-by Frank Macdonald
I have recently returned from a trip to Thunder Bay which meant passing through two Toronto airports. I have been in airports before, but what I noticed this trip was that airports grow bigger as I grow older. Bigger as in verging on elder abuse.
Booking tickets from anywhere to anywhere used to be a simple cash exchange to fly on planes that didn’t weigh everything including your underwear, and charged accordingly.
So I asked the help of a friend who has spent much of her career flying to various parts of the world and could handle the online purchase as easily as getting on a city transit. That part went very well.
She did caution me, though, that when flying any distance, “always arrange for a wheelchair.” This is something airlines provide for the old, the halt and the lame. I barely qualify as one of those, I thought, so I skipped the request, convinced I could carry myself from one loading gate to another.
The trip west went fairly easy, although I failed to make a connection in Ottawa, which set my arrival plans back six hours. But I and my luggage (my now very expensive luggage) got to where we were going.
It was an incredible week that included Thanksgiving and the opening of a retrospective of paintings by my late wife, the artist Virginia McCoy. It was also an opportunity for the McCoys to host a family reunion around Virginia’s beautiful exhibit. A reunion usually means food, Thanksgiving usually means food, the opening of the exhibit usually means food.
I didn’t calorie count, just hoped that the airline wouldn’t weigh me instead of my luggage on the return trip.
But oh, the return trip!!!
I left Thunder Bay sometime in the very early hours for Toronto. There, I had a four hour wait for the Halifax leg of my homecoming. Arrived in TO without incident. That was because I would discover that all the incidents were already there, waiting for me.
Instead of landing in the civilized airport on the islands in downtown Toronto, this flight arrived at Pearson International Airport.
I stepped off into an airport that could easily be confused with someone hollering “Fire!” In the United Nations building. Crowds of people charging at me, and crowds of more people chasing me. The curious thing was that everyone seemed to know where they were going, except me.
When I first looked at my boarding passes, both coming and going, I was assigned a seat and clearly informed of which gate my flight would be leaving from. It was kind of A-B-C-1-2-3!
What I noticed on my boarding pass from Toronto to Halifax was that the gate where I was to wait had not been identified. I walked along and walked along and walked along, looking for the gate that would shout out to me Halifax. The stroll was becoming a hike and the distance I could see ahead of me suggested that I might be walking to Halifax.
I tried to bury the wise advice I had received, “Ask for a wheelchair when you book your tickets.” I guess I thought I was much younger and the airport much smaller, like it was 40 years ago.
Forty years later I had to admit defeat. I walked up to gate that was being manned by people working for the same airline as I was trying to find. I showed them my boarding pass, the one without a gate number.
The woman was pleasant and clicked her computer a few times, then grew serious. “It’s a long way,” she told me.
I lied and told her I had asked for a wheelchair but the request must have gotten lost. She pointed to a row of seats, instructing me to sit there and someone would come. The print on the seats said “Invalids!” At this point I was in no mood to argue. I felt exactly as the seats identified me. I sat and waited.
Forty minutes later a golf cart-like machine arrived, nodding to me. The woman driving it set off towards my destination, clicking off one kilometre after another. I was sure we had just passed through Waterloo and we headed for Windsor.
Eventually, she brought her chariot to a stop in front of an elevator. “Take the elevator to the Lower floor and then you will see another one of these.”
I did as instructed, arriving at the bottom of somewhere, walked a bit and saw another golf cart. The woman on this cart drove me across a good chunk of Ontario before coming to a stop.
In front of us was a very, very steep escalator. I was to get on that one to the top, then step off and walk to another of similar steepness. Then I was to walk some more and my gate would be there waiting patiently for my arrival.
The escalators made me think that if Donald Trump had to go up instead of down on one of these, he would have abandoned his ambition to be president of anything.
Then I walked, and walked some more. I was not looking for Gate 1 or Gate 7 as in the civilized part of this urban wilderness, I was looking for gate C2B.
When I couldn’t walk any further along the airport corridor I found myself face to face with C2B, the very last gate in the entire universe that is Toronto. The only thing that assured me I was still in Canada was the Tim Horton’s offering Canadian sustenance to exhausted countrymen. A double double and an apple fritter, please.
I had explored much of Toronto on foot because I was too proud to say, “Wheelchair, please.”
But all during my time spent trying to find the end of the airport, my thoughts were on Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his determination to turn the relatively small Billy Bishop Airport in downtown Toronto into an international airport. All that it would take is levelling the SkyDome, the CN Tower, and about a million acres of downtown Toronto just so the likes of me can get lost in two airports in the same city. Incredibly stupid idea. A deep hole should be Doug and the idea buried forever.