I still have few miles to Lovelock. So more tales on our trip to Wales in 2003. And no, I don’t make in out of the Heathrow Airport in this chapter.


I have never been a very patient person, and there are two times when I am particularly impatient. I am in a minority on the first of these times. It is in restaurants between the meal ending and the service staff returning my credit card as payment. Many if not most people enjoy the opportunity to the few moments, giving them the opportunity to savor the meal. I hate this time. After I have finished my meal, all I want to do is get out of the restaurant and onto something else.

While I may be in the minority in my dislike of post-meal restaurant waiting, I know that I am in the high majority in my second big dislike of waiting period. It is the time between landing and disembarkment at the airport. No one likes this period. People fork over thousands of dollars so that they can be in first class and hence the first one off the planes. The plebes among us (myself included) come up with strategies to work our way off before others. This generally involves sitting in the aisle seat and the accompanying dissatisfaction of being hit with food trays as the flight attendants run up and down the aisles. I, who does not like being touched very much, can’t stand it when those trays or bodies going to the bathroom, run into my elbow. It is this dislike, and not the great views, that I usually choose to sit in a window seat. Given the choice, then, I must suffer for a few moments of waiting to leave the aircraft for the pleasure of not being beaten or bruised on my exiting of the plane.



The wait is particularly hard at Heathrow Airport, one of the largest and busiest airports in the world. It took literally fifteen minutes from touchdown for the plane to arrive at our gate. It then took another five minutes for folks to open the door. Given that we were a full plane, it took us another 10 minutes to disembark. I became concerned that my general impatience would cause me to lose it before I could leave the plane. The only thing that kept me for going berserk was the thought that if I lost it, I would be denied entrance into the U.K., and put on the first plane back to the U.S. And I feared on the return trip, I would be given an aisle seat--thus having the worst of all possible worlds. So I kept it together, and sauntered out with the rest of my fellow passengers as calm as a summer’s day.

We walked off the plane and in immigration. My experiences at other immigrations have not always been the most positive of experiences. When I was 13, my grandmother took my sister, Kris, and me to Mexico and Guatemala. At the immigration room in Guatemala, some young army guys went through my suitcase in a very thorough fashion. As they should have, for I had something hidden in my suitcase. Nothing illegal, mind you. Nothing illicit. Just something embarrassing. On that trip, my mother and my traveling companions were walking outside the door of our house to go to the airport. Literally, as we were two steps outside the door, my mother gasped, saying, Jon, I forgot to buy you deodorant.” I at age 13 had never thought a lot about deodorant, and could not see what the big deal was. My mother, however, must have noticed on our way to the car for our trip to the airport that sometime during that summer that my sweat glands opened up and I was stinking to high heaven. Then she said, “Well, we don’t have time to stop. Just run back and grab mine.” I did so. And as I did so, I was mortified. You see, her deodorant was the most feminine of all deodorants. Its baby blue packing and its name, Secret, just lets one know that there is nothing manly about this stuff. After all, real men are happy with their body odors as they indicate hard work, virility, and well, manliness. They would never go for a deodorant that explicitly stated that body odors were supposed to be a secret. Rather, men go for deodorants which say, “I know that real men have body odor, but you can’t get women with body odor, so I have to mask my real smell.” Yet I could not find any manly smelling stuff that day, and so grabbed the Secret, put it into my bag, and vowed never to let anyone know about my little secret of carrying the Secret.



And I did okay in my ruse until we arrived at Immigration in Guatemala. Immigration in Guatemala was just a bunch of 19 year olds with machine guns and a sense of empowerment brought on by the fact that they could look through other people’s stuff. I think that they were particularly empowered by the fact that they could for once humiliate a young American male--perhaps an act of revenge for the 1954 CIA backed overthrow of the democratically elected government which left most of the men in Guatemala psychically emasculated. So they really went through my stuff, and of course, found my well hidden secret, the Secret. One of the guys pulled the container out of the bag, and called a couple of his comrades to look at the bottle. All three opened it, smelled it, and then pointed to me and laughed. I am certain that they called me a “fag” in Spanish. They then threw the Secret to a fourth guy, who also laughed at me. Finally, they felt that America had finally been taught its lesson, and I was allowed to go through Immigration. To this day, I on behalf of America am humiliated.

To add salt to the wound, Dorey for the entire time of our marriage has used Secret as her deodorant. At times, when my Irish Spring or Musk or other manly deodorants have disappeared or dried up, I have had to use Secret. I smell like a feminine flower the whole day, forcing me to relive my Guatemalan Immigration experience yet again. (Dorey informs me that she recently changed deodorants, now using Dove. If America can overcome the indignity of Viet Nam, I on behalf of America can perhaps now overcome the indignity suffered at the hands of Guatemalan Immigration officials so many years ago.


With this experience and its residual fear firmly in my mind, we approached the Immigration Official at Heathrow Airport. Going through immigration was kind of a disappointment, though, in an odd sort of way. In the Immigration line, I kept have a conversation with the immigration official. He would have asked me, “What is your purpose in the U.K.? To which I would have responded, “Fulfilling a lifelong dream.” I had him replying, “Welcome to the U.K., and may all your dreams come true.” (Actually, in writing and reading the paragraph, it looks to me as if it were dialogue written by a man who uses Secret deodorant. I really should keep my internal conversations to myself).

Nothing like this happened. One could tell by his accent and appearance that he was not born in England. Rather he appeared Indian. I smiled at the notion that an Indian was the first person to meet in England, indicating the truth that England is a multi-ethnic culture. We gave him our passports. “Is this your first trip to the U.K.?, he quite nicely asked. We told him it was. While he stared at us for a moment, I don’t think he was really too concerned about letting us into the country. Rather, I think he was stealing time at work to write another paragraph of his long, unpublished and unpalatable novel about the anomie of being an Indian immigration official in the U.K.

However, beyond not asking us what our purpose in the U.K., was, the guy failed from a public relations point of view. He did not welcome us to the U.K., or wish us to have a good vacation in his country. Rather, after he stared at us for a couple of more seconds, he slapped our passports with a couple of stamps. “You can go on,” he said wearily.

And at that, we were in. At that moment, I became very happy for Dorey. Other than a couple of quick trips to Canada, which we all known don’t really count, Dorey was in a country other than that of her birth for the first time.

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I have walked 645,753 steps in 53 days. I have, then, walked 305 miles since I left Alameda. I will be in Lovelock in 9 more miles.