Welcome back, fans! You will have noticed that it's been a bit since I've posted anything on here. My Year of Writing Dangerously is off to kind of a slow start, although my Year of Photographing Everything I See is going swimmingly, as my other blog is happy to show you. Nothing particularly interesting has happened to me on the airplane lately -- which is a good thing from a non-blogging standpoint and suits me fine -- and I have thus far put off a post about, for example, the relationship between management and flight attendants during contract negotiations, because I am trying not to bring an I Hate My Airline vibe to this space, and any conversation about our (mis)management's attitude towards their employees and their rights to a fair contract can engender nothing but. Besides, Sunday is Valentine's Day; better to spread a little love.
In which vein I am combining two of this blog's Primary Themes, and telling a flying story using an excerpt from my first novel, whose publication is one of my stated writing goals for this year (and which is hopefully currently breezing through the first stages of the Fabulous New Novel contest to which it was recently submitted). In the Fall of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, my then-young flying career teetered on the brink. There were going to be furloughs, and plenty of 'em, and when I was assigned a five-day Narita/Beijing trip in my last-ever month of International Reserve, I was morosely convinced that it would be the last time I ever set foot in Asia, and thus my one-and-only shot to cross the Great Wall of China off my List. After a short flight NRT - PEK, we had a very short layover in Beijing. It was dark when we landed at 7pm and still dark for our pick-up early the next morning; there was nothing for it but to visit the Wall in the middle of the night. The other flight attendants (whose careers were in less immediate danger, after all, barring a total implosion of the airline) had all either visited the Wall before, like in the daytime when you could actually see it, or weren't interested enough in visiting it to stay up all night, and so I set out alone in the backseat of the car driven by the husband of the woman who sold bootleg DVDs out of the back room of her bar. The only real difference between my real-life experience and the story that follows, of course, is the kissing bit, since I stood on top of the Wall -- and the World, it seemed -- alone. As the photo above implies, I returned to the Wall years later with a friend, but my Night Atop the Great Wall of China remains one of the most singular and spectacular experiences of my life to date.
From Kiss Me, Straight:
“Only one problem with our Moonlight Visit to the Wall, I guess," I said to Josh as we finally stepped out of the car in the parking lot at the base of the Mutianyu section
"No moon?"
I mimicked Katie's finger-on-nose gesture for "You got it."
We had gone back to the hotel after DVD shopping and retired to our respective rooms for a quick snooze and a shower, then met in the deserted lobby at 1:45, each of us carrying a cup of the reprehensible in-room coffee. Susan's husband had been very smiley and friendly, but he spoke no English, so he popped a surprisingly hip lounge CD in the player and drove us through the night in silence.
"If you get the chance," I had told Josh during the ride, "you should still go to the Wall during the day. Here, where I think we're going, there's a gondola that you can ride up to the top, you can run around, take pictures, all that, then there's this toboggan that you ride to the bottom. It's awesome! There's no safety rails or anything, just you on this little metal sled flying down this rickety metal track at the Great Wall of China. Honestly, some days I love this job."
Now, standing in the otherwise empty car park, the Wall felt deserted. We were the only three people detectable, which made the Wall feel ancient and undiscovered. Actually, I knew the Wall ran atop the hill of which we were at the bottom, but with no moon, there was no visual indication of the Wall whatsoever. From down here, it was impossible to tell where the mountainside ended and the Wall began. The “gee, it runs on forever” aspect of the Wall would be largely lost, if we were able to see it at all.
"Um, where is it?" Josh asked.
"Up there." I pointed into the darkness. There were no lights on in the parking lot; the stalls that lined the road for the first hundred meters or so, usually packed with vendors hawking souvenirs and ice cream, were empty and black. Having spent almost my entire adult life in cities, either living in one or visiting them on my layovers, I'm not sure I've ever seen it quite so dark. In the complete absence of light pollution, the moonless sky sparkled like one of Benji's costumes; it was positively dripping with stars.
Susan's husband gave us his toothless grin and a thumbs-up, then reclined his seat and settled in to wait for us.
"Well, OK, I can kind of see where the path cuts between those stalls," I started hesitantly, taking somewhat confident steps across what I knew to be flat, smooth parking lot. "I guess let's start over there."
Josh fell in behind me. "Dang, it's dark. We won't be able to see shit."
"Well," I joked, "you won't be able to say you saw the Great Wall, but at least you'll be able to say you've been to it."
From the edge of the parking lot, I saw a single light over a sign about fifty feet up the path to our left. We approached the sign, which was posted at a fork in the path. An arrow pointed off to the left, indicating the bathrooms. Another pointed back where we had come from to the parking lot, and a third pointed up the path to our right, apparently towards the Wall. The path was lit for our first few steps by the sign, but after only a few yards, I was only barely able to see my feet and had to feel along the ground with the edge of my shoe every few feet to make sure we didn't stray from the path, which quickly led uphill. It was pitch black, and the only sounds were our breathing and our feet crunching on the gravel path. Josh reached for my hand, because if he fell behind by more than about two steps, he wouldn't be able to see where I was going. What I remembered to be about a fifteen-minute walk in broad daylight stretched out over forty-five minutes in the dark, partly because I was concentrating as hard on the happy feeling in the hand Josh was holding as I was on not going over the side of the mountain.
"At least if we fall into a ravine or something, Cee Cee knows where we are," I said, when, after about forty minutes, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to find the Wall or the parking lot before sunup.
Josh laughed. "At least we'll get a longer layover in Beijing."
I knew that as long as we kept following the path uphill we'd reach the Wall eventually, but I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, and kept expecting to get smacked upside the head by a tree just around the next bend. Then Josh tugged at my hand and I stopped.
"Do you notice that?" he asked me.
"What?"
"Straight ahead. It gets even darker. Is that it?"
Seeing as how we were standing plunged into the blackest darkness ever, I was about to tell him he was imagining things, but I looked up the path and saw that he was right. The blackness had more black to it; it seemed almost palpable.
I took about three short, tentative steps forward, then put my free hand out in front of me to avoid contacting the Great Wall face-first. Which I would have done in one more step—I’d planned to raise my hand to chest level, but smacked into stone about halfway up.
"Ow, fuck!" I hissed. In the thick blackness and equally thick silence, it might as well have been a blood-curdling scream.
"Is that it?" Josh asked, coming alongside me, still holding my other hand.
We craned our necks and watched the darkness in front of us rise up towards the sky. This close to it, we could discern the top of the Wall as the place where the stars began.
"Wow." Josh murmured. Not being able to see the Wall made it seem massive, an ancient presence too large for our modern spirits to measure. We stood, awed, for a minute, then I felt a tug on my hand. "C'mon."
Josh put a hand on the wall and felt his way along further up the hillside, apparently looking for a way up onto the Wall itself. After about twenty feet, we came to an archway cut into the Wall, and we felt our way up about ten uneven, crumbling steps until we emerged on top of the Great Wall, beneath a star-drenched sky. I couldn't see anything—the Wall could stretch five feet in front of us, or hundreds of miles over the surrounding hills; we had no way of knowing.
"Amazing," Josh muttered.
"Yeah." And it was. It felt like we were standing alone on top of the world, the darkness infinite and humbling. The sky was endless, and I felt tiny.
"Dude," Josh whispered, "it's like being in the center of the universe and the middle of nowhere at the same time. Really makes you realize what a speck of dust we live on, doesn't it?"
Not that he could see me, but all I could do was nod agreement. I was entranced by the sky and by the sense of my whole life, the whole world, just being a blink in the eye of whoever was watching over the universe. Josh was right, I felt at once supremely important and laughably insignificant. We could see nothing in any direction, and yet it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life. We stood, touching, in silence for several minutes.
"You know," I finally said, "If there are astronauts up there tonight, they can see us. The Wall is supposed to be visible from space.”
"Well, I hope they won't be offended if I do this," he said, and finally, deliciously, at fucking last, he kissed me.
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