Living Without Fear

My comics journal about being stuck in Germany, back in 1998.

Hi friends! It’s time for another episode of The Drawing Book, the sketchnote journal I kept in the late 90s. Those were some adventurous days. Last time I looked back at The Drawing Book, I wrote about a trip to the Arctic with my dog.

The Drawing Book wasn’t just one book, though. It was a series of hardcover sketchbooks. I’d started writing in the first one, back when I was still an art student in Toronto. By the time I reached the last page of that book, I was a flight attendant in Calgary. This is what I wrote on the last page, pretty soon after my Arctic adventure:

It was time for a new book. This was it:

I started writing in the new book while I was in Mainz, about a half hour west of Frankfurt, Germany. This was the city where I stayed on my 24-hour layovers, when working on Air Canada’s flights to and from Frankfurt. By now, I was used to this routine: fly to Frankfurt, stay for a day, fly home. But in September 1998, something unusual happened. The Air Canada pilots went on strike while we were on our layover. Flights were grounded, and we couldn’t get home.

I didn’t have a cell phone or a computer to get online with. In my hotel room, I watched the news:

The view above, was the view from my hotel room. We were there for a week!!!

It’s hard for me to imagine, now, just being stranded somewhere for a week, without an internet connection, and without any consequences! If that happened to me now, who would look after my mom and my kids? Luckily, back then it was stress-free, and I could just hang out and roam the streets of Mainz.

We weren’t allowed to leave the town, in case a sudden change happened which would enable the airline to get us home. So we waited.

I even had time to sketch one of my favourite details about Mainz - the sidewalk of our hotel’s street, which featured a nicely detailed pattern in the paving stones.

Havana - it was a great club in a medieval cellar, a few blocks from our hotel. I think it’s still around, actually.

Then one day, we got the word: Air Canada was flying us home to Calgary through Manchester. We packed up and flew to England!

In Manchester, we stayed in the amazing Palace Hotel. You should look at its website (it has a different name now). Each room was different and beautiful and spacious and strange, and maybe haunted. What a surreal 24 hours in that town. Then we headed to the airport, where I drew in the drawing book while waiting to board the flight. By now, I felt like a dramatic heroine, a character in a story. We’d been waiting to get home for eight days.

“Living Without Fear” - I guess it must have been a new book that was being advertised. To me, it seemed like a message telling me to hang in there. I was almost home.

Thanks for reading!