A little bit less alone
Last night, after a week of stillness and silence, British airspace reopened. Today the sun came up, I woke up to the drone of a faraway plane, and I felt just a little bit less alone.
After a six-day flight ban affecting just about all of Western Europe, the beginning of a return to normality, even for someone who hasn’t been stranded somewhere or had her travel plans thwarted, is a welcome thing.
Over the course of less than a week, the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano — an Act of God, technically speaking — has grounded close to 100,000 flights and cost the airline industry $1.7 billion, or £1.1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of passengers have been stranded, the lucky ones put up in hotels on their insurers’ or their airlines’ expense, the unlucky ones left at the airport to hope for the best. The skies above London, usually buzzing with air traffic from 6am until 11pm, have been utterly still.
No one has been getting in, and no one has been getting out.
The Eurostar and the ferries that connect the UK to the mainland have, of course, been chockerblock-full. Despite extra services being laid on by everyone from small cruise operators to the Royal Navy, the flow of human traffic has come to a near-complete halt. For love or money, you you can’t get on — or off — the island right now.
The volcano was a surprise for most people, myself included. But for me, more surprising than the smoke, the ash, the lava and the flight ban was what followed: my own bizarre reaction to this volcano-induced exile.
For all of my joking about how, over the past five or six days we have technically been marooned on an island, and how in my fantasies I had a tan/had more time to swim/was subjected to fewer political ads, I have found this experience deeply unsettling. The island in question is large, populous, massively industrialised and technically just a half-day’s swim from the mainland. But for many people, and certainly for me, one of the things that enables us to live the lives we do is the expectation of easy interconnectedness. We travel freely because we believe we can freely go home. This past week, that has not been so.
My world has changed a little
The internet has still worked, as have the phones. But the most physical, genuine way to connect, the most real and complete way to be there, has been closed off. Granted, flying is expensive and a hassle and comes with bad food, but it’s the fastest way — and in many circumstances, the only realistic way — to be present somewhere far away. Far like France, or far like LA — when flying is not longer on the table, far is far.
My family is not in the UK — they’re in Canada. And whilst I had no plans to visit them during this time, I felt completely freaked out that due to circumstances beyond my control, I couldn’t get there even if I wanted to. What’s more, I really need a break from London. I want to get away for a weekend, go to Italy and walk on the beach and just chill out. And I can’t. I can’t do it this weekend, and I likely won’t be able to do it next weekend, either, if the passenger backlog is anything like authorities expect it will be. I am stuck, and I don’t like it. And knowing I’m stuck makes it even worse.
So why isn’t anyone else freaking out?
One of the things that amuses me most about Londoners is their reaction to snow. Strangely enough, it comes around every year, indeed you might even refer to it as a standard symptom of winter, yet when it arrives in anything more than a cheery dusting, Londoners freak out. They hole up in their drafty houses, abandon their cars in the streets, and make well-choreographed, overdressed missions to the local, inevitably understocked, supermarket, where they proceed to panic-buy everything in sight. As a Canadian — albeit Vancouver raised — who has seen a snowy winter or two, I find this absolutely hilarious. In my books, four inches of snow is just not legitimate cause to buy up my local Tesco Metro’s supply of longlife milk, but for many of my neighbours, God help you if you stand in their way.
I suppose I thought I would see the same — to my eyes — overblown reaction to this Act of God and the havoc it has wreaked, as I do every winter to the ol’ snow situation. But that hasn’t been so. Even though Britain is full of farms that produce all sorts of food, the hold on air traffic, if it went on, would undoubtedly have a more profound affect on the food supply than would a snowfall that lasted the same amount of time. So why haven’t people bought up all the groceries?
And another thing: during those longer wintry spells, news channels are constantly churning out human-interest stories about who has been affected to what degree, and how strangers all over the country are pitching in and helping each other out. These stories have been surprisingly scarce over the past week, which has led me to believe that the ‘stiff upper lip and let’s get through it together’ spirit just might not apply here, or at least not to the same degree.
I’ve spent a bit of time puzzling over this, but I think I finally understand: it’s about being home.
I think, for many people, home is a place. One place, one feeling, one group of people. But for a lot of people, ex-pats especially, I would venture, home is a little more complex than that. It can be people, rather than places, or it can be several places at once. It’s also about being free to move: if your identity is linked to your freedom of movement, and that freedom is suddenly impinged, you’re going to feel the existential pinch. And I really did.
The meaning of home
I think what affected me so much, and affected the people who are stuck elsewhere, or stuck here and want to get home, or are here but feel that home isn’t here but somewhere else or with someone else, doesn’t really wash with the people who are already home. I don’t think this event registers the same way to a person who only leaves the island for business and pleasure as it does for someone who needs to leave to feel complete.
As someone who isn’t completely home here, or in Vancouver, or wherever she is, not being able to move freely between my homes and be closer to the people I love most, was distressing. Home for me is being near the ocean, which I grew up next to. It’s my family, wherever they are. And it’s space to think, wherever that is. It’s also my house and haunts and community in London, and my history in Vancouver. But the thing that ties these things together is choice — that my home is where I choose to be. Knowing I couldn’t leave if I wanted to — and realistically, still can’t — wasn’t easy. It made me very fretful.
I’m curious as to how this affected people who didn’t need to be anywhere other than where they were, but have close friends, parents, siblings or partners elsewhere. Did the distance feel greater for them, too, or am I just overreacting?
Of course, there’s a necessary caveat here: my experience is as a relatively affluent, unimpeded person in the Western world. I’ve never been a refugee. I don’t know what that’s like. I’m not comparing the experience of the past few days to being forcibly removed from my home, or exiled, or any of the other ways people can become separated from home and family. I’m just thinking about it for what it is.
Photo by Tipiro; sourced via Flickr courtesy of a Creative Commons licence
