Underground, Overcrowded

My friend Shawn Small is a master traveler. He's so savvy, in fact, other people pay him to help them travel well. Last week, a shortened version of my most feeble travel story appeared on his blog. If you want insightful thoughts on God, travel and culture, you should follow Shawn. If you want an extended laugh at a travel novice, read on.

Some lessons are best learned in solitude. Some are best learned through failure. And some come most clearly while stranded in a dark subway tunnel under Paris. 

When Christine and I were 25 — still acting like kids and newlyweds — we made our first visit to Europe. We had a friend, Selena, doing graduate work at the University of Liverpool and we decided that was as good an excuse as any to visit the UK. Selena was also friends with Christine's sister Ellen, so we decided to take her along. Of the many mistakes that colored this trip, that was among the biggest. Do not go to Europe with your sister-in-law; I don't care how nice she is. You will find yourself watching other couples stroll romantic cobblestone streets in the City of Light while you eat at Chili's and carry extra bags. 

The second mistake we made on this trip was to overbook it. We should have been content with Liverpool and London. Instead, we crammed in Scotland and Paris. I would have traded all of the latter for more of the former, but it's the latter that taught me the lesson of this story.

A third mistake (the list of mistakes could go on for pages but I'll stop at three for now) was that none of us spoke French. Christine's French was the best among us but it was still shaky. We were staking our travel on the language skills of a 25-year-old who, when worried about making a flight on time, asked a cabbie, "How many minutes does the airport have?" 

On the penultimate day of our trip, a Sunday, Christine, Ellen and I awoke in the center of Paris, two blocks from the Champs-Elysees. Thirty-six hours later, we were supposed to be resting on our own beds. Between Sunday morning and Monday afternoon, we were scheduled to catch a subway train out of city center to a station named Laplace, transfer to an airport shuttle in the suburbs (we weren't flying from de Gaulle, of course, because we were 25 and trying to pinch every penny possible), catch a flight to London, ride a bus back to Liverpool where we could stay with Selena for free, and get up early for our low-fare-no-refund flight back to the states. If any of those transportation dominoes failed to fall in line, we would be stranded in Europe. Stranded in Europe with your vivacious young wife isn't a bad prospect. Stranded in Europe with your wife and her sister is completely different. 

Ellen has severe allergies and asthma, so Paris was hard on her. Our Sunday had an ominous beginning when she threw up in a subway concourse and had to explain it to police. We hadn't even touched the first domino in our journey home when we found ourselves huddled around a garbage can in an empty subway corridor, patting Ellen on the back and hoping not to be delayed too long. Just then, three men in fatigues and berets walked around the corner. Two of them were carrying assault rifles. I still don't know if they were police, military, or terrorists but they seemed to think we were a threat to public safety, or just Americans which, I came to believe, were synonyms to most Parisians. They asked us, "Is there a problem here?" We did our best to make them understand that we were only sick and weary travelers, a communication that failed until Christine, our language expert, used the universal sound and sign language for vomit, at which point they retreated. We managed to buy train tickets and hop aboard just in time. We were headed home. 

The streets and subway in Paris are largely vacant early on Sunday mornings. There was little conversation as our train clattered through its tunnel. Ellen was still feeling sick and the rocking of the train didn't help. There were only two other people on the train with us. At one stop, two stations ahead of Laplace, the doors opened, a voice made an announcement in French which we did not understand, both of our fellow travelers got off, and the train sped away again. It seemed like every other stop along the line. But then our train halted. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. In the tunnel. In the dark. Not at a platform. Turns out, that announcement we didn't understand was explaining that we had reached the end of the line for shortened Sunday service. Our train and its conductor were ending their shifts and we were stranded somewhere under Paris contemplating the very real possibility of hiking through dark subway tunnels in search of escape. Ellen barfed again. 

Apparently, thanks to previous traveling American idiots like us, or due to admirable French foresight, there is a rule in place for Parisian train conductors that they have to sweep their train for stowaways before they park it for good. We were in the last car and, eventually, the conductor found us, fidgeting and worrying next to our puddle of American vomit. He was unhappy. We got a tongue-lashing that I'm certain would have been offensive if we knew what he was saying, and eventually understood from him that we should not exit the train and walk aimlessly through the tunnels under Paris. We should stay put. He would take us back to the last stop. 

That was a help but not as much help as we needed. We were still two stops away from our transfer point at Laplace and time was ticking. In a mad rush, we read time tables to find another route to Laplace, dashed up and down stairs to the designated platform, jumped aboard, and hoped that this line, too, wasn't shortened for Sunday service. This was the long way — it would require an extra transfer — but we were back on our way to Laplace, and to Texas.

Our train was now above ground and we were happy to see the warm, golden hue of sunlight splashed against the graffiti-ridden sound walls that lined our new route. We made several stops, inching closer to Laplace and hoping to fell all the dominoes just in time. And that's when Christine's French kicked in again. We stopped at a station called Maison Lafitte. An announcement came on and Christine shot up from her chair. With a look of terror in her eyes she gasped, "He said…he said…it's-a-no-good!" Then she grabbed her bag and bounded off the train.

Christine had recognized an important word in the announcement; something that sounded like "terminus". Her communique, "It's-a-no-good!" was meant to convey that we had to get off the train or risk another delay and another tongue-lashing from an angry conductor. Ellen and I didn't interpret as quickly as we should have. We did our best to follow Christine's lead but Ellen was groggy from nausea and I was carrying my bags as well as hers. By the time we gathered ourselves and moved toward the exit, the doors were closing. There was a moment, forever seared in my memory, when I lunged my luggage-laden hands toward the doors, seeing my young wife on the platform outside, still with terror in her eyes, mouthing the word, "Noooooo!" 

Too late. The train was moving, leaving Christine behind. Through the windows, I managed to send her one final message. I pointed to the platform and shouted, "Stay here!" 

Ellen and I sped away toward the "terminus" which, this time, was an enormous train yard above ground. We knew the drill. The train stopped. The conductor ambled aft. We stood in the doorway of our car, rather proud this time to know our way around "terminus" and not to have soiled his train with the waning contents of Ellen's stomach. We had the pleasure of meeting two conductors this time — one ending his shift and another beginning his. The two stood on the ground next to the train and spoke in angry tones while making animated gestures toward us. Then they shook hands, said good-bye, and the new conductor mounted his train and drove us back to town. 

On the ride back in, Ellen and I did some math. We expected to get back to Maison Lafitte just four minutes before another train that could still deliver us to Laplace in time to catch the shuttle in time to catch our flight to London. From here on out, we needed everything to go right or all was lost. I gave something of a pep-talk, encouraging Ellen to fight through her nausea. 

We arrived at Maison Lafitte and saw Christine across the station. Now that we were in-bound, our train was on a different set of tracks, one removed from the platform where we left Christine. To get to her, we had to race up stairs, across a street, and back down to ground level. We had no time to spare. We shot up the steps and raced to the turnstile that guarded the steps down to Christine. This particular turnstile wasn't just the people-counter version you cross to get on roller coasters. It was a fortified gate built into a chain link fence. I slid my paper train pass into the automated turnstile, and it popped back out at me. The gate stayed closed. I tried again. Nothing. Ellen tried. Same result. Then it occurred to me that our tickets wouldn't work at Maison Lafitte because we were never supposed to catch a train here. Just then I looked down the tracks to see our train chugging into view. I grabbed Ellen's bag and threw it over the fence. I shouted, "Climb!" and started to hoist my sister-in-law over a chain-link fence in an effort to trespass on French mass transit. 

It didn't work. Ellen couldn't make the climb and I realized we were too late anyway. We watched the train pull to a stop and load several passengers who would have preferred to stay and watch the desperate American sideshow. Christine came to the turnstile, eyes red with tears, grabbed the bag I had thrown over the fence, and exited the Parisian train system for the last time, defeated. 

We had one final course of action and we took it. There was a cab stand outside Maison Lafitte and, even though we were far from the airport, we asked a cabbie if he could get us there in time for our flight. He saw it as both a challenge and an opportunity. I am certain of two things about that cab ride: we did not pay the standard fare, and we got to the airport in time. Thirty-five hours later, we were home. 

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from my experience in Paris. Probably the most obvious is this: Don't go to Paris. They speak another language there. Also, sister-in-law-vomit isn't charming even in the most romantic city in the world.

But the more subtle and more personal lesson for me had to do with my heritage. I grew up in a rural Texas town of 1,200 people. I like to visit cities and I can make a living in suburbs, but I am most deeply at home in locales where people are sparse. A week before the debacle at Maison Lafitte, Christine and I had enjoyed a lovely, relaxing overnight in Fort William, Scotland. We met some locals who did us a favor. We explored a highland walk dotted with sheep. We sampled haggis. It was quaint and pastoral with no drama and no angry train conductors. I'm not sure that the difference between our Scottish and French experiences can be attributed entirely to language (some of the brogue spoken is Scotland was as hard to understand as French). In France I realized my fluency in a language whose alphabet is solitude and whose grammar is neighborliness. In the immortal words of John Denver, "I'm just a country boy." It took being stranded in the Paris underground to learn that.