My first international trip came courtesy of a counting error. I was a couple years removed from college and had flown into Newark International Airport for a training session at my company’s headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. This was at a time when Newark was the East Coast hub for Continental Airlines, long before the brand disappeared in the merger with United. After a few days in Princeton, I was back at the airport waiting in the gate area for my return flight to Chicago.
Minutes before our scheduled boarding time, the public address system crackled to life. It was the voice of the gate agent informing us that the flight had been oversold and she needed four volunteers willing to take the next flight to Chicago two hours later. In exchange for the inconvenience, we would receive a round-trip voucher good for anywhere Continental flew in the Western Hemisphere.
An audible grumble passed through the crowd and a few comments about corporate greed and, “There’s no way I’m giving up my seat”, but no one approached the counter. I, on the other hand, had geography on my mind. I knew Continental had a large U.S. footprint, but I wasn’t sure how widespread their operations were outside the country. So, I walked over to the gate agent and asked to see a route map.
As expected, there were dots and lines all over the continental United States, but there were also dots in South America next to Caracas, Bogota, Lima, Santiago, and a few other cities.
“Could I use the voucher to go to South America?” I asked.
“Sure. It’s in the Western Hemisphere.”
“How about Rio de Janeiro?”
“Yes, including Rio.”
“I’ll take it.”
I grabbed the voucher and quickly shoved it into my attaché case, like she had handed me a bag of illegal drugs. Maybe I was afraid she would change her mind and take it back, but getting a free trip to Brazil felt like I was committing a crime. I was shocked the rest of my fellow passengers weren’t doing the same map check I did and mobbing the gate agent for a free ticket. I believe one other young man walked to the desk to take advantage of the offer, but I didn’t see anyone else move. I guess the last two “volunteers” were bumped against their will, but that wasn’t my concern. All I was thinking about was how soon I could make it down to Rio.
Just to give additional context, you have to understand that this trip was going to be a HUGE deal for me. I had the best parents anyone could ask for, but there was no money in the budget for international travel when I was growing up, not that I even thought about it. Copacabana Beach might as well have been on Mars. I spent plenty of time on the beach, but it was the beach on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. My biggest travel aspiration as a child was to go to the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1984 since it was so close.
As I got older, my curiosity grew through reading books and watching television shows about the historic sites of the world like the Eiffel Tower, the Roman Colosseum and the Great Wall of China. But there was no backpacking around Europe or taking a gap year in some exotic locale to find myself, all on my parent’s dime. As the son of two first generation college graduates born into Jim Crow in the Deep South during the Great Depression, that wasn’t yet part of our culture.
In fact, at the time I took the voucher offer from Continental, I still didn’t have a passport. The one thing I did have was a wanderlust to see all those places I had read about and seen as backdrops in James Bond movies. If a two-hour delay was all it took to help me start scratching that itch, it was worth the wait.
I stopped by the post office the next day to pick up a passport application and went to a neighborhood Walgreens to have my picture taken. Six weeks later, I checked my mailbox and found a padded manila envelope from the U.S. Department of State with the little blue booklet inside.
The signature page was the first thing I saw with a message translated into three different languages.
The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.
Not valid until signed.
My picture was on the facing page below, behind a starred watermark. I checked that all my vital information was correct: Name. Birthday. Place of birth. It felt like I was being inducted into a secret society and my passport was a passkey that gave me access to its benefits . I signed the top page to make it all official and considered myself a member of the club.
Flipping through the booklet, the most striking feature to me was all the little light blue squares on each page. Even though I hadn’t traveled internationally yet, I understood that a stamp in one of those squares meant that you had been somewhere. They were all blank now, a sea of endless possibilities. But I had a feeling that once I started filling them in something fundamental was going to change. The person in that picture on the front page was going to look at the world very differently than the one who had a few stamps under his belt.
I did a quick Google search on Rio to get the basics. Beautiful beaches. Samba. Favelas. Crime. “The US. embassy suggests you avoid crowds and protests.” Watch your wallet. Blah blah blah. The beauty of being that young is that you assume none of those warnings apply to you. I found a reasonably priced hotel in Ipanema and reserved a car to pick me up at the airport. Everything else, I left to chance.
I called Continental customer service and redeemed the voucher for a ticket about a month out. As the date approached, I started getting that queasy sensation in my stomach you feel on one of those amusement park rides that lift you in the air a couple hundred feet, hold for a few seconds, then let you freefall before stopping abruptly a few yards off the ground. The prevailing emotion wasn’t fear -though there was a healthy dose of it - as much as excitement mingled with the knowledge that I was about to put myself in about as vulnerable a position as a person can get.
I would be travelling over 5,000 miles to a city I had never visited before in a country where I didn’t speak a word of the language. There would be no friends, family, classmates, or coworkers to greet me or show me around. Zero. If something went wrong, I had to figure it out on my own. The only hint of protection I had was that message from the Secretary of State in my passport, “…in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.”
By the time departure day came, I was jumping around like a boxer in his corner before the big fight, ready to just get it over with. I zipped my suitcase, double checked the passport in my jacket pocket and caught a cab to O’hare.
To be continued…
Part 2 available at link below.