On
Tuesday, April 20, I was walking down the narrow footpath of
Cambridge Grove, an ethnically mixed street in Hammersmith in West
London. I was one of the many stranded and stalled in Western Europe
because of the Plume of Ash emanating from that volcano in
Iceland.
A young
white man came towards me, wearing black pants and jacket. When he was a
few inches away, he turned towards me, opened his mouth, and let out a
monstrous belch. The noise was worse than the smell, but I could catch a
whiff of gas, beer, and garlic.
I obeyed
the New Yorker's first rule of the street. Show nothing. Keep
going. But my world was becoming one of eruptions. We can measure an eruption
by
its power to disrupt.
That small
one from a surly young man's mouth disrupted nothing—except for my
momentary peace of mind on a leafy English street in spring. That
immense
one from Eyjafjallajokull, which sounds like a name in an Icelandic
saga,
disrupted global systems and hundreds of thousands of lives.
When air
travel finally began to resume in England on the Wednesday, no-one
knew when a symptom of disruption might check in. Thanks to the help of
friends, nagging and nagging the airlines, I got a reservation for
Wednesday night, April 21.
Boarding
pass in hand, I appeared at the gate. "But you're not on this
flight," a puzzled and polite agent said. I was asked to wait with a
clutter of baby strollers that also had to be loaded on. A few minutes
later, an equally polite agent said that their computers had been
erupting with errors for hours, They were checking people in and then
making them disappear. I was not to worry. I would get on. My
baggage would get on. "A hard day for you," I said.
"You have no idea, Ma'am," he replied. "You have no
idea."
My hotel
bristled with glitches as well. My rational self tells me that it
was badly built and that glitches revealed systemic weaknesses. My
irrational self thought of eruptions and the subsequent disruptions
going
viral. The television screen would go blank. Two fire alarms went off
within the week I was there. The second was at 5:30 a.m. Guests streamed
down from nine floors to stone patios. Some of them were fully
dressed as if they went to bed prepared for disaster. Two Japanese women
were wearing masks. Two young Chinese girls huddled within shimmering,
silvery, space age, fire resistant blankets. Be prepared, be
prepared. I could smell toast and bacon. A cook, in a chef's hat, smoked
a cigarette near a shrub. When I checked out, I asked about the
alarms. "Oh," the clerk said, "the second one, this
morning, was a real fire in the kitchen." Was my chef the guilty
party? Or were the stoves as badly wired as my TV?
The Plume
of Ash has shrunk. More flights have resumed. In Europe, the
eruptions now also come from the vocal guardians of travel and
communications in the public and private sector. In the future, we will
smell many more of their emissions of wind as people avoid and shift
responsibility for a possible over-reaction to the Plume of Ash. The
Wednesday headline in The Guardian was, "Heathrow opens—and
now recriminations start to fly." A subhead followed, "BA
(British Aviation) chief attacks government."
Yet, as I
talked to people who were stranded and as I listened to people in the
airport, I heard none of this. People were paging home. Their
cell phones were connected to residential numbers. "I don't
know how long this is going to be, but I want to come home," was a
common refrain outside of the airport. "I am coming
home," was a common refrain inside the airport. Yes,
destructive eruptions can happen in the home, but they feel like our
own.
"Home": the point of stability from which we depart and to
which we avidly return.
Because
the Plume of Ash fouled up my schedule, I could go to a play in one of
those slightly musty theaters around Leicester Square in which the
greatness of British theater tests and sustains itself. I chose
George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, an eruption of
stage craft that violated late Victorian conventions.
The
actress playing Mrs. Warren was a bit too "mimsy," a phrase
from a British actor friend of mine. The sets were clunky, miring Shaw's
language and conflicts of character in a stodgy realism. The play is
still radical, still fiery, and, I realized, it is about the meanings of
home. Mrs. Warren's profession is to manage houses of
prostitution—which she does successfully. Her job has been her escape
from poverty to affluence. She fantasizes that she and her daughter, a
Cambridge graduate who knows nothing of her mother's livelihood, will
eventually settle down together as mother and daughter. Her
ruthless business partner wishes to marry the daughter, sire a child,
and
leave all his money to his new family. And the daughter, as tough as
both
mother and would-be-husband, leaves them all to create her own
home.
If I
discerned a common prayer during this volcanic time, it was that one's
home might be strong and sane enough to offer some protection against
street kid hostility, the fragility of human systems, and the eruptions
of the elements.