An Emigre’s Return to Syracuse, Covid Year Two
By Daniel Koch
January 2022
When we arrived at Heathrow, a family of four with two small kids and baggage in tow, we were three hours early for our flight. A British Airways employee intercepted passengers before allowing them into the queue for check-in. “Are you U.S. Citizens?” she asked. “I am. My wife and kids aren’t, but they are my immediate family,” I replied. She told us that only U.S. Citizens were allowed to board, and that my wife and two children would not be allowed unless we could show evidence that they were my immediate family.
In the run-up to our July 2021 flights, I thought I had checked and read everything out there about traveling to the U.S. in the pandemic. Coronavirus numbers had reduced in the summer months and international travel was permitted, but there were still restrictions in place. We all needed to have negative Covid tests taken within 48 hours of departure. The free over-the-counter LFTs were not good enough – the tests needed to be supervised and certified. We paid for test kits to be delivered to our home and we were watched taking them by a lady in South Africa over a video link, who produced electronic fit-to-fly certificates for us. I then had to load all these documents up onto an app for the airline to approve.
I grew up in central New York State, near Syracuse – closer to the Canadian border than to the great ‘downstate’ metropolis. I hadn’t seen my American family for two years due to the pandemic. We thought we would splash out and pay for flights to Syracuse airport this time, which are always substantially more expensive because it involves a connecting flight. Normally we fly from London to New York City and make the long drive from there. But it was looking like we wouldn’t even make it out of the U.K.
The fact that my wife, children, and I all had the same surname in our passports and live at the same address was not sufficient evidence that we were indeed a family. They wanted a marriage certificate and my boys’ birth certificates (with my name showing in the ‘father’ section), which I didn’t have. I tried arguing that none of the information we’d received from the airline had said that that kind of evidence would be necessary. But it was futile – without it they would not let us on the airplane.
The day before, my wife had given our neighbors a key to the house and a bag of potatoes from our garden that we had dug out before we left. Calling them was our only hope. Miraculously, they picked up, gained entrance to our house, rifled through our files, and managed to find and photograph the required documents. After a tense hour with our whole trip hanging in the balance, the airline accepted these, and we were back in business. We told our kind neighbors we would like to repay them in some way for their help. “You’ve paid in potatoes,” they said.
To get to Syracuse we had to fly to Chicago, go through immigration, then transfer to a domestic flight. At O’Hare we collected our checked bags and waited, seemingly endlessly, for our passports to be stamped. We rechecked our bags, went through security, again, and finally got into the terminal. The departure screen showed that our flight to Syracuse had been cancelled. There were no further flights until the next evening. A friendly airline employee told us he could put us on a flight to Washington and we could get a connecting flight from there to Syracuse which would get us in about midnight.
On to Washington. But when we got there, it turned out the late flight from there to Syracuse was also cancelled. We were exhausted. The airline said they could not get us onto another flight to Syracuse until three days later. Reluctantly, they agreed that they would put us up in a hotel for one night and said we could try stand-by the next day. So off we went in a taxi, one boy sleeping and the other wide awake, on unfamiliar roads to somewhere in Maryland (or was it Virginia?) very late at night.
At the hotel desk, we presented our voucher. The receptionist had a lapdog – why, I do not know. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any rooms,” she said. “We told the airline not to send any more passengers.” There were no other options. Every hotel in the area was fully booked. We fell into a deep despair. But just then a couple came to the desk saying they were disgusted with the hotel after a bad experience the previous night and that they would not be completing their stay. “We’ll take that room,” we said. “Beware,” said the unhappy man, “the toilet runs. We didn’t sleep at all last night.”
The hotel staff protested that the room hadn’t been cleaned and they could not give it to us, but in the end they relented. If they didn’t put us there, we would be sleeping on the lobby floor. The room had indeed not been cleaned. We slept in a bed that had been used by someone else the previous night. But it was a place to sleep and we were grateful to have it. The toilet was fine.
The following day we did get a standby flight. That was not straightforward either. In fact, it was a very stressful experience. But at least we made it. At Syracuse we were told that because we hadn’t arrived on our booked flight the day before they did not have a rental car to give us (even though we had already paid). We did get one in the end, but let’s just say that this story could go on and on.
Why did we feel the need to make this trip? In the age of FaceTime, we can talk to our friends and relatives across the ocean anytime we like. In fact, we had been doing more of that during the pandemic than we ever had before. The life of the émigré is much, much different now even than it was when I first moved to the UK some twenty years ago. We could have cut down on carbon emissions, avoided the risk of catching Covid in the airport, and saved ourselves the ordeal of trying to manage two small children in full public view for that many hours (during which one decided to lick an airport handrail, for example).
How many species, once grown to maturity and gone to pastures new, continually go back to the place where they were a cub or a kid to spend time their parents, siblings, and old friends? It’s only us, really. Perhaps somewhere along the line, our caveman ancestors who left the family pack learned that by returning home from time to time, they or their young offspring could discover new tricks that helped enhance their survival or reproductive success. But I can think of no material need for modern humans to go back to their old home (unless of course it’s a hope of keeping a relative warm for some sort of inheritance).
The impulse must therefore be spiritual or derive from some source deep within our human psyche. We went to America because it was somewhere we thought we needed to be, in the flesh. To see grandma. To hug each other. To respond to the knowledge that the ever-pressing forces of aging and death will eventually rob us of people that – if we had our own way – we’d preserve just as they are, or were, forever. I needed to go home, to bring my wife and my children there – because of a powerful, untouchable, not-fully-explainable feeling.
Looking back, I think of our Planes, Trains and Automobiles-like experience as a silly (stressful though it was at the time), 21st Century, first world-problem sort of equivalent to Odysseus’ journey home from Troy. After a rather horrendous trip, the beleaguered voyager faced a final, unexpected challenge when he reached the shores of Ithaca. Before he could really go home, he had to slay the suitors who were clamoring around his wife Penelope. For us, it was procuring a suitable vehicle from Syracuse Airport’s Budget Rent-a-Car. There was no slaying, but it did get a little testy. Mercifully, the gods were with us.
