Greg Wesson's Esoteric Globe

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were REAL men, women were REAL women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small furry creatures from Aplha Centauri
- Douglas Adams, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Ah, the good ol' days. Sometimes I feel like I've really missed out on a few things, being born when I was. Not to complain too much, because I have had the opportunity to take part in some really cool things, but in a lot of ways the past can strike us as being a lot more glamourous then what we have as options today.

I recently flew from Toronto to London on Air Canada, and despite my best hopes for an upgrade as one who both paid a full-fare Latitude class ticket and an Aeroplan Elite member, I wound up sitting in the Economy section of the plane with all the unwashed masses. I never quite got comfortable in my seat, so sleep never came, however I was at least able to watch 3 movies on my personal entertainment unit - Jumper with Hayden Christensen, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets with Nicolas Cage and the majority of 27 Dresses with whats-her-name from Grey's Anatomy and Knocked Up. I didn't actually see the end of 27 Dresses, but I am pretty sure based on what I saw that the lead girl from Grey's Anatomy was going to end up with Cyclops (or at least the actor James Marsden who played Cyclops in X-Men).

Despite the films, it was not a really pleasant experience, and my first thought on arriving in London was, "how quickly can I get to a bed and have a nap." Nothing against Air Canada (because it's not like any of the other airlines are better with their Economy Class offerings), but long distance air travel isn't that great.

There was a time, at least in my mind, when this probably wasn't the case. I imagine days in the past when silver bodied Lockheed Constellations flying New York-Gander-Shannon-Paris with all the passengers wearing suits and dresses, being served Lobster Thermidor by beautiful, young, blonde stewardesses.

I wrote about this previously in a blog post about my visit to see the Concorde, now grounded on a barge in the Hudson River as part of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Seeing the china place settings and bottle of Champagne, it got me thinking about the age of luxury air travel that I had missed. I wrote:

It was luxury air travel. I can imagine what it must have been like on board, flying from London to New York, sipping champagne and eating off Wedgwood china. It was a chance to forget about the drudgery of air travel. It was an opportunity, if only for a few precious hours, to forget about overcrowded airports, cranky security people and weather delays, and be part of the adventure and glamour of flying. It was the physical embodiment of what the phrase “jet set” conveys: fashion, wealth and privilege beyond the masses.

I was reading a post today that made me think of this topic again today, and got me a little moist-eyed at the thought.

A blog called "Cranky Flier," which usually covers airline news and events, today had a guest blogger today by the name of Tony France, who wrote about the Decline of First Class.

Mr. France joined American Airlines in 1986 or 87 (the post is a little muddled at that point), just a few years before the accountants and bean-counters got a hold of the airline industry. Mr. France says:

The big picture visionaries with outsized personalities who kept one eye on the future and did business with a handshake were slowly, inevitably replaced with Ivy League micro-managers who knew only P&L and ROI. Atmosphere is not quantifiable ergo luxury inevitably loses out to utility and optimization. Glamour, even my first fleeting taste of it, wasn’t to remain on the scene for much longer.

Mr. France writes about his first experience travelling first class on a trans-Atlantic flight, going to visit a friend in Paris. Mr. France, as an employee of American Airlines, got the privilege of flying across "the pond" as a "non-rev" passenger (i.e. he didn't pay, as in non-revenue) in the mid-to-late 80s. Mr. France describes an absolutely excellent meal (you need to read it for yourself, it had my mouth watering), and compares what he received back in the last 80s to what first class means today:

Today’s First Class is not about the food at all; Robert Crandall (former president and chairman of American Airlines) himself once said as much. It’s the seat. As flights have gotten longer and markets more competitive it is the onboard hardware, a combination of a Borg energy pod and a spa cubicle that allegedly drives the customer’s decision.

While I could certainly appreciate the joy of a lie flat seat after trying to manoeuvre myself (unsuccessfully) into a position that would be comfortable for sleeping on my recent flight, I do have to agree with Mr. France when he bemoans the passion for beds that lie flatter or TV screens with more on-Demand options at the expense of the atmosphere and experience of trans-continental travel:

So keep all the movies and shows, fellas, my laptop screen offers a larger and better picture. Better yet, send that huge library of stuff back to the masses in coach since they don’t have onboard power but for the most part have individual screens. Do something with the walls other than the usual mood-neutral blues and beiges. How about a world mural, like TWA used to have, or commemorative artwork like Pan Am once gave away? Could Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” as a bulkhead piece help turn Alitalia around? Italian art, Italian food and hospitality, Italian wines and leathers? How could they go wrong? But I digress - at least it would be something, anything, to evoke the old romance and glamour of flying, of discovering new destinations, even if the guy in Seat 1K is a million-miler who has seen it all before.

I too miss the old romance and glamour of flying, and would be happy to see it come back. Whether I would be willing to pay extra for it, now that's a whole different story, but there is something that is lacking in today's air travel.

Luckily for me, Rail Team is right at my doorstep. From St. Pancras station to Marseilles in just 6 hours and 17 minutes. Connections from London to as far as Japan, if you so choose, with a wide variety of classes of service.

Heck, I bet I can get a little caviar aboard the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (even if it isn't quite the "real" Orient Express).

There was a song released by song in 1992 called "Bad Day for Trains" by Patricia Conroy. She's a Canadian, so maybe you never heard the song.

This past few weeks, though, have been bad days for planes.

It started in London Heathrow. The shiny new Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport in London has turned from a story of the opening of a state of the art terminal to finally make LHR a nice airport into a public-relations disaster, with British Airways rethinking their move in schedule to the new terminal, and the executives at the airport getting called before a special session of the House of Commons transport committee.

The whole thing brings to mind the song "I'm So Worried" by the boys at Monty Python. Despite being written in 1980, seems very timely with the verse:

I'm so worried about what's hapenin' today, in the middle east, you know
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow
I'm so worried about the fashions today, I don't think they're good for your feet
And I'm so worried about the shows on TV that sometimes they want to repeat

The Heathrow baggage mess has even spawned a video game, where you play British Airways CEO Willie Walsh in a game called Terminal Panic. You try and move the luggage from the pile on the floor to the luggage belts.

Then, to add to the mess, in the past few weeks 4 budget airlines have gone backrupt. Aloha Airgroup, ATA Airlines and Skybus Airlines in the USA and Oasis Airlines in Hong Kong have all stopped operating, cancelling all flights, leaving passengers stranded and potentially out of the cost of a flight.

Finally, in the past few days, American Airlines has cancelled 1000s of flights due to wiring problems in the MD80s, one of their most popular planes. This is all coming on the heels of the revelation that the FAA, the governing body of airline travel in the USA was allowing Southwest Airlines to fly planes that had missed important inspection dates.

Luckily for me, I haven't been travelling much in the past few months. I have been working in Toronto, which has gone from being snow-covered and cold to sunny and warm in just a few weeks. In fact, I have enjoyed more than a few casual beers on the open patios this past weekend.

It may be bad days for planes, and by extension business travellers, but luckily for me my business travel is way down and it's been a good few days for patio weather.

P.S. I know there isn't much point in this entry except that I felt a little bit like gloating over the fact that I have enjoyed sleeping in my own bed for much of the past two months, and to share the funny Terminal Panic game. Enjoy.

P.P.S My Dad is over in the UK right now, and hopefully won't get tied up by the mess at Heathrow. If he does, then I'll feel bad about my gloating, and will have to post an apology.

I love nature. One of the great things about Toronto is the number of ravines in the city, because in most cases those ravines have been left wild. I can walk out of my apartment building, which is less than 2 minutes walk from the subway and has more than 20 restaurants and pubs within a 5 minutes walk, and be at the bottom of a natural ravine in less time than it would take me to get my first pint at the local sports bar.

The great thing about these walks is that in many cases, even though there are roads, railway tracks and highways running along the edges of the ravines, you seldom can see them, and often can’t even hear them. In my walks, I have encountered numerous wild critters, most often squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and various birds, but also larger and more impressive creatures like deer, foxes and the occasionally coyote.

The preservation of this nature is one of the reasons why I am a regular contributor to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, an organization that buys and preserves natural lands within Canada. It is also why I often write to my elected representatives in the city of Toronto, the province of Ontario and the nation of Canada to voice my support for higher density housing, more money for transit and support of climate change initiatives like the Kyoto Accord.

In my personal life, I try as best I can to live a life that leaves as little impact on the world. In some places I have excelled. I no longer own a car. I keep my heating and air conditioning turned off unless absolutely needed. I don’t take bags at the grocery store, and have started to look at the places my food is from to determine if I can buy local produce to reduce the amount of carbon it took to get the food to my table. And I have stopped all but a few of the companies I do business with from sending me paper bills, electing to read and pay my bills online every month, saving both the paper and hopefully a few grams of carbon from the lighter load the mail truck has to haul.

I’ve always grown up with conservation as well. My parents used to save up bottles and newspapers in the garage, and my father and I would drive 30 minutes to an old barn north of the city I grew up in to drop them off at a recycling depot, long before blue box, curb-side recycling was introduced here in Canada. My father was also a stickler for turning off the lights and not standing around with the fridge door open. Of course, that may have been driven by equal parts wanting to save the planet and keeping the monthly hydro bill low.

In other ways, though, I’m not as good a conservationist as I wish I could be. I still eat meat, and probably eat more than I should (both for the environmental impact, but also for my health). I eat out a lot, and there you have no control over the ingredients to know if they buy local or have lamb shipped to them from New Zealand. I wish I could compost, but my building doesn’t provide it and it’s hard to put a compositor out on your balcony.

The area, though, where I stray furthest from my conversationalist tendencies is the amount I fly. I fly a lot for work, and when I vacation I tend to get on a plane and fly somewhere as well. Today I’ll be getting on a plane to fly down to Austin, and by the time my return flight lands in Toronto on Sunday, I’ll have flown a total of 59,461 miles and 63 flights this year.

According to the Carbon Footprint Calculator at the Carbon Reduction Institute in Australia, that works out to about 22 tonnes of carbon that have been released into the atmosphere because of me.

Al Gore, who was the narrator of the film “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming and climate change has come under some criticism of late for his supposed contradictory behavior, flying on private jets and living in a energy gobbling home while preaching to others to change their behavior. I feel for him, because I know what it’s like to struggle with the same issue.

I love travelling. I get antsy if I am in the same place for too long. I have wanderlust, and I have it bad.

I’d love to fulfill that wanderlust in an environmentally friendly way. I’d love to take trains or buses. I’d love to slow down the travel I do to a nice, easy pace. But at the same time, I have to pay the bills. I could take a year off and travel the world, but I’d need to come back to work eventually. My job allows me to fulfill my wanderlust while still making the money that I need to survive, and hopefully save enough up that I can retire early and do that slow method of travel for the rest of my life.

I realize, too, that the above paragraph is nothing but a thinly veiled justification, and re-reading it rings hollow to me. I guess the real truth, as inconvenient as it is, is that I am not strong enough in my convictions to give up what I love.

So I continue to struggle.

I’ve tried to be better about the way I fly. Try and schedule trips to the same place for multiple weeks, so can stay in the same city over the weekends, saving extra and unnecessary flights.

I also, earlier this year, purchased carbon credits for my flights from 2006 and 2007 from
Zerofootprint.net, which is a Canadian company that plants trees to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. By spending enough money to plant enough trees, presumably the amount of carbon that I released into the atmosphere during flying will be gobbled back up by those trees. The total carbon released into the atmosphere will be 0.

I have problems with offsets, though. The carbon from flying is released high into the atmosphere where it can do more damage, and the trees are pulling in the atmosphere down at ground level. As well, I question whether purchasing the offset really plants trees that wouldn’t be planted anyway, or if even without the offsets areas would get forested and reforested anyway.

My biggest issue with offsets, though, is that what I am doing is paying someone else because I am too lazy or stubborn to change my lifestyle. In the Middle Ages, some within the Catholic Church sold Indulgences. An Indulgence allows a sinner to “serve” their punishment for the sins they have committed, thereby clearing themselves of the sins and ensuring that they don’t need to spend time in purgatory after death waiting for the sin to be “purged.” If you’ve ever gone to confession, after you’ve been forgiven for the sin you’ve been given an indulgence – the priests command to say “6 Hail Marys and 5 Our Fathers.”

Back in the Middle Ages though, some unscrupulous priests would exchange indulgences for cash, thereby “purging” the sin without making the sinner do anything to serve their sentence for the sin. It was this in part that led to the Protestant Reformation lead by Martin Luther.

Offsets feel to me like those sold indulgences, a purging of the sin without doing anything to actual deserve it. It’s me saying that I am too important to change, and therefore someone else can by living greener than I am. If someone else does my dirty work, then I don’t have to. A commenter on TV once said that buying offsets is a little like buying a man a hat after forcibly shaving his head, and thinking that everything is alright.

So I continue to struggle.

I’d love to have a conclusion to this entry. I’d love to wrap it all up in a nice little bow. I’d love to either be able to commit to the large scale changes that I would need to make to be a better climate warrior, or at least be able to justify in a real and reasonable way my lifestyle. I can’t do either of those, though.

Instead, I can only close with a quote by someone smarter than I am. Sir William Empson, English poet and literary critic from the 20th century who said, “life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that cannot be solved by analysis.”

So I continue to struggle, and hopefully continue to maintain myself between the contradictions.

The two drunks were sitting across the aisle and one row behind me on the flight were getting louder, and I was starting to question the wisdom of the flight attendants who had served them the double jack and Cokes (with not much in the way of Coke). I’m not positive that trying to reason or argue with drunk people is a very good idea, so I just looked out the window and tried to ignore the constant stream of swear words. However, another passenger decided to take a different approach, and the man sitting two rows behind me finally told them to be quiet.

“Why don’t you come over here and shut me up,” one of the drunks asked, his tone suddenly nasty. “Now, why don’t you shut up and f**k off.”

This was not going to be the best flight I’d been on.

* * *

I take a lot of flights, but usually take them at very specific times to very specific places. The Monday morning and Thursday night flights are mostly full of people travelling on business, and most often pretty frequent flyers. Add to that the locations that I am flying - Newark, Seattle, San Francisco or Atlanta are large metropolitan areas with lots of business going on. On those early Monday or late Thursday flights, you pretty much get a plane full of people who have done this before, do it regularly, know what to do and aren't likely to be taking much joy in the process of travelling from point A to point B.

Occasionally, though, I fly on days other than Monday and Thursday or to locations that are more known as tourist destinations rather than places to work. Such a flight was my Wednesday night flight from Seattle to Reno. I was going down to Reno to spend a few days working, but there was a large subset of the plane that was going down to Reno for fun. Reno is the second or third largest city in Nevada (depending on whose stats you use), and in addition to the obvious draw of Nevada's legalized gambling and sports betting, the self-proclaimed "Biggest Little City In the World" is also only 35 km from Lake Tahoe and some amazing Nevada and California skiing.

Given those draws, the better portion of my mostly empty Alaska Air flight was filled with kids going skiing and grandparents going gambling, and to be expected of those going on vacation, they were already starting their good times with a few drinks at the bar.

As has become almost expected as of late, our departure time came and went, and we soon learned that we would be delayed 2 hours, meaning we would not land in Reno until 12:30 in the morning. I, having a full day of work ahead of me on Thursday, took the time to read quietly and do mental calculations in my head of how much sleep I was going to get. Some of those going on vacation, though, took the opportunity to imbibe even more alcohol.

Finally we boarded our flight, and I took my seat in an empty row near the front of the plane. In the row ahead of me sat a man who was dressed in clothes that immediately made me think protestant minister, and I assumed that he was going to Reno something more akin to work rather than the sinful pleasures of gambling. Across the aisle from him were two youngish (i.e. my age, so we'll call them youngish) men who were happy and loud, obviously mostly drunk and loud enough that the entire plane soon knew that they were from Victoria, Canada, they had been delayed 7 times today in trying to get to Reno, they passed the time of their delays by drinking, and their plans were to gamble tonight and ski tomorrow.

A few rows back a man boarded with a wild beard and hair down to the small of his back. He stumbled to his seat with bloodshot eyes, and collapsed into his seat in a bit of a heap. This amused the youngish Victorians to no end, and soon enough the more rambunctious of the two had moved to sit down beside the wild man with his wild hair. As the flight progressed, and the two drank more and more double rum and cokes (easy on the coke), they got louder and louder, more foul with their language and nastier with their tone.

Now, I'm pretty thick skinned and have no expectations of comfort on flights, so I did my best to ignore the two and read my book. Some of the other passengers didn't take the disturbance in stride though, and soon there was a few heated exchanges between cranky, sober passengers telling the drunkards to shut up, and the drunkards, cursing the sober passengers, laughing manically, and then trying to make friendly conversation with their tormenters, which just seemed to irk people even more.

There was one exchange between the drunken Victorian and a man who I can only describe as looking like Willy Nelson, if Willy Nelson had his nose chewed off by a mountain lion. He looked like the kind of guy that you wouldn't want to mess with, the kind of guy who lived in the mountains and wrestled bears for fun. But the drunken Victorian, who looked a lot like a guy who worked in an office - not exactly in fighting shape, certainly not to take on a wild, frontier man - was not deterred.

Finally, the protestant minister look-a-like sitting in front of me rang his call button, and whispered something to the flight attendant when she came by. We landed, and things were heating up in the cabin between the drunken Victorian and Willy Nelson, when the captain came on asked everyone to take their seats as security was boarding the plane.

Two Reno airport cops boarded the plane, and the protestant minister look-a-like pointed at the wild haired guy with the bloodshot eyes, the drunken Victorian who had been talking smack to Willy Nelson, and his rather surprised friend, who admittedly was a little loud before the flight took off, but had been pretty quiet most of the flight. The more drunk of the Victorians cursed, and the cop, putting on his best "respect my authority" look, told the Victorian he'd better, "watch his language, son," which was especially funny to me because the cop and the drunk were about the same age, though I didn't laugh. Laughing didn't strike me as an especially bright thing to do in the tense atmosphere of the plane.

The cops escorted the men off the plane, the one quieter Victorian looking somewhat dumbfounded and sheepish, but the other two (the wild man and Willy Nelson's tormenter) looking defiant, which I chalked up to either complete drunken ignorance or some sort of misguided stand against the man. Either way, I didn't figure that the Victorians would be doing much gambling tonight.

I, it being almost 1 in the morning, wasn't interested in doing much gambling either. I just wanted to get to my hotel and fall into a comfy bed and sleep. Sometimes the most taxing thing about travelling is the fact that you sometimes have to share a tight space with other people...