FLYING HOME

While in Budapest, Fred and I became better acquainted with everyone on the trip. I guess you could say that all of us got better acquainted with each other. But it was on this particular flight that I got better acquainted with John B. and George B. We all sat in the first class section of our Pan-Am flight to Florida, and John B. and I talked the whole way home.

We left in the morning, and arrived around 2:00PM that same afternoon (chasing the sun). John told me about his meat-packing company, and about his family. Some of it was very touching, and so I won’t divulge such private matters in this blog. But there is one thing he spoke of that has since been reported in the news, so I’ll touch on some of it – because it is such a Forrest Gump thing.

Before this point in time, John was suffering from depression brought on by his business falling off and his family-life faltering. So he had determined that he would take a break by taking his boat (it had a crew, so it was probably more like a yacht) out in the ocean to stay for awhile and drink – just to get away from it all. So according to plan, he took off from where he lived in Florida, sailed away for awhile, then chose a spot to drop anchor and sit.

He was in the territory of the Bahamas’ when he ordered the anchor dropped. He got an alert from the crewman who dropped the anchor to come take a look. Curiously, the anchor certainly didn’t go down very far for how far out to see they were. So he had a diver go over the side to see what the anchor had hit. Wouldn’t you know it! The anchor had struck a portion of a sunken Spanish ship – possibly an old Galleon (the kind that carried gold).

Now John was completely cheered up, and had a new purpose to his life! Because he was one of the ones who had taken President Bush out on his fishing trips of late, he was politically very well connected, including with the Bahamian government. So his plan he told me, was when he got back from Poland, he would solicit the Bahamians to lease this portion of the ocean (since it was in their territory), to explore this find. He suspected it was the ship that had reportedly sunk with 9 billion dollars worth of doubloons on board – so he couldn’t exactly tell them WHY he needed the lease, but would be more general about his petition in order to get an exploration grid over the sunken ship.

Of course, many years have gone by since this flight home, and I did receive some faxes from John stating what he was up to in the context of underwater exploration. And when I went back to Poland, I did some negotiations with the Gdansk Maritime Museum curators for John on the possibilities of exploring the Baltic Sea and river that emptied into it where Nazi treasure was suspected to be sunk.

All of this was such an interesting way to pass the time on the long flight, but the very best part was getting to know John. He was just such a wonderful, friendly, intelligent man. It was a privilege to know him as a friend and watch him in the next couple of years go from the brink of his life changing forever, to living the life he had wanted all along.

Where was Fred on this flight? Fred was where he always was on every flight I ever took with him. He was off talking to the flight attendants, the general passengers, and the rest of our trade mission group. When not bothering everyone around him, he was reading the newspaper. I never traveled with Fred where we ever carried on a conversation. We didn’t really have a lot to say to each other. Fred preferred to do squats in the isle so he could be the center of attention (he never exercised a day when he was on the ground), or to read the paper. On this flight however, I hardly knew he was around, because my interest was truly engaged with the stories of sunken treasure and exploration.

I don’t remember anything about Studibert and Frank. I’m sure they were on the same flight with us because only a few months later, Studibert began to formulate a plan he was certain would utterly destroy me that had been sparked by this chat on the plane with John. It took me a long time to figure out why he would even bother with such a plan, but it would became annoyingly apparent all too soon.

In the end, the flight was too short, and as we went our separate ways, we all vowed to stay in touch, and do what we could to coordinate our efforts to benefit the people we met in Poland. And so we did for awhile.