Getting There

You’re a couple from far away, on a hot afternoon. You stare out the window of a hotel shuttle bus from Pearson airport in Toronto but don’t see much beyond the freeways of the place, its sky everywhere.

You hope that the bus is heading in the right direction and will stop at the right time, that you replied correctly to “You don’t have a ticket, correct?” (the bus driver offering this in a loud voice, smiling, one eye on the other passengers), that your hotel reservation holds, that the water is hot and the bathrooms clean (that you have a bathroom in the first place), that somehow you can get some food.

Arrival is easy when you know the place. In my case, the shift from the British Airways 767--pause to acknowledge that I showed up at Heathrow yesterday with an Air France reservation, which they’d cancelled on me--to my hotel room in Toronto with a slice of pizza in one hand, the first of two Blues in the other, and the Globe in the one after that was so smooth that I’m not sure it happened. (Except that just now, next morning, I phoned back to the hotel about what I’d left behind.)

Yes, and knowledge is easy when you know. We don’t label our street corners, our trains (oh right, we have no trains), in general our systems and procedures for everything from shopping for groceries to unlocking doors, for people who are new to them.

I feel for the young man I saw this morning check in at WestJet. He checked a mammoth hockey bag and a backpack the size of a barrel. That left him with a smaller suitcase on rollers, a smaller backpack, a camera bag, and his jacket. Approaching the counter, he had to walk backwards to manage it all.

If he’s by himself when he arrives, I hope he finds his way.