Thursday, July 10th 2008 [San Francisco Airport]

Airports are very strange places. Not that they are all the same — on Bouganville the airport is a tin shed, barely keeping out the oppressive heat while Changi airport in Singapore is an expansive shopping centre kept at a temperature that would make Eskimos cold. But they all serve the same purpose, to collect people coming from large distances or to send us on our way. All airports have, by mutual agreement, decided that they should hire Charlie Brown’s teacher to make important annoucements over the speaker system. The only well enunciated messages all seem to start with “This is a security announcement….”. They are places were ridiculous feel-good security measures are implemented that serve no purpose, such as throwing all the “potentially explosive” liquids in a big container together. Because that is so much safer.

San Francisco International Airport is sterile and bland. The building is tall, but mostly empty, with its clean while tiles reminding me of a medical facility in a science fiction show. People crowd around the airline terminals in the centre, leaving vast swaths of empty space inbetween. On the East and West ends of the terminal are the two security checkpoints, and the small grey carpeted concourse run out like narrow fingers.

It is rare that I can head to an airport on an extended journey without mixed feelings. There is a lot of excitement heading off to different places, be they new or familiar. On this trip I am especially lucky as I am meeting up with good friends in England, getting to explore the ancient ruins of Greece, and even fit in some physics on the coast of the Adriatic sea. Perhaps most significantly I escape the oppressive heat of Davis, trading the ashen clouds and red sky for the natural grey of a British raincloud. Even so I cannot help but feel a twinge of sadness for the people that I leave behind.

I get my boarding pass from the ticketing machine. In the lower right hand corner the code SSSS appears. Once again I have been “randomly” selected for a secondary security check. As a foreigner without a machine readable passport this happens on almost every trip that I take. The machine tells me to take my boarding pass to the ticketing gate. Over at the ticketing gate, there is a sign declaring that only people that have tickets with barcodes from the machine should line up here. A quick glance at my ticket confirms that there is no barcode on it. Looking around for further instructions on what to do if you don’t have a barcode proves to be an exercise in futility, as does any attempt to wave down a person who could tell me what I am supposed to do. Finally I get into the line, prepared to be treated as an idiot either for being in this line or for asking about the lack of the barcode. It turns out that it is the latter; when I get to the front counter I am told not to worry about that. I make a half-hearted attempt to explain that the sign is somewhat misleading if barcodes are not always printed (and my guess is it has something to do with the non-machine readable passport that I have) but the person behind the ticket counter is not particularly interested in making travel easy for people that try their best to follow instructions. My heart is not really in it either; airports are one of those places where the rules are not clear, but you will attract attention for breaking the rules. The check in line that I am in is accepting bags for travel to Okinawa, Tokyo, Kyoto, and London. I check the luggage ticket on my bag for the familiar LHR before it disappears down the conveyer belt.

Time to make it through security. As I make my way to the front of the line I am ushered to one side to await my extra special screening. While waiting I remove my shoes, remove my watch and laptop, and debate briefly whether or not to hold onto my boarding pass and passport before also surrendering them to the grey plastic box. After a few minutes of standing around in my socks the TSA agent comes over and leads me to a large plastic box that is roughly the size of a telephone booth. I have been in one of these before, they shoot little jets of compressed air at you in order to blow particles that may be on you into their chemical sensors. I have heard that the acetone in nail polish remover provides a false positive as it is similar enough to materials used in some of the explosives they check for. My source is not particularly reliable, and it is something that I have been meaning to check but keep forgetting about before taking a trip. As I have not removed any nail polish this morning it seems I have missed another chance to determine if this is true. [By the way, anyone out there reading this who has gone through after recently using nail polish remover, please make a comment down the bottom. Otherwise I shall have to try and remember on my next flight to verify the statement.] The doors of the little booth close, the light turns from red to green. Psst, psst, psst, psst, psst, psst, psst. The compressed air blows over me, and after what seems like an eternity (but is probably closer to 30 seconds) the machine fails to find any explosive markers. A buzzer sounds and the doors slide open, and a different officer from the TSA waves me out of the machine.

If you have ever gone walking with me, you may be aware that I don’t run places but that I move fairly quickly by default. To the extent that to move at what most people consider a normal speed requires me to be concentrating. Thankful to be done with the security process I moved out of the little phone box and made it over to the container containing my belongings. From behind me I heard “Stop, sir!”. It was the TSA agent that had waved me out of the machine, and now he looked quite nervous. I don’t know about you but nervous armed people, regardless of uniform or intention, automatically make me nervous. My first instinct in this situation is to stop whatever I am doing and raise both my hands above my head. I cannot emphasise enough from previous experience how bad of an idea this is. It just takes one person to see someone with their hands raised above his head to start yelling and looking the bad guy with a gun and then you have complete pandemonium on your hands. And you do not want to be the person with their hands waving in the air when the other members of the TSA pull their guns out. After all, I don’t want to end up like Jean Charles de Menezes. Instead you have to make a conscious effort to turn and face the questioner, palms outstretched placed at most as high as your shoulder and slightly forward. If you can pull it off, put an apologetic shrug in there as well. It also helps if you can stop grinning like a maniac. The last one is the one I have difficulty with, as I find it quite amusing how much effort one has to put in to deal with security guards. The agent tells me to make my way to the seats in the centre isle, and tells me not to touch anything. A different agent scoops up my grey boxes and moves them over to a central bench, where he started to wipe everything down with a white cloth.

I have been through the extra special security screening in almost every country I have visited. The white cloth is coated with a chemical that will react with residues of some fairly common explosives. If it detects anything it will change colour, I believe. Most places will just wipe down the outside of your bag with the special cloth. A couple of places will open the largest compartment of your bag and check inside it as well. Before this trip, the most paranoid I had seen was in Australia when they pulled me to one side to wipe down my bag and the hippo plush toy I was carrying. In this case, the agent was literally wiping down everything. My bag was emptied of all its belongings, many of which were electronics. Three power adapters, a cable for connecting the camera to the laptop and a couple of boxes for converting power to different voltages tipped out. Each component was wiped down, and every compartment of my bag was also wiped. They even went as far as to open my copy of Quantum field theory in curved spacetime and black hole thermodynamics and wipe down random pages of the interior in the search for explosive residue. I don’t wish to sound like I am complaining here, in fact quite the opposite. Most of the security checks I have been through have been cursory glances to make everyone feel safer. If they are going to inconvenience me with the extra security check I would much rather it be through than some meaningless charade. Having finally convinced himself that my collection of assorted electronics and physics texts were indeed harmless, the TSA agent smiles and wishes me a pleasant flight.

After the security gates at SFO it is rather dull; we have the same collection of three stores copied a couple of times with a Japanese food bar thrown in for good measure. I have a chance to stop and think about the upcoming journey. When I woke up this morning I was hot and uncomfortable from the relentless Davis heat. Making my way out to the train station meant passing under a nearly red sun, yet after a couple of hours and a mere 90 miles I had made it to a platform at SFO, where a cool sea breeze blows gently. In 45 minutes I would climb into a giant metal can that would fly for 9 hours, taking me to a location quarter of the planet away. The same red sun beating down on me in Davis would be the one that could not quite penetrate the thick white British clouds. I am somewhat awed by the fact that we can travel such great distances in such short times, and the world feels a little smaller. It seems strange at this moment that I have let distance stop me from seeing some of my friends for such a long time. When I reach Bristol I will be meeting a friend that I had not seen in almost four years. When we met up on that previous occasion I was afraid that we were going to be arrested by the Singapore police for breaking and entering, but that is another story for another time.

Almost time to board. In a few short steps I will be on the plane. I get out of my seat to take the first step in my journey of 10,000 miles. Thankfully the 9,999.75 miles that don’t involve walking along the gangway into the plane will not require that much effort on my part.