Roads go ever ever on/ Under cloud and under star,

On the tenth day of September, twenty-five years after I had been born, I stood beside my wife outside the MOV airport in Parkersburg. I was certainly whelmed by the dinky size of it. There was nothing to it really. Might have about ten employees on hand. Our family outnumbered them by at least one. Everyone was there to see us off and it was quite nice to be able to spend some time with them while my brain attempted to crawl down my spinal cord to hide within my stomach.

Oddly enough, my anxiety had next to nothing to do with the actual flying bit. Though the prospect of crashing did lurk the in deeper recesses. I had built up crossing through security as some sort of great and terrible thing. Months prior I would scour news site for horrendous travel stories involving the invasion of privacy and various hoops a traveler would have to leap through to make it onto the plane. This curiosity was driven from an odd personality quirk I had tried to bury from my youth. I was hyper-guilty.

The scenario always played out like this: a teacher, RA, police officer, etc. would speak to a: class, floor, group and accuse an anonymous member of some wrong doing: cheating, shitting on the floor, trespassing and no matter how certain I was of my innocence I would physiologically react as though I was being tortured on the rack. I was always seconds away from blurting out "Yes! It was me! I shit all over the floor!"

So, the thought, and just the thought, of airport security was the worse thing I could think of. I was certain out of the 4 other people on our tiny flight to Cleveland I would look too shifty and would be escorted stage right to a dimly lit back room with a "Hang in there" kitten poster haphazardly hanging on one wall while I was cavity searched thoroughly by a bored security guard.

Luckily, none of that happened. Though I did have to go through the metal detector a few times until it was realized that my new passport holder with a RFID blocker in it was causing the machine to ping off. Having made it through security we were able to board the first leg of our journey. The plane was a small one with twin propellers. It seemed like I was climbing into a sort of antique, or better yet something from an Indiana Jones film. Elizabeth and I tried to wave to our family waiting in the glass enclosed airport but it appeared that the glass was tinted in such a way that prevented them from seeing us.

The plane ride was actually quite smooth and fairly enjoyable. With each gain in altitude it seemed like my anxieties were falling away bit by bit until I was finally exposed to the great mystique and marvel of the whole endeavor. I was flying through the air toward another country.

I was moving 3,000 miles toward the night, toward London, toward the next year.