever since.”

“And Prague? What do you do in Prague? What is there to do?” (Now you want a travelogue?)

“We walked around Old Town and looked at stuff.”

“What do you do in Prague?”

“Buy stuff, apparently.”

“What do you buy?”

“Mostly street art. (And drugs. And a few leftover Soviet era weapons. And some porn. You know, the usual stuff).” The boarding line is gone. The plane is waiting but it won’t wait forever. Manners. Control.

“So what do you see in Prague?”

“A lot of old buildings. Ten million people and a complete disregard for vowels. (and traffic laws. Not to mention pee in every street corner and beer and absinthe barf everywhere.)”

“Oh, a complete disregard for vowels. Zat is very interesting. You can go. Have a great flight.”

We hustle down the gangplank.

“You did good, Mom.” Madora tells me.

Of course, we run into yet another line as we herd past people trying to shove their oversized belongings into overhead bins and filtering past first class and business class to our tiny seats in cattle class. And god help me, I start mooing. Madora gives me the look, apparently convinced I am going to be thrown off the flight and all this insanity will begin again.

Ah, travel has never been so glamorous. Or comfortable.

I wonder what would have happened if I had answered honestly – that I have become radicalized by travel to sane countries and I am filled with the desire to wreak havoc on our out-of-control political system until we return to where Americans traveling on American passports to America are not treated like criminals. I assume I would be discovering the comforts of the Bastille and interrogation by men in black suits.