1989: Trapped in Europe (998 words)

A Houston teenager goes solo

A crack in the Iron Curtain: dismantling the fence at the Hungarian border on May 1, 1989. © Eric Bouvet/Gamma-Rapho/Getty

I was 16 years old, on my first trip in Europe, and I was all alone in the airport in Vienna, Austria. And I couldn’t get home. When I showed my ticket—a paper ticket—to the agent for Tarom Romanian airlines, he shrugged his shoulders and told me that they had no record of me on the flight to JFK the next day. I stood there, sweating—the airport wasn’t air conditioned—and the reality of my situation sank in. This was 1989, before cell phones and certainly before credit cards for teenagers. The only money I had was just enough in American Express traveler’s checks to pay for one night at the airport Novotel, which was their version of like a Super 8 Motel. Which had been the plan for me to get home.

Being alone at 16 in Europe may sound kind of glamorous, but the reality is that I had gone there with my high school choir from Houston. We were on a singing trip to Austria and Hungary, which means that, when we weren’t earnestly singing a capella folk songs and Liebeslieder waltzes to small groups of elderly people, we were blanketed with chaperones—not that a bunch of choir dorks like us were going to get into trouble anyway. It was the opposite of glamor.

But—it was Europe! And thrilling for me coming from Houston, where a building from 1970 is considered old. I was a girl who still lived in a secret world of castles and princes, although by the age of 16 I would have scoffed at the notion and cranked up the Violent Femmes. But there I was in Austria, seeing actual castles and ancient old walls and history, so much beautiful old history.

Of course, when our tour bus crossed the border into Hungary, we saw walls topped with barbed wire and empty watch towers. These were not the romantic Medieval castles of my imagination. But this was 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, the year the USSR started to collapse back into Mother Russia. In fact, the Soviets had agreed that April, just a few months prior, to withdraw their forces from Hungary. So those watch towers along the Hungarian border had only been recently abandoned. It looked dreary and dangerous, exactly what we in the West imagined the Soviet Union looked like, from movies like White Nights and Moscow on the Hudson.

Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights (1985)

I am sure that our teachers and chaperones had tried to explain all of this unfolding history to us at the time, how momentous it was that we were visiting a fresh-from-the-Soviet-bloc country, but I don’t remember it making a dent on me. I was pretty oblivious, although I do remember being surprised to see a used paperback copy of 1984 for sale in Budapest.

Our group had travelled on the cheap, which is how we came to fly Tarom, the national airline of Romania. We may have been choir dorks, but we were a bunch of American kids, which meant that we were sophisticated, and spoiled, compared to your average Eastern European in the late 80s. Tarom still exists and is no doubt a lovely airline, but in summer of 1989, I just remember thinking on the flight over how kind of crappy and cheap everything seemed, like the plastic cups were all flimsy and rough around the edges, and there were older women with babushka head scarves on the flight carrying live animals, which did not look like service pets. They looked like dinner. These may have been uncharitable thoughts, but I was a sheltered urban American kid who had never had to live under a Communist dictatorship. I didn’t understand that Romania was about to get out from under the thumb of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and that they were probably lucky to have a national airline at all.

Anyway, at the end of our singing tour I had left the group to meet up with my grandparents, who were visiting the beaches in Normandy—1989 was also the 45th anniversary of D-Day. So I had left the choir and flown to France to meet my grandparents, but to return home I had to fly back to Vienna alone and spend the night at the cheap airport hotel to catch my Tarom flight the next morning. Which, looking back on it, is kind of cool and amazing that my parents let me do that when I was only 16—I must have appeared to have my shit together, which I absolutely did not feel like I did standing there sweating, alone in the Vienna airport, being told I could not get on the flight to JFK the next day.

These were also the waning days of suitcases without wheels, the kind of clumsy box you had to carry with a handle, and this being my first trip to Europe, I had packed a monster. I remember struggling with this giant, heavy rectangle, sweating my way over to a bank of pay phones to call my stepfather in tears, bawling that I was trapped in Europe. Somehow, he calmed me down and bucked me up and got me to march right back to that agent at the Tarom desk and insist that yes, I was on that flight to JFK the next day, I had a ticket, goddamnit, and a passport, both of which I had somehow miraculously not lost during the whole trip.

So I made it on the flight. And when I arrived at JFK the next day, still far from home but at least back in the New World, the customs agent made a point to check the entire contents of my overstuffed suitcase, to the extent of literally squeezing out my toothpaste and sniffing in my shampoo bottle, because there was no way a 16-year-old traveling alone from Europe was not laden with contraband. Which I wasn’t. I tried to tell him: I was a choir dork.