Last Ape Standing Dispatch #1: Amsterdam
My 777 KLM jet in Amsterdam, pointed south to the Cape of Good Hope
This post was originally published on November 15, 2019 on a previous version of ChipWalter.com.
Here I sit in Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. It was here in this port city that the Great Age of Discovery began 500 years ago. That’s when the Netherlands and the powerful Dutch East and West India Companies undertook to build their planet-wide trading empire. It’s ships sailed the globe and controlled trade from Europe to Indonesia and Japan in the east to the new world (including New York – then New Amsterdam) in the west. Those Dutch — they were everywhere.
Amsterdam is still a central port except now it’s exchanged KLM Airbuses for Tall Ships and sailing frigates. Millions of people from all over the planet stream through this airport, speaking strange languages, wearing interesting clothes, looking as sleep deprived and befuddled as I must look, in search of bathrooms and coffee. They are streaming here now in the grey dawn (the planet hasn’t yet seen fit to turn its face fully to the sun), and I’m streaming with them following a flight from Detroit over the Atlantic that would have given a sardine claustrophobia.
It’s ugly what airlines have become. What happened to the old days of inefficiency, half full jets, easy upgrades to business or first class, and leg room that enabled me to avoid incipient thrombosis. I had to chuckle (humorlessly) when I watched a video on my nifty back-of-the-seat screen featuring the CEO of Delta Airlines earnestly telling me that my safety and comfort were his top priority (not to mention the top priority of his 10,000 or so employees) as I sat so efficiently seated with all of the other poor, flying weebles into a personal space no larger than a phone booth (phone booths are made for standing!). “Why are you doing this to me?” my inner traveler screamed.
I’m willing to concede safety is a priority for Delta’s CEO, since 200 people, no matter how maximally seated, going down in flames is probably bad for the bottom line. But it was difficult to see how he or any other Delta employee gave a baggage handler’s scowl about my comfort. In fact it seemed to me that Delta had gone out of its way to make the flight as discomforting as it possibly could. I’m 6′ 2″. I need space! In this space a ferret would need space! Here there was none and even less when the man in front of me pushed his seat back. I was like a prisoner in solitary confinement, AND I was paying for it! Or at least National Geographic was. Even reading was difficult, let alone writing (I gave up). The seating seemed even tighter, if possible, than it was in the commuter jet that flew me from Pittsburgh to Detroit as part of the strange backward itinerary that the great airline Gods had plotted out to ferry me, eventually, to Cape Town.
But then, I reminded myself, THAT is the end game – South Africa. Flights to an exotic place, a Cape of Good Hope, a place that the great Dutch explorers settled and swept around as they plied the world’s waters and created the first global trade routes. AND a place I would soon write about where the world we live in today undertook the creation of the first symbols, the foundation of western civilization and thought.
That was where I was headed, and I’m sure my journey wasn’t nearly as difficult or as dangerous as even the richest Dutch captain. So I have resolved to shut my yap, open my sleepy eyes and smile at all the other Last Apes Standing, each with their own issues and dreams and destinations, flowing around me in search of plumbing and caffeine.
It’s good to remember these things as I prepare to sit on another jet, legs locked, heading south to continue my upcoming journey into the past.