The flight was scheduled to leave at 21:05 on December 31, 2019 and arrive in Dubai at 09:55 the following day. A duration of over 12 hours. However, its actual departure was a bit later. We celebrated the arrival of the New Year, on board, probably somewhere over Newfoundland.
My habit is to plan rigorously, but avoid excitement about the trip itself. Such a state of emotional detachment has its pros and cons, but chief among the pros is that it side-steps any deep disappointment when things go wrong.
Once the trip starts, I generally just follow along and go with the flow of planned events and steps as they unfold before more. I tend not to think too far in advance or too deeply about where I’m going. In this state of mind, however, otherwise little things seem to have greater impact.
The first clue that something different was happening was when I reviewed the in-flight menu. A choice between a meat and vegetarian dish, but what struck me as odd were the ingredients: bean stew, dried fruit saffron rice and spiced eggplant, zucchini.
It was when I flipped over the page to look at the back side that I saw the Arabic version of the menu. My thought was “oh that’s interesting.”
I recalled having seen a few people in middle-eastern dress board the plane, but I had not thought too much about it. The menu not only reminded me of where we were going, but it connected me to those people that boarded, the place we were going. The trip had moved from planning to actuality.
I like to watch the map to see how the flight is progressing. The first part of the route followed the same path one typically follows on a flight to northern Europe: across Labrador, south of the tip of Greenland, and south of Iceland. From there it cut a little further north than usual, touching the southern tip of Norway and then south east over Copenhagen, east and then across former eastern block, and south across Turkey, Syria, and Iraq to the United Arab Emirates.
As I followed the map I saw we were flying over Bagdad. The site of so much violence, despair, lost hope, over the last 20 years. We were just 11 kms above it. As the map unfolded before me, I read the names of the other towns: Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Tehran. All these are regularly in the news, and rarely for good news, but as sites of violence, carnage, protest, autocracy. While a distance of 11kms seems very close, in the air it seems far removed, and travelling at over 1,000 km/h, I felt comfort in that this was only a fleeting point of convergence, a momentary brush with all the history. The contrast between these places and where we were going was stark: peace, violence; rich, destitute; stable, out of control. The distance between them was both so little and so wide.
These contrasts persisted in the back of my mind for the entire trip and I failed to fully rationalise them.
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