It’s January 30th—around 5PM—and I’m waiting in Toronto for my flight to Keflavík, or at least I was. I’ve been and gone, and now I’m back. Now it’s November 1st—around 11PM—and I’m still waiting, it feels like, still waiting to arrive or depart to where I’m going or where I’ve been. The nature of stationary plays havoc with direction.
I brought with me on my trip to Berlin via Iceland the camera built into my phone from 2014, the camera built into my iPad from 2017, and a Nikon D7100 borrowed from my Dad. I took many gigabytes of pictures—hundreds of them—and they’ve all been sitting on my computer ever since I took them. I love taking pictures, but what to do with them after isn’t anything I’m particularly consistent with. It’s the same with writing: I love it, and there are piles and piles of notes all transcribed into and sitting on my computer ever since I wrote them.
I’d started to cover some of my trip before and during with entries here, here, here, and here, and then another after I got back here. It’s an okay start, but now I’m going to do the rest.
As I take my seat in the plane it becomes clear this Airbus must be an off‐lease deal from an eastern European or Russian airline…
…and with the open cargo door visible from my window, I can see the exterior purple paint is covering what used to be a white airplane. Fun fact—the extra coat of paint on this aircraft adds an estimated 300 kg (about 660 lbs.) to its overall weight. So, Wow air, how about instead of charging me an additional fee for bringing clean clothes in the form of a packed suitcase you scrape a few kilograms of extra paint off that wing?
Anyway—me, my cameras and clean clothes, and hundreds of kilograms of superfluous paint are soon flying over Toronto. The late winter evening sun blasts into the cabin as we bank sharply over the lake. Our path east adds to the speed of the rotation of the earth and the daylight fades away in front of me as we climb. I feel my eyes water. I love flying. I love seeing the city from above, seeing something so full of activity appearing more and more static the higher you get above it.
Dusk vanishes and it’s immediately night. All I see out the window now are the pockets, strings, and smatterings of orange light, the colour of night, broadcasting up from the last remaining roads and towns before being replaced with the uniform darkness of forest and ocean.
There’s no in‐flight entertainment, and I had neglected to load anything onto my iPad prior to departure—so after going through every single possible setting in the control panel and geeking out, I start to sketch on it using a stylus my mum gave me…
I sit quietly for a few hours, meditate on the state of being motionless in my seat as it hurtles through the air, and eventually fall asleep, something I am often unable to do on an airplane. Gentle turbulence wakes me, and increasingly turbulent turbulence keeps me awake for the last hour of the flight. Our decent becomes rougher and rougher as we creep closer and closer to the darkness below—in the distance I see an island of orange light. Closer still and the winds blow and the cabin flexes while we bank down in a series of turns that in my sleep‐deprived state make me wonder if the pilot is lost.
But we’re not lost. The ground catches up and the wheels touchdown. It’s just after four in the morning local time. It’s raining and warmer outside than it was back in Toronto. Winds are so high the ground crew is unable to use the jet bridge—so we’re told to put on our coats and be careful as it is “quite windy” and make our way down the stairs they’ve rolled up to the airplane and walk to the terminal.
It’s an incredible welcome: the wind smells different. The rain feels different. And I can tell I’m no longer departed. I’m arrived.