July 1997 is where it started for me. That was my first international trip with my then-fiancée Laurin. We were newly engaged, madly in love, just two months out from our wedding day… and flying to Australia. For Laurin, it was about the gazillionth time she’d flown across the oceans.
But for me, this was a first. This trip was a huge deal for me. Before Laurin, I never taken an international flight; in fact, I’d never spent more than three hours in the air. Going to Australia was big new stuff. Come to think of it, any kind of travel was big new stuff in those days.
I’d connected with Laurin via the personal ads nine months earlier, in October 1996. We agreed to meet at an all-night diner in Wichita, where we stayed up all night talking about our lives. Laurin ordered coffee; I ordered tea. I shared my piece of French silk pie, and Laurin shared countless stories of her travels. She had been everywhere, it seemed. Everywhere. Europe, South America, New Zealand, Australia. I looked into her eyes and wondered what this well-traveled woman would see in the likes of me?
“You’ve seen a lot of places,” I said. “Paris, London, Rome. How do you do it? Are you rich?”
“Not rich,” Laurin had said. “Just resourceful.”
In the years that followed, I would learn what that meant. I would learn about the way Laurin monitored travel sites for good deals. The way she sought out lower-star hotels in trendy neighborhoods. The way she window-shopped restaurants to find the best midday menus. Laurin turned affordable international travel into an art form. So many times, when I was out and about doing errands, I would get a phone call from her exclaiming that Such-and-Such airline was offering round-trip tickets to Prague for $300. Just like that, we would be planning a trip to Prague, booking our lodging and studying the city online…
Such is life with Laurin.
And for me, that life started in July 1997, our first international trip together to Australia.
We flew from Wichita to Los Angeles, spent a few days exploring the city (her city, as she had attended university there), then caught a late flight to the Land Down Under. I can still remember walking into Bradley International Terminal in LAX that first time. I felt like a ballplayer getting called up to the Big Leagues.
We were on a Qantas flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. Nineteen hours on the plane. In 1997, airlines did not have the high-end entertainment packages we see today. As such, the only inflight distractions on our nineteen-hour flight were an in-flight yoga lesson (stretching from your seat), a series of music videos by the Soweto String Quartet, and a couple of semi-recent movies projected on a community screen, one Australian and one American.
The American film I had missed in theaters—The Devil’s Own, starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt with a weird Irish accent.
The Australian film was a weird little comedy called…
I don’t remember what it was called. But I know it starred…
I don’t remember that either.
Wheels up was around 11:00 p.m. We lifted off the coast of California and were floating above the Pacific when they served us our meals. Then the films began.
The Aussie comedy rolled first. It opened on a guy trapped in a car as it tumbles down a hill and into a river. A voice-over narration, which we assume is from the man, laments his current circumstance:
“Maybe it’s life’s way of getting even,” he says, “extracting what was owed like some landlord when the rent’s overdue. I’ve talked my way into plenty, and I’ve talked my way out, only this time, if there was somebody up there, he wasn’t listening.”
Flashback to a few weeks earlier, and there’s our hero, a slick real estate hustler named Ben, manipulating a young couple into overpaying for a ramshackle two-bedroom flat. Our hero is crass, and he is arrogant, which makes him much beloved by his greedy boss, the head of a hard-hustling property development firm more interested in the bottom line than the welfare of its clients. The boss is so taken with young Ben that he puts the lad on a fast track, even approving of Ben’s marriage to his daughter Sharon. Everything seems to be going Ben’s way… until he is wrongly arrested for accidentally punching a police officer. Sentenced to community service at a local day center, Ben’s relationship with an at-risk teen forces him to question his val—
I blinked.
The film’s credits were rolling.
I had fallen asleep and missed the whole thing.
No worries, I thought. It will be released in the States within a few months. I can see how it ends then.
But this obscure little Aussie film never made it to the States. I watched for it in theaters, in video stores, on cable, but to no avail. It had not earned enough money Down Under to warrant international distribution.
My only opportunity to see this film had been on that Qantas flight from Los Angeles to Sydney.
And I had slept through the whole thing.
The rest of the trip to Australia was amazing, and I took so many pictures on my tiny Polaroid that I ran out of film. But I couldn’t quite shake the regret at having missed the rest of that film. When we returned to the States, I searched IMDb, still a fledgling site at the time, for keywords and clues that might reveal the title. I did this every couple of months or so for years.
Nothing.
In 2003, when Laurin and I volunteered at the Sundance Film Festival, I met an Australian man named Jimmy who was a ravenous film geek. Jimmy was a regular encyclopedia of Aussie film knowledge. I got a kick quizzing him about forgotten Aussie gems, and he’d rattle off trivia off like Rainman.
“Oh, yeah, mate. The one about the killer pig was called Razorback. The one with Colin Friels sportin’ bleached hair was Back of Beyond. The cop in Bullet Down Under was Mark Jackson, the footballer who played for Geelong…”
But when I asked about the weird little comedy about a property developer who punches a copper and ends up trapped in a car in a river… Jimmy was stumped. “Never heard of that one, mate. Ya sure it’s from Australia?”
I didn’t find the film until the summer of 2015, almost 18 years after it first appeared on my radar. How I found it is not important, a series of fortuitous IMDb clicks after spying this actor on TV and wondering where else I’d seen him. Bottom line, the film is called River Street, released in 1996, directed by Tony Mahood. I purchased a cheap copy on Amazon to see how it ended. It’s nothing special, a serviceable little comedy, easily forgettable.
None of that is important.
What is important is that I almost never saw it. Yes, I know, it’s “only a movie,” but under the circumstances, it was not just any movie. Not to me, anyway. It was the first in-flight movie I ever attempted to watch, on my first long international flight, an Australian film being screened while I was actually going to Australia.
And I had slept through it. This cannot be emphasized enough—I slept through the movie. And this, I think, is the lesson, the recurring mantra heard in that ‘80’s slasher series—whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.
Don’t fall asleep. I’m not saying you must force yourself into sleep-deprivation when traveling. Don’t do that, please. Your body isn’t made for it. But what I am saying is that the experience of traveling is the experience of living. And we all sleep on the experience of living every day, distracting ourselves with worry, fear, discontent, hiding away in our phones, almost instinctive in our lack of engagement with our world.
That is how we sleep through things.
Today, it may be “only a movie” we miss, but tomorrow might bring something more—a Minke whale’s onyx back as it crests in a harbor, a sunset on the Riviera the color of Himalayan pink salt, an Iberian lynx stalking through trees, a Julia butterfly lighting on the table.
All things I’ve seen. All things i would have missed if I had never woken up.
Do not fall asleep on these things.
Do not fall asleep on life.
You don’t want to miss the end of your own movie.
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