Thank You, Jesus

The Deity at Toronto Pearson Who Made Tom Fish Fly

This is an Ask & Give post—stories of asking for what we need and giving what we have. On the road, there’s a thinness of margins, between you and me, between “all good” and “oh snap.” People, often strangers, show up for each other. The road is, of course, both metaphor and not. It’s a feature of nomad living and brick-and-mortar dwelling. It’s yours, and it’s mine. And I’m honored to feature stories from the roads you/we travel as part of the collection.

The author of today’s story is a traveler, a cycling enthusiast, and funny—which is hard to pull off in writing. I’d describe his humor. But you’ll see. Tell me in the comments when you first laughed out loud.

Tom Fish

publishes both Tom Fish Is Away and The Musette. The former is a travel diary “less navel-gazing and more awkward urinal encounters,” plus interviews with fellow travelers (one was me!). The latter is “half-formed thoughts on the sport of cycling.” I believe it was “Ireland Diaries: A dolphin dilemma” that won him the Substack Featured Badge; it’s his most popular and a delight. For me, “Marrakesh Diaries: Shock and awe” features the beauty of Tom’s prose and the keen perspective from which he takes in the places he visits and shares. Pieces like “Chefchaouen Diaries: True blue” offer spectacular photos and make me yearn to visit.

Here’s Tom.

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Thank You, Jesus

One of the best things about travel is when a complete stranger, someone who doesn’t know you and so doesn’t have to go out of their way to help you, does so. One of the worst things about travel is the fact that this help is often necessary because other complete strangers have fucked things up.

The man at the customer service desk in Toronto Pearson Airport was a huge help to me, but his help was only needed because many, many other people I had come into contact with that day had been the human equivalent of a blocked drain. 

It had been a day of delays. The first person to become a hindrance I didn’t know, didn’t even live in the same country as. My flight from London Gatwick to Toronto Pearson was delayed not because of the snow that was hitting the south of England, but because a crew member of the WestJet flight coming over the Atlantic had called in sick. And so my plane would be late to arrive in London and, obviously, would be late to leave. I had been due to arrive in Toronto at 2 and then into Winnipeg, my final destination, at half 5. Now it was looking more like 8 thanks to the sick crew member. The illness wasn’t their fault of course but I felt there must be some injustice somewhere. 

Three hours late, we took off, and nearly seven hours after that we began to prepare for our descent. A flight attendant, a member of the crew that had made it onto the flight, was the next person to be very unhelpful. The lesson of this whole story, apart from to tell you all about the miracle of a man on the customer service desk at Toronto Pearson Airport, is essentially that you shouldn’t fly with WestJet if you want to have a nice time, and particularly, if you’d like your flight attendants to be helpful. I told the flight attendant that I had never changed planes before, and that I had an hour and a half to do so. I was looking, I suppose, for some reassurance that everything would be fine, maybe a few tips on how best to navigate the process. I was not reassured. Everything would not be fine. An hour and a half to change planes in Toronto, I was informed, was nowhere near enough time. Toronto Pearson, I was further informed, was one of the busiest airports on the planet, and we were landing at rush hour. I wanted to tell the flight attendant that this news was, to put it mildly, an absolute disaster, and quite a surprise given that WestJet themselves had made the arrangements. Why, I wanted to ask, had they had me try to change planes in such a short amount of time at rush hour? And why does an airport even have a rush hour? Can’t they stagger the landings throughout the day so there isn’t a rush hour? But I couldn’t do this because he’d sauntered off down the plane to, I presume, spit in someone’s dinner or sneeze on their baby. 

Many, many other people then made sure they were of no help at all by being on other planes also landing at Toronto Pearson. We made it down onto the runway but there we stayed while we waited for a gate to open up, a process which, appropriately enough given the blizzard-like conditions outside, moved at a glacial pace. Then we couldn’t get the doors open because the aforementioned blizzard-like conditions meant it was frozen shut. I suppose this was mainly the fault of the weather but in my ever-increasing state of agitation it became the fault of the person who had designed a plane where the doors could freeze shut. 

A Grecian Harvest Home, or Thanksgiving to the Rural Deities, Ceres, Bacchus by James Barry

By the time I left the plane I had just forty minutes to get to the next one, a clear impossibility and so it proved. By the time I had made it through customs and retrieved my bag, the other plane, the one going to Winnipeg that I was supposed to be on, was already taking off. Not to worry, WestJet had put me on the next flight heading west. I walked through the terminal to find somewhere to eat and as I did so looked back down at my phone which had the new flight details. This flight was also delayed - more people being more unhelpful - and then, whoops, there was no flight at all, at least for me. I was on a flight, and then I wasn’t. What had happened wasn’t clear but at some point in the thirty seconds or so that I hadn’t been looking at my phone, I had been taken off the flight or the flight no longer existed. 

So, I came to the man on the customer service desk. The people who work at these desks, who are there to provide service for customers, seldom do so. These desks are often actually there to provide no answers to a customer’s questions or solutions to a customer’s problems. They are there because they have to be and the people behind them usually reflect that. Not that day, not at Toronto Pearson. 

I walked up to a man who looked a little like Jesus, if Jesus had a desk job and liked eating lots of poutine. He was not your average customer service representative. Jesus, as we shall call him as I have forgotten his name and, well, it seems appropriate, liked providing a service to customers. Jesus was cheerful and happy to see me and eager, I hoped, to perform some miracles. He did, however, start with a warning. I was unlikely to get on a flight to Winnipeg that day. I should face up to the fact that I might be in Toronto for the night. This possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. I was booked on a flight from London to Winnipeg that day and so I would get to Winnipeg that day. But no, he said, there had been various problems of differing sizes and shapes and so everything was, essentially, fucked. And for some reason someone somewhere, now known to me only as Judas, had taken me off the one flight that I had managed to get a seat on. 

But this was, he said, brightening a little, an error. I should be on that flight. I don’t remember now what the exact nature of the error was, by this point my blood pressure was in danger of shooting into orbit and so my listening skills had become somewhat strained, but there was definitely an error. And Jesus was going to try to fix it. 

He picked up the phone to somebody. He had a man in front of him who simply had to get to Winnipeg that evening. 

“Hmm, I know,” he said, as if answering to a comment from the person on the other end of the line which went something like “well I simply have to get to Barbados and stay there for the next three months, but life isn’t fair, buddy.” I debated starting to plead, or start making things up. But the other person had clearly relented. 

“Ooooh,” said Jesus. Was this good? 

“Am I on a flight?” I whispered. He shushed me. 

“Hmmm,” he said. He looked troubled again. Jesus didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to think. I just wanted to be on a flight. 

“Amazing!” he exclaimed. He read my mind, and held a finger up. Wait. “That’s great. That’s confirmed? Brilliant.” Jesus put the phone down. “You’re going to Winnipeg.” 

I could have kissed him. Of all the customer service representatives I could have met that day, I met Jesus. Jesus liked his job and he liked helping people. My blood pressure began to sink back to non-emergency levels. With the help of a few beers in the airport bar it sunk further still. 

Of course it wasn’t as simple as that. A few hours later, during another delay, I looked up at the board to see that the flight to Winnipeg had been cancelled. Another customer service representative with no obvious similarity to a deity said no, this was incorrect. The board was wrong. The flight was very delayed, though. The pilot was stuck in customs. The plane wasn’t going anywhere without the pilot. But as the time neared midnight I was in the air again, on my way to Winnipeg. I was many, many hours behind schedule, but just getting there felt like a miracle. Thank you, Jesus.

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Have a story for Ask & Give?

Want to write about a time when someone, perhaps a total stranger, had your back or when you helped out someone in need or witnessed such an exchange? Hit me up here or by DM if you’d enjoy having your work included in the collection. (Not yet published pieces may be given priority.)

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