I awoke with a jolt sitting straight up in the bed with a drowning gasp. Instantly I remembered where I was, where I was going, and the morning dread came on. This is common for me, but it was amplified this day - it’s excruciating, but luckily it only seems to last for about 5 minutes.

Had to get a move on - checked the clock - 7 AM. Plenty of time - maybe too much time - 4 hours ‘til checkout - everything packed - the Holiday Inn across the way was not gracing me with an internet connection that morning. I opened up some american radio program on the computer’s music program and took a bath - hot to soothe the flaring pain in the ol’ shoulder and knee, get the sweat and piss residue off of myself.

Time dragged.

The plane for Argentina was not slated to leave until 6. The suggested time to check in was 3, but I would be at the airport about 3 1/2 hours before since I had no better place to be. Best to squeeze every moment I had coming to me from the hotel, catch the airport shuttle and bide my time in Miami International Airport.

And so I relaxed as much as I could. Nothing to be done but to wait and wait and wait, turn away the maid, smoke cigarettes, check the clock, write in my little notebook, turn on the radio, turn it off, look under the bed - make sure I didn’t forget anything, tweeze my manly eyebrows down, look out the curtains, try to shit. Tidy the room, empty the ashtray, check the clock, wash my hands, look under the bed to make sure not to forget anything, flip through a book about Buenos Aires, check the clock, smoke a cigarette, look out the curtains, drink a stale soda from last night, open the window, empty the ashtray...

Waiting is a form of torture - the inactivity of it, the paralysis. When there’s no way to speed things along, time stretching out - something specific looming.

But finally it was time to check out. Into the shuttle and out at the airport. Same two unwieldy bags. I was walking through, looking at all the glowing signs behind the counters, and I was walking - past Air Canada, past Lufthansa, past EL AL, and on. Finally I started wondering what was going on, and I must have looked confused, too, because a security guard asked me where I was going. I told him and he said that first, I should get a luggage cart. “Go on. There are some free over there. I’ll watch your bags. Go ahead.” Then he told me that Aerolineas Argentinas wasn’t open yet and that’s why I couldn’t find them. He wasn’t sure where they were, because they opened after he got off work.

It turned out they took over the slot Air Canada was operating in - then the LCD screens changed over to Aerolineas. And so there was nothing to do but to wait some more, with no specific idea of when they would open, light raking in through the glass front of the building, periodically wheeling out the cart like a very organized bag lady to smoke here and there, trying like hell to pay attention to the talk I played on the pod and not absorbing any of it. And what’s the point in describing the day? I woke up at 7 and waited at the hotel until 11. I got to the airport and waited for the Airline to open until 2:00. I checked in, went through a security check, and waited in the boarding area until 5:00. A good 10 hours with little to nothing to report.

Along the way, I started to talk to some people here and there. A very sweet woman from Chile was talking to me in Spanish, of which I may have understood about 30%. She’d been in Queens, someone in her family had had a brain annurism and she’d been caring for him. She was from a part of Chile where it rains once every 4 years and then flowers bloom all over the place. Her grandchildren were bilingual and helped her go shopping in New York. I showed her Kentucky on a map. Kentucky. What a place to be from.

I took 10 pictures with as many cameras of an international crew of high spirited twenty-somethings on their way to Peru to provide earthquake relief. Later when they asked me what I did and I told them I was a photographer (among other things) we all had a laugh since I couldn’t find my way around their cameras with a flashlight and a map.

My paranoia over my personal information extended to signing up to use the internet. Credit card between my teeth, I hunkered down with my tights around my knees in a toilet stall, typing in my precious credit card number while the busy bathroom bustled with the sounds of toilets flushing and a confused and crying child being told to sit on the toilet in Spanish.

A man from Buenos Aires spoke to me several times - with the accent I understood about 5% of what he said. Oh, yes, it was becoming obvious that my crippled comprehension would be compounded by the accent. A beautiful accent, one of the reasons I wanted to go to Buenos Aires, but imagine that you were just learning English - and what you had learned was standard American dialect - the way people talk in the movies - more or less - and then you went to New Zealand. That’s the only way I can describe the difference.


View from the Window of the Plane - Miami

So then I was on the plane - a gargantuan thing with three rows, the middle one was wide enough to use as a bed, and was by several people later in the flight. I had two seats by the window all to myself and it started to drizzle. I spoke to no one, no one spoke to me. All the announcements were in Spanish first and then English. I was glad to understand them for the most part, then to have the translation confirm what I had understood. It all seemed so easy, too easy. After all the planning and anxiety, the feeling that I was undertaking some sisyphean task, I was sitting in an airplane seat getting ready to take off, calm - bored even after such a long wait.


Sunset


Outside the windows there were clouds beyond compare. Chills ran through me, staring at them. I recognized animals and people in the clouds until it got dark, and as the sun set, I had to pull my camera out of the overhead and try to get a shot of the bizarre tableau - an endless landscape of pinks and oranges with fluffy beings seeming to inhabit the sky in a semicircle at regular intervals.


Another View

Our eyes are trained to recognize patterns, and what loveliness that is.


Creatures of the Sunset (That should be Donald)


In the dark, more stars were visible than I could ever remember seeing before. Odd square patterns of lights could be seen on the ground when we cleared the clouds below. The Bucket List played on the monitors, and audio was available in English and Spanish.

Intermittent cat naps were interrupted by turbulence, announcements, and a screaming 3 year old boy. He was in the care of a nanny, ignored by his mother and doted on by his conspicuously wealthy grandmother. His fits of disoriented bawling went unnoticed by the mother while the nanny tried again and again to calm him down. After about an hour of this the mother resigned herself to taking him in her arms. He immediately fell asleep. I think she was the only one in our area of the plane who managed to sleep through his epic, shrieking tantrum. Crescendoes were acknowledged wordlessly between passengers with disgruntled eye contact.

My first airplane meal awoke the familiar diarrheal cramping. Years of this sort of thing has trained me to contain the impending outburst for a more appropriate time, generally ultimately resulting in constipation. There was no way I was going to humiliate myself with an echoing trumpet of shit to foul the air of the surrounding 20 rows. No, somehow I have trained this testy container of mine that there are times when it’s urgent messages to me will go ignored, and this was definitely one of those times. It leaves me with the sensation of having a water balloon carefully contained above my pelvis, another item on my to-do list.

In Pistarini (the airport) we disembarked outside and took a shuttle in. Climbing into the shuttle I caught a glimpse of the woman from Chile and her male companion. They looked like they wanted to get on the packed shuttle and I felt I was deserting them when the first bus pulled away, but I smiled and waved. We were right on time just at 4:00 AM - a curse for me since my hosts would not be up and about until 7:30 - it would be a long wait at the airport - at least 2 1/2 hours until I could catch a cab into the city. Wholly unfamiliar was the process of the checking and stamping of the passports, but it went off without a hitch.

Customs was simply an x-ray machine fed by a conveyor belt. I am so used to being an american, ordered in airports and bank lines to wait until I’m called. I was standing with my cart of luggage, waiting for the customs person to call me forward when I felt a cart gently bump the backs of my calves. I rocked my knees back to let whoever had done it know I was there. And again, the pressure prodding me. There was a clear line on the floor - one that in America would mean to wait behind this line until you’re told to proceed. I turned to see whether this was done out of cluelessness or aggression and a woman who resembled a short haired version of Cathy from the Sunday comics asked me which line I was waiting for. I had seen a family split between two lines moments earlier, so I said in halting and broken Spanish that I was waiting to be called to the next open spot. The exasperated woman pushed past me and began unloading her suitcases onto the conveyor belt in front of me.

Annoyed, I moved to the machine on the right. The man tending to that machine said something I had to ask him to repeat 3 times. It was that I needed to use the machine on the left. I moved back over to the other belt, disgusted by that bitch of a woman who was now unloading her things from the other side of the belt. Why she couldn’t have simply indicated that I should go ahead rather than prodding me and then contemptfully cutting me in line, I’m not sure, but it gave me a little shot of anger and with this surge of energy, I wielded my bags onto the belt with enough verve to prompt the woman behind me to gently suggest that I be more careful. I realized then that behaving aggressively might land me in a fix in the customs line, though the woman watching the luggage go through was as passive as if she were watching a day-time soap. I never would have anticipated customs being so simple.

And with that, I was in the airport proper, exhausted and a little chilly, though 4 degrees Celsius is not nearly as bad as it sounds to the American ear, with my cart of luggage, taking the same routine as outside of Miami - out to smoke, in to wait. Out to smoke, in to write in my little notebook and wait.

And that was Thursday (and then some).

Edit: Wrong Duck