Road Fever by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online Page A

catch her eye.
    She stared at me coldly and in her best homeroom teacher’s voice said, “Sir, I made the call. If the cart isn’t here, it’s not my fault.”
    And off she went to have sex with animals.
    A LL RIGHT , I’m sorry. That was a little tantrum right there and it was uncalled for. Time has passed. I’m better now. I can say nice things about the airline industry if I really want to.
    For instance: the flight out of Montreal to Moncton, New Brunswick, left smack-bang on time, and the Canadian attendants seemed to enjoy their work. It was a pleasant flight and no surprise at all. Over the past six months, in preparation for the long drive, I’d flown to nearly a dozen countries in South and Central America. Not one of my flights originating from a Latin destination—not one—had ever been delayed. No bags were lost. The flight attendants had been professional and pleasant. Even American carriers were on time out of South America. Small Central American carriers—companies that might be called Firecracker Airlines—had been on time. Professional.
    And now a Canadian flight was proving as pleasant and professional as a flight out of El Salvador.
    I just want to know how it is that the United States of America suffers
the worst airline service in all of the Americas
.
    No, wait. A pleasant upbeat attitude is said to prolong life. I’m going to take a deep breath here, count to ten, and try to see it from the industry’s point of view.
    So:
    Air travel, in the United States, is no longer the option of the privileged few—as it is in Third World countries—and what passengers experience is the result of a kind of economic egalitarianism. That’s the way to look at it. The airports are crowded because more and more people can afford to fly; which results in more scheduled flights; which results in delays; which results in crowded airports; which results in seatmates who know, and can recount with enthusiasm and startling endurance, the plot of the latest
Star Trek
movie.
    Better conversation, I’d say, than the kind of things you hear from ticket agents.
    When I’d gone to London to talk with Alan Russell, my flight out of Kennedy in New York had been delayed. Natch. “It’ll be about three hours,” the ticket agent said. A line formed and several people changed flights. After a half-hour wait, I had my audience with the man behind the counter.
    “Can you tell me,” I asked, “how long we’ll have to wait?” I thought I could cab over to see a nearby friend.
    “You mean exactly?”
    “Sure.”
    The man smiled one of those you-poor-fool smiles: the kind of merciless grin you might see on the face of a Marine drill instructor hectoring a naive recruit.
    “Sir,” the ticket agent said, “we could leave in two hours. We could leave in five. There is no such thing as ‘exactly’ in the airline business.”
    It’s the kind of attitude you expect from bureaucrats in failing countries all over the earth, and the nicest thing I can say about the airline corpocracy in the United States is that it is not precisely evil. Odd that mismanagement and inefficiency should breed such arrogance.
    N EW B RUNSWICK , bounded by the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, lies on Canada’s eastern seaboard, just north and a bit east of Maine. It is one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces along with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
    Prior to the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ceded the region to Great Britain, the area was known as Acadia and was French. During the American revolutionary war, British Loyalists settled the Maritimes. The Acadians, a French-speaking minority, however, have preserved their identity and have increased in population. The sense of struggle that Acadians live with has toughened them, and Acadian men, especially the younger ones, are regarded as tough monkeys: “Hey, Bobby Choquette, he can scrap, eh?”
    Many of the Acadians live on the Atlantic coast and are fishermen. You meet