Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
The Lufthansa employee at Frankfurt Airport held the digital thermometer to my forehead, looked at the result and said: “That can’t be right.” This is not what you want to hear when your ability to get on a plane home relies on those little numbers.
I asked what was wrong. My temperature was registering at 35 C, a bit low for the normal range. “I’ve always been cold-blooded,” I told her, breaking one of my cardinal rules for airports: no jokes, especially bad ones.
She shook the thermometer, the way I shake the TV remote when the battery’s dying. She aimed it at my forehead again, frowned and said: “Do you feel alright?”
I wanted to say, “Sure, considering that the world is ablaze with disease and unrest,” but that would have broken the rule mentioned above, so I just said cheerily: “Absolutely fine!”
She shrugged, stamping my boarding pass with a red “OK.” Never have I been so happy to hear that bureaucratic “thunk,” a sound I’d grown familiar with in Germany. Her colleague had already asked me a series of questions: Did I have any symptoms of COVID-19? (No.) Had I been barred from any flights in the past 48 hours? (No.) Was I aware that I would have to quarantine for 14 days when I got back to Canada? (Yes.)
After a year in Berlin, during which the world turned inside out, my family and I were going home. Like the huge majority of Canadians, I have not travelled since the pandemic began (the Canada Border Services Agency says the volume of air passengers to Canada is down 95 per cent from a year ago). I was not relishing the prospect of nine hours in the air, but our return had been planned a year ago, and unless we suddenly sprouted fins, we would need to fly back: Berlin to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Toronto. If you’re wondering what it’s like to fly internationally during the era of what my teenaged son calls “the ‘Rona,” here’s an account of that journey.
I’ve always thought of Berlin Tegel as the Danny DeVito of airports: tiny and adorable. Unlike Mr. DeVito, it’s been slated for demolition for 10 years. A state-of-the-art new airport, Brandenburg, will open in October to service Berlin, but until then we have cramped Tegel. Because the volume of air travel is so low (the International Air Transport Association estimates that passenger numbers won’t rebound until 2023 at the earliest), it’s easy to keep six feet apart from other travellers.
Everyone wears a mask. Most shops are closed, and the café that’s open has doors marked eingang (entrance) and ausgang (exit). Some airports have stepped up their game during this crisis – Heathrow in London has cleaning robots, 100 “hygiene technicians,” and “fly safe pit stops” where travellers can pick up free masks – but Tegel is not among them. We had checked in online, but at baggage dropoff I’m informed that new restrictions mean I can’t bring my small wheeled bag onboard. I have to check it, and because it weighs more than eight kilograms, Lufthansa thinks I should pay €300 (around $465). Cue a frantic culling of the bag: Goodbye, water paints! Go live with the expensive calculator and extra socks in the great beyond.
We board the one-hour flight to Frankfurt. I startle the woman sitting in the middle seat of my aisle by asking her if she’s in the right place; when we booked, my daughter and I had an empty seat between us. A flight attendant tells me the flight is full. “At the beginning, we kept the middle seats empty,” she says. “But now we have these.” She points to her mask. At home, Air Canada and WestJet have also resumed selling middle seats, a move that dismayed nearly three-quarters of Canadians in a recent survey (to be fair, 85 per cent of Canadians say they have no intention of travelling internationally this year, so the point may be moot).
I’ve been reading about the risks associated with airline travel, the added gamble of filled middle seats, about the usefulness of HEPA filters in killing the virus. I am a font of trivia – the air on a plane circulates completely every five minutes! – that will be useful for precisely the next nine hours, considering I intend not to fly again until there’s a vaccine. While the flight attendants tell us to wear our masks except when we’re eating or drinking, I reach above my head to turn the little air jet to full blast (“it can’t hurt,” according to expert opinion). I bathe in hand sanitizer like the perfume-splashing lady in the Jean Nate commercials of my youth.
At the Frankfurt airport, the technology is 21st-century, augmented for the pandemic present. The facial-recognition scanner reads my passport but refuses to let me through the gates until an airport employee points out that I need to pull down my mask. We try to board an elevator, but the woman inside points to a warning written on the floor and says: “Nur drei personen!” (Only three people.) Every other seat in the boarding lounge is taped off, which is fine when no one is flying, but what happens when the airport becomes busy again?
Oddly, and despite my anxiety, this trip represents a calm departure from the madness I usually associate with air travel. Passengers give each other space – we stand especially far from the woman who’s wrapped herself in a head-to-toe plastic poncho like the ones you get at Niagara Falls. The flight is only about a quarter full, so there’s no need to board by zone, and no one rushes the gate. There are no fisticuffs over the overhead bins. People have entire rows to stretch out in. After years of profit-maximizing airlines squeezing passengers closer and closer like factory hens, here we are in the plague times, sprawling like movie stars.
But it is impossible to ignore that these are, indeed, plague times. The purser employs a series of euphemisms during his announcements – “this unusual situation,” “these current difficulties,” “amended in-flight services.” The amended service amounts to a kind of Bavarian picnic: a bun, cold meat, a giant pickle, potato salad. Not bad. We can remove our masks to eat or drink, or, as the purser helpfully informs us, “if the oxygen masks descend from above.” We’re lucky to be getting this service at all: Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline, was teetering on the brink of collapse and was rescued by a bailout of €9-billion from the German government.
At the end of the flight, we are told to remain in our seats and to disembark when our row is called, another astonishing moment of civility. But once we’re in the airport, I’m shocked at what I see – or don’t see. I’m used to grumbling about how hectic Pearson International is – now, it’s deserted. The day after we land, it’s announced that Canada’s busiest airport will cut its staff by more than a quarter.
At the end of the moving walkway, security staff hand out contact forms and COVID-19 information sheets. I dutifully fill out the form, only later reading about the 21,000 people – scofflaws! – who have arrived in Canada and decided to ignore the quarantine regulations. Didn’t they listen to the border agent? Ours read us a gentle, Canadian version of the riot act: We must self-isolate, have someone bring us groceries, report any COVID-19-like symptoms we might have. Then he lets us go and we wander down to the giant, eerily empty baggage retrieval area. For the first time ever, our bags have arrived before we do.
I’ll read, the next day, that the Canadian government is warning passengers that the virus was present on 19 international flights coming into Canada in the past two weeks. The risk seems worth it, to be home. That’s where I intend to stay, until the world rights itself again.
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