Monday, February 11, 2002 6:23:59 PM
Skaal! Riita and Vainamoinen!

In the autumn of 1965 I packed my belongings. My parents drove me to the airport. Greater Pittsburgh in the age of the 707, not too far removed from the Constellation and DC8. The fountains were gone from the entry drive even then. I remember them more from postcards. Stepped round concrete basins splashing water colored primary lights in the twilight. The invitation of the circular entry capped with a heavy concrete and steel portico. Inside the door an Alexander Calder mobile defining flight.

I checked in at the TWA counter. Flight to Kennedy International, transfer to Copenhagen. My first commercial flight. Age 20. I refused to take out an insurance policy at one of the machines that spat out policy that traded lucre for death. Bad juju. My father thought I was crazy.

I spent the week before drinking goodbye with my friends. Terry, Janet, David, David, Gary. I was in love with Riita. She was Finnish, and would whisper sweet songs to me about Väinämöinen, hero of the Kalevala, while I examined intimately her square face framed with shoulder length blond hair in the dim light. She embodied all I wanted to discover about Scandinavia. My passion, unrequited.

Air travel is a magic carpet ride.

I arrived at Kennedy and grabbed a shuttle to the TWA Terminal #5 designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. I thought of Scandinavia, Denmark the near future; Riita, my friends, the close past; this modern curved building, the present. I was shuffled through customs into the departure room. Quarantined, cut loose from America. A host of sophisticated people, men who wore tailored suits and dark winter overcoats, women smelling faintly of perfume and alcohol surrounded me. I had a sheepskin brown coat, a heavy plaid shirt and blue jeans. The odors, sights, murmurs of voices, evoked a feeling of weakness in me. I sat and read while the world around me buzzed brightly with purpose.

The flight around the world was both exciting and numbing. I joined the demimonde of dulled consciousness somewhere after the first hour. Through the side port window I raised the shade halfway and watched as we greeted the dawn somewhere mid Atlantic, which was water water everywhere. We landed in dreary drizzling Copenhagen.

My first discovery. They speak Danish in Denmark. The signs had words of possibly fourteen tortured syllables giving impossible instructions. The airport loudspeaker sounded guttural and full of glottal stop. There was French, German, Italian and English, but I was too stunned to understand any of it. I was an extraordinary distance from home with not one familiar face in sight. I have not forgotten the feeling, which is why I am kind to folks with strange accents, especially the ones that have the same confounded look on their face as I wore that day.

Customs. I sat in a tiny area. Presented my Passport to the man and the woman who sat across the desk from me. "What," they said, "is the purpose of your visit to Denmark?" I said, with a great deal of pride, "I am going to school."

"School?!," they said with some alarm in their voice. "Where is your visa?"

"Visa?!" I said with alarm in my voice and remembered the bit of advice written on my letter of acceptance. …at customs say that you are a tourist visiting Denmark. We will take care of any formality after you have arrived. All those hours on the plane, the adventure of my lifetime and I was about to be booted out of the country.

"What school?" They asked.

I said New Experimental College and pulled out a rumpled brochure that had ridden in my coat pocket. The customs official called the school. I breathed easier as I saw their threatening looks of concern turn benign. The conversation, in Danish, was a bit of magic to me. These people can actually understand this stuff, I unreasonably thought. Three years in French class and I never occurred to me that people used foreign language for communications. My passport stamped tourist. And then I was on the flight to Aalborg.