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The Old Country Early in 1985, I met a young lady through an ad she had placed in the "In Search Of" section of Washingtonian magazine. Her name was Ellen J____, and in the manner of singles-ad types, we quickly started spending nights together at each other's apartments. Nevertheless, it was a strange, unemotional relationship. She was an odd woman, given to long silences and bursts of manic activity. Almost six years my senior, she was tall and thin and had a magnificent mane of chestnut hair which fell almost to her waist. She lived on a trust fund set up by her late father and spent most of her time practicing the violin in her large Silver Spring condo. She had a bizarre job: she ran the computerized billboard at the Connecticut Connection at 18th Street and Connecticut Avenue downtown, the Washington equivalent of the moving headlines in Times Square. (Shades of The Late Risers.) The keynote of her personality was an unreasoning hatred for the twentieth century, with its (as she perceived it) wicked ways and dehumanizing mechanization. She went to great trouble to delude herself that she was living in 1885 rather than 1985. Television, popular music, night life -- all filled her with revulsion. Her idea of a good time was playing first fiddle in a large contra-dance band, the Capital Quicksteps, on weekend nights, sending hoards of similarly-minded men and women, dressed in gingham and suspenders, swirling around the decaying dance hall of the Glen Echo Amusement Park in an orgiastic frenzy. (And I mean that literally -- I've never met such an overwhelming sexual group of people in my life, the dancing a weird mixture of foreplay and primness. With no TVs or any desire to go out nights, Ellen and her nineteenth-century coterie were sexual aficionados of the first degree. She certainly taught me a few things.) Ellen and I both wanted to do some traveling, being at that stage of life with a decent income and no obligations. In keeping with her anti-machine sentiments, Ellen's only previous trips had been to music camps in the Adirondacks and a two-week pilgrimage to the Faeroe Islands. The Faeroes are small outcroppings of naked rock in the far North Atlantic, between Iceland and Scotland. The islands have no TV, no radio, one weekly newspaper (in Danish, which Ellen couldn't understand) and, at the time she visited, 21-hour nights. This was Ellen's idea of an earthly paradise, a place that hadn't changed any since the sixteenth century -- or the sixth, for that matter. When we discussed possible destinations, she desperately wanted to go back and spend another two weeks communing with the seagulls and the whale carcasses and the burly Faeroese. This didn't sound like a whole lot of fun to me. I didn't want our trip to be the usual seven-countries-in-eight-days tour of big cities, too fast and crowded to really appreciate what you were seeing. But two weeks in the Faeroes . . . . I suggested that a somewhat more civilized alternative might be Scotland, a place with its own dark deserted islands but also with big cities and a sense of history. I had recently been fascinated by Scotland, for purely genetic reasons. When I was growing up, I knew that my family name was an Americanization of the German Koch, and therefore always assumed I was of German ancestry. It wasn't until the early '80s that I found out, in researching my family tree, that the vast majority of my ancestors were actually Scottish, with some Belgian, German and English thrown in. This came as a pleasant surprise, since I had always seemed to have a primordial attraction to bagpipe music and moody silences. With this new knowledge of my roots, I spent many hours on my apartment balcony, smoking my beloved rum-twist cigars, sipping Laphroaig (a wicked single malt Scotch whisky) and slowly getting smashed to the skirl of Scottish folk songs on the stereo. It felt right. "Or Iceland," she said. Well, OK. (I guess I was lucky she didn't suggest Israel, since in addition to her Cheevyness, she was also an ardent Zionist and talked often of helping to "take up the fight.") We set about planning a trip encompassing both, with a week in each place. One of her antediluvian friends was a travel agent, and I took a long lunch hour one day to drive up to Bethesda and get everything arranged. I had borrowed $3,000 from my credit union and planned to spend it freely. The trip fell through, though, because Ellen and I fell through. Soon after making the arrangements, I started to wonder whether Ellen was the person I wanted to share Scotland with -- or even if I could stand being alone with her for two weeks without strangling her. She was always kvetching about my tastes in the arts, with my New Wave albums, my collection of old sitcom tapes and my utter fanaticism for the Greaseman, a local radio personality who was not for the faint-of-heart. (The Grease was the top-rated morning DJ at the time, a raunchy, infectious romantic hiding behind a line of macho patter so exaggerated that it became endearing; the station's slogan for him was "Changing the Way Washington Talks," which was greatly understating matters -- one could not go ten minutes without hearing one of his bizarre catchphrases on someone's lips. This drove Ellen nuts, as she found the Greaseman utterly incomprehensible.) She tried to get me interested in contra-dancing, in vintage clothing (a nice euphemism for dead people's clothes), and in boring afternoons at the Baird Auditorium listening to some hermit play the zither, all in an effort to wean me from my century and save my machine-damned soul. Worst of all, she hated my car, a red 1967 Karmann Ghia convertible, and only rode in it under duress, white-knuckled because it didn't have shoulder belts or a roll bar. Admittedly, it wasn't the safest car in the world, and she was no longer in her immortal 20's as I was, but how can you not like a Ghia? Her preaching on the awfulness of modern life grew weirder each day. The tensions between us finally came to a head in May, during a weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, where the Capital Quicksteps were playing at an annual gathering of East Coast contra-dancers known, that year, as Victoria's Revenge. My Ghia had conked out on the way up Friday afternoon, necessitating a tow and a five-hour delay in getting there, understandably pissing Ellen off. After we were on the road for the second time in Ellen's gold 1972 Dodge Dart (no slave to fashion, Ellen), she informed me, rather disingenuously, that her doctor said she couldn't have sex for some unspecified reason. I accepted the punishment for what it was, but the thought of having to deal with Ellen sans sex for two days was appalling, because it had become the only thing we could do without getting into a fight. She was tight-lipped with rage because I spent Saturday reading Seven Days in May on the veranda of our Victorian bed-and-breakfast in Cape May instead of listening to the Quicksteps' rehearsals at the Cape May Town Hall, perched dramatically on stilts above the crashing surf. We argued over that, over where to eat dinner, over the fact that I hadn't brought any "dance clothes." The dance itself that night was an endless procession of nut cases, all dressed in period costumes and mad as hatters. I managed to dance one dance, a polka, with a twelve-year-old girl who dragged me bodily from the sidelines, only to give up on me in disgust when I kept stepping on her. My discomfort and my revulsion with the lunatic dancers showed too clearly for once, and I went back to the bed-and-breakfast alone. By the time we took the ferry to Delaware and drove home Sunday morning, we were barely speaking. On the next Wednesday, she bought me lunch at Babe's on Wisconsin Avenue and told me politely to get lost. I felt as if I'd been paroled. I was now free of my obligation to visit Iceland and decided to spend my entire two-week vacation in Scotland. I immediately called up Ellen's travel agent friend to cancel the Iceland portion of our trip, only to find that Ellen had already canceled the entire thing, losing some deposit money and all our reservations in the process. Gritting my teeth, I rescheduled everything and spent a few days getting up early and calling hotels and inns all over Scotland getting reservations, marveling at the crystal-clear connections and entranced by the musical accents. After a few transmogrifications, my schedule shaped up as follows: Sunday, July 14 through Friday, July 19 -- Edinburgh The schedule was a nice mix, I thought, between the big city and the small, out-of-the-way places I could later feel smug about visiting. Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, was by all accounts one of the prettiest cities in Europe, full of art and culture and history. Tobermory was a small fishing village and resort on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast. Portree was the main city of the Isle of Skye, home of Drambuie and Skye terriers. By the end of May, everything was set. The fare to and from Gatwick Airport, south of London, was $472, leaving me plenty of money for gifts and sidetrips and a chance to sample as many single-malt whiskies as I could find. The next month-and-a-half were a torture of anticipation. I was a government contract negotiator with the Military Sealift Command on Wisconsin Avenue, a position I had taken the previous February with a substantial increase in salary but with, as far as I could determine, no duties. What work I had was generally completed by 8 AM, and the rest of the day was spent looking as if I had something to do (which is infinitely harder than actually doing something) and sneaking across the street to a bar called Maggie's, which usually had enough MSCers in it at all hours to enable us to hold staff meetings there. As my departure date of July 13 drew closer, I got more and more excited and less and less able to think about work. The day before I left, July 12, I went home early to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger on her 8th mission. The main engines fired up, then were suddenly shut down by the computer as Challenger, with five astronauts and two civilian scientists aboard, teetered back and forth on the pad like a nicked bowling pin, a nasty premonition of her destruction six months later. I hoped my departure would be smoother. I had spent many hours compulsively making lists concerning the trip. I had a list for what would be in each bag and carefully refined each list and repacked each bag twenty times. On the night before my departure, I had everything down to two large soft-sided cases, a duffel bag and a shoulder bag. I had a journal for taking notes and 325 frames of slide film. I planned on being a complete bore upon my return. I was the first member of my family to venture to Europe, (except for my dad's Mediterranean tour of duty on his aircraft carrier in the early '50s) and in my planning I had envisioned a large-scale send-off from my parents. However, it turned out that my father would be out of town in Seattle that day teaching a course on MILSTRIP (don't ask) to a bunch of bureaucrats, and my mother was flying out the same day to meet him. My only sibling, my sister Jamie, lived in Fort Worth. Consequently, I had no one to even take me to the airport, and the thought of leaving my Karmann Ghia in an airport parking lot filled me with dread. I finally coerced a good friend of mine into braving the terrors of Washington traffic and giving me a lift to Baltimore-Washington International, still known as Friendship Airport to those of us who want to sound like old Washington pols. I woke up on Saturday the 13th to a hot, sweltering Washington morning, with the temperature expected to reach 100 degrees. It was the day of Bob Geldorf's Live Aid, and I watched a little of it as I repacked for the fortieth time, making sure to include a cache of rum twist cigars, the only proper accompaniment to good Scottish whisky. I visited with my mom for a while and helped her move all her screen-house plants indoors for the week. She left at noon and I mostly laid on the floor, listening to the concert and soaking up the air conditioning, until my friend arrived to take me to the airport. Friendship is a much nicer, roomier and more efficient airport than Dulles, the international airport nearer my house. (I have always been mystified by the popularity of Dulles, which, despite its famous Eero Saarinen architecture, is perhaps the most unworkable airport in the US.) I arrived at 3:00 and struggled to get my luggage to the World Airways counter. This small effort exhausted me in the heat, and even in repose I sweated like a pig, making me wish I'd lost some more weight before the trip. I was at my heaviest ever, around 235 pounds. (Not all that bad, actually, for somebody six foot two, but still on the beefy side.) I immediately headed for the airport bar. The Live Aid concert was on, and everyone was watching it avidly. I had three National Premium beers, the first of uncounted beers I would consume in the next two weeks. (I was still young enough at 28 to equate beer-drinking with maturity and intellectual freedom, a sort of low-rent Dylan Thomas.) While Elton John was singing, a fashionable young lady -- slab haircut, multiple earrings, T-shirt, pegged short jeans and white pumps -- sat down. She was waiting for her Army husband to arrive from LA on the 5 o'clock flight, and engaged a few people at the bar in giggly ingenuous conversation. Most of the people around me were military, and she eyed their various potables while chewing her lower lip. "Y'know, I've never had a fancy drink. Do you think I should?" She included all of us in the question with a cute flip of her head. Everyone suggested something -- martinis, rum and Coke, bourbon and soda. I suggested single-malt whisky but was booed down. The bartender finally gave her a Brandy Alexander with the promise "Really -- it doesn't taste like liquor at all!" While we was watching Crosby, Stills and Nash sing and our young military wife was on her second Alexander, I felt a strange tingling sensation on my stomach and found a grasshopper, of all things, crawling under my UVa polo shirt. When I had dragged my luggage in from the car, a swarm of grasshoppers had landed on me, bringing to mind all sorts of plagues and curses. This one had apparently been hiding in my clothes for over an hour and a half. Turning from my bar compatriots, I tried to get rid of it as discretely as possible. Sitting next to me was a sailor who looked as if he was rooted to his seat. He wore a blue jumper with four gold hashmarks, but his rate was on the other side and I couldn't see it. He kept telling us all in a loud garrulous voice of the "unbelievable value" of the Live Aid concert -- "If you wanted to see each of these bands separately, it would cost you a million dollars. That's right, a million dollars." After someone laughed at this, he started to enumerate the various charges, but by the time I left, he'd only gotten up to about $500. I took a seat at the World departure lounge, too keyed up to read my paperback. World has seven gates opening into a huge lounge, and I sat by one of the gates not being used to avoid the other people. When I checked in at the desk, I found that my charter company had already given me a seat, 16K, which was a window seat but not the side I wanted to be sitting on. The plane, purring outside the window, was a DC-10, looking a little beat-up in the wavy hot air. I was wearing my glasses for once. My contacts had been feeling strange and I figured I`d be up all night, since I've never been able to sleep on airplanes. (I have no idea why somebody doesn't schedule a daytime flight to Europe.) I had the contact lenses with me, but didn't bring any saline or cleaner with me, a lapse in my careful planning. I got out my journal and started to make some notes. Unfortunately, I found it reminded me too much of writing in blue books, something I'd been doing a lot of the preceding week in my graduate business courses at George Washington University. I gave up after a few sentences. Finally, the boarding call came. I sat in 16K nervously waiting to see if anyone was going to sit down next to me. The thought of being trapped in my narrow seat for seven hours was horrifying. I sighed with relief when the door was sealed and I was still alone. We took off at 6:59:25 PM, July 13, 1985 -- 35 seconds to midnight GMT. The take-off roll was an uncomfortable 45 seconds as the plane struggled into the hot thin air. I was disappointed to find that I could barely see out of my yellowed, scratched window. What kind of operation was World running that the windows were this shitty? The steward doing the announcements as we climbed to altitude sounded like Lawrence Welk, and he said that they would be raffling off a bottle of champagne later in the flight. What next, a sing-a-long? A half-hour later, as I rearranged my legs on the seat next to me, the captain announced that we were passing over Nantucket. The sunlight on the other side of the plane was brilliant. The cabin felt cozy as we settled in for the long haul. I reset my watch to Greenwich Mean Time, got a Michelob and a little bag of peanuts from the beverage cart and opened my paperback, Intrepid's Last Case. I dearly love flying, however, and knew that even over the ocean, with nothing in sight for hundreds of miles in the pitch black, I would spend most of the flight with my nose pressed against the window. I always got off airplanes with a crease across my forehead from the top of the windowframe. Around me, I could hear a lot of English, Irish and Scottish accents, very pretty over the white noise of the engines. The guy across the aisle from me was sipping a Seagram's and highlighting the fine print in a guide to the Riviera. His wife was drinking milk and looked bored as hell. An hour and a half later, the sun set in a blaze of colors on the port side. The haze disappeared and I could actually see the Atlantic for the first time, limitless and awesome in the approaching dusk. It was a variety of colors, blue and silver and grey and black. I thought of Charles Lindbergh, flying to France for 33 hours over this scary, unmarked immensity, most of the time below 1,000 feet. Seeing it, Lindbergh's courage suddenly seemed other-worldly. I also thought of the hell people had to go through to cross the ocean the other way -- the sickness, the poverty, the long voyage towards a new life, towards the unknown; my ancestors, the Kochs, the Scotts, the Doyens, the Flemings among them. Somewhere in the blank face of the Atlantic below me were the graves of the Arctic, the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, Nungesser's White Bird; names so evocative they made my neck tingle. So much of America's history is tied up in the Atlantic that I felt a sense of awe and privilege to be studying it from seven miles up, a beer in one hand and my feet up on the neighboring seat. The movie was The Falcon and the Snowman. After watching it for an hour or so, getting a headache from the lousy non-electric headphones, I was amazed to see the sun starting to rise on the left side of the plane -- the same side it had set on scant hours before. There is such a thing as a Great Circle Route, Virginia! Below were small fluffy clouds, pretty in the red light against the dark ocean. I figured we were nearing the Irish coast, but the sky clouded up and I couldn't see the ocean any more. We were near where an Air India 747 had exploded and plummeted into the ocean a month earlier, killing hundreds. Something nice to think about. The air became bumpier, the right wing outside my window flexing disturbingly with each bounce. The stewardesses passed out UK entry cards, on which we were supposed to state if we were bringing in illegal things, like liquor and cigars. I figured my fifty rum twists in the luggage compartment weren't worth discussing. The captain announced we were passing the Welsh coast, but I still couldn't see anything. He also announced that the predicted temperature in London that day would be 65 degrees. After Washington, it sounded wonderful. After watching a smarmy little video about the joys of London, I glanced out the window and, through holes in the overcast, spotted the United Kingdom for the first time. We were passing over a group of lakes, then a small village, the Welsh countryside dark and shadowed under the clouds. My first British town! It was 6 AM. Glancing ahead, I could see a big thundercloud looming in our path. So could the captain, and he announced that we would have to circle until the cloud moved off of Gatwick. We made a slow turn to the south and moved into clear air over southern England. I could see the fields of East Sussex, the south coast and, across the English Channel, the dark shape of France and the European mainland. What a small country. Turning back towards Gatwick, we plunged into the clouds, a weird amber light illuminating the plane. The seat-belt light came on. When we broke through the bottom of the clouds, we were about 4000 feet up, banking sharply over a strangely sunlit landscape of hedgerows and mansions and large swimming pools. It looked a lot more prosperous than I had anticipated. Making our final approach, we skimmed an A-road, devoid of traffic in the Sunday dawn. We touched down at 6:21:30 AM, July 14, 1985.
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