Monday, July 14—People have been asking me am I excited to vacate, to go back to Poland. Yes, but not to the point of losing sleep in anticipation. I don’t anticipate because, as the blackest of pessimists, I would only anticipate trouble, troubles so dire and serially persistent—missing my flight, arrest for forged documents, carjacking and Polish highway robbery at the hands of the mafia (Russian bastards!), and plane crash on the return flight—that they would convince me to turn back, not start, never travel again. (Fortunately, so far, I have not the courage of those irrational convictions.) So, I don’t anticipate and let come what comes. Trouble has seemed much less troublesome as a reality than a fantasy. People manage real terror on a daily basis.
As it happened, my flight to Chicago offered no trouble at all. Checked in well in advance, such that they placed me on an earlier flight to the Windy City, stand-by, giving me plenty of time to switch terminals in O’Hare and make my connection. Hot summer day, beautiful sky, clouds below like the light froth of lovely weather, the head of ambrosial summer. As we approached O’Hare, a model of Chicago lined up along the lake shore, smoggily, with a life-size street map spread out below. Descended through evanescent cumulus as resistless as sleep. I was reading the July Harper’s and came upon this line in Gass on Henry James, “Travel has its pleasures but not their descriptions.” Anyone who has read James’s Little Tour of France can no doubt attest. Yet, in this little tour of Poland, I bend the bow of The Master in full foreknowledge of gassy futility.
The Warsawa pulled up to the gate and applied its ear to the gangway. I recorded two photos of its glossy whiteness.(1) Our pilot appeared at the boarding desk with a retinue and a bouquet of flowers, not nestled into the crook of his elbow, like a beauty queen, but grasped at the stem end like a nightstick or a flashlight, blooms to the floor. He wore, in addition to a broad smile and gray eminence, a red silky sash reading “Retired.” Not quite yet, I thought. What was the opposite of “maiden voyage”? I couldn’t remember, “terminal,” “swan song”? I was sure pilots had a term, “valedictory,” “farewell”? When we pulled away from the gate, the Warsawa passed under an arch formed by two fire trucks issuing salvos from their water cannon in his honor. My preferred way of seeing emergency vehicles in action.
A fine late afternoon for flying, the sun bright; sleek tubular jets nosing deliberately about for take-off, a pod of judicious whales, aluminum skins agleam. Throttling up we breached faultlessly into the aery ocean and banked over a tideless, steel-blue Lake Michigan, nicked occasionally and only occasionally by a sailboat here and way over there. More quilted earth over terra Michigan. Our Great Circle rout would overfly Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Greenland. One had visited those places on maps, and now (again) their airspace, but the likelihood of touching down on that austere there was, God willing, slight.
Tuesday, July 15—Flight generally, and this particular flight, repeatedly, has blessed my pedestrian mind with Olympian views. The gibbous moon risen over Lake Huron. Clouds shifting across the undersphere, amber herds of woolly mammoth. Solitary Canadian roads fork and score the relief map of taiga. Holes in the cloud cover drop into depths, like those entrances to vast limestone caverns in Mexico that young extremists base jump into. Arctic and Antarctic icescapes, glacial cataracts, mistbergs. As if all worldly forms have spectral patterns in this Platonic manufactory. And painted, like the original Greek. A band of indigo marks some atmospheric horizon, from which with imperceptible suddenness, emerges, or succeeds, that deep blue for which this planet is so rightly esteemed in the solar system, though moonlit tonight, not sunlit. More and only words for such imagery, mostly futile.
The rosy fingers of Tuesday’s dawn smoothed the cotton batting of LOT’s worn mattress cover. Our venerable pilot brought Warsawa home to Warsawa for his last time, a gorgeous descent along the Wisla, the fields and domiciles of his fellow Poles laid out in neat strips and in suburban developments, not unlike an Old World Monopoly board.(2) Perhaps, as if he could not bear to cease his Olympian life, or perhaps it is a tradition among retiring pilots to make one final pass upon the airport and the city, we pulled out of our initial approach—we had almost touched down—winged about, away from the Palace of Culture and Science, in a long leisurely arc and repeated our reconnaissance of the Wisla. In spite of this scenic delay, we landed on time, to a twittering applause, his last, it would appear, at the controls. A second water cannonade greeted our arrival.
The taxi ride to my hotel on Constitution Place revealed a national capital down at heel, a little rundown, gray, grotesque, as the poem prefers, the grass in the public spaces at least a month overgrown, the graffiti common. I, too, prefer my cities imtouristperfect, but they take some getting used to. Checked into my hotel, the MDM, a completely satisfactory accommodation; took the small, slow elevator six floors up to my room on the seventh floor, room 524; and conned a map of the city. Commenced my walkabout almost immediately, first toward the Palace of Culture and Science, that epitome of Soviet grayness and grotesqueness, a central landmark but little more. Not even a skeleton but something of a carapace of a creature that never really thrived here, the lower floors are occupied by pubs and clubs, restaurants, and movie theaters—the people’s true culture. Bums slept on its masonry benches, the groundskeepers derelict, and a wheel-chair bound double-amputee relieved himself behind a tree in mid-afternoon with an indifferent audience of traffic, other transients, Socialist Realist heroes—and me.(3-5)
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