Prologue

My train is racing through the Alps. The scenes that rush by my window are charming and incredibly beautiful, each village with its colorful steepled or onion-topped churches and neat, pleasing-to-the-eye gingerbread patterns in the houses. The snow is deep and the sky an impossible sapphire blue. 

I can’t believe thirty-five years has passed since I last traveled this route from Frankfurt to Innsbruck, Austria, surely one of most picturesque and largely unsung cities in all of Europe.  Even after all this time, it seems as though part of me is still in Innsbruck, having never left.

I hadn’t bothered to pack a suitcase in the dark hours before dawn this morning when I’d crept quietly out of my hotel after only two hours of sleep.  I didn’t intend to be gone overnight, although one never knows, and I was just too exhausted to bother packing.   All I carried was a shopping bag containing my ever-present camera and a copy of my autobiography, which had been published only several months prior.  It was to be a gift to a family which had last known me thirty-five years ago, when I was barely sixteen.  

Since then so much had happened, and I wondered what their reaction would be when I showed them the book I had written.  They were in the book as an important part of my life, yet they had no knowledge of this, nor of the fact that I was now one of the few women in the world who had made it into the left seat of a major airline as an international airline captain.  When I knew them, I hadn’t even thought about being a pilot yet.  That inspiration was to come a few years later.

It had been awhile since I had read my own book, and I reread the parts of it about them in the first hours of my journey, which would last over seven hours.  I was a little warm in spite of the bitter cold that morning.  I hadn’t realized the streetcars in Frankfurt didn’t run this early and had staggered exhaustedly the mile or so from my hotel in the dark.    

I’d first traveled this same route by train 35 years ago when I left my home in San Diego, but things were different now.  Back then, trains had a certain sound to them—a certain rhythm.  First there would be a loud CLANK CLANK as the momentum started, followed by a more subdued clunk clunk.  Then another CLANK CLANK, followed by clunk clunk.  The clanking would get faster and faster and faster and would finally disappear as the train got up to speed.  Back then, you could feel the rails.

This train was very sleek and modern.  If I hadn’t been looking out the window as we pulled out of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station) I would have had no sensation that we were moving at all.  The ride was so smooth that later, after I’d had my head down for awhile reading, when I looked out I literally could not tell whether we were moving or not in the pitch-black before the first light of dawn.  With nothing for my eyes to focus on, I was convinced we were stopped.  A few minutes later I saw some lights whiz by and realized we were traveling at full speed.  It was remarkable, especially when compared to some of the ear-shattering local trains I’d experienced in the United States. 

I was impressed by the smoothness and quietness of the ride, but I missed the noise and rhythm of the train on the rails.  My mind raced ahead now.  What would I find when I got to Innsbruck?  Was my host family dead or alive?  If they were still alive, had they moved and I wouldn’t be able to find them?  How old would they be?  I was now fifty-one.  They would have to be in their eighties.  This trip had come up so suddenly I’d had no time to try and look them up first.  This was crazy!  What was I even doing here? 

This was just like me.  My whole life seems to have been dictated by irresistible spur-of-the-moment whims and my succumbing to them.  It kept things interesting—that’s for sure.  The argument about whether I should or should not have made the effort to take this trip raged in my head all the way to Innsbruck.

When my flight had touched down in Frankfurt from Kuwait just fifteen hours or so earlier, it was the middle of the night.  I had almost exactly fifty hours on this extra long layover to either take this side-trip or forget the whole thing.  The normal layover time was around twenty-six hours, never long enough to consider a side-trip like this, but this was an exception.

I was so groggy when I finally lay down in my hotel bed at 2:00 AM this morning, I decided to not set an alarm and, on the off-chance I woke up in time just two hours later, I would get up no matter what and go catch that train.  That’s the deal I made with myself. 

The “night shift,” as I like to call it—otherwise known as my subconscious—apparently couldn’t resist the temptation, and woke me up at precisely 3:55 AM.  The voice in my head was saying, “You may never get this chance again!  Get up, already!  Don’t you even think about going back to sleep.  I’m not going to let you.  I’m going to stay right here and scream at you inside your head until you get up.  "GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!"  I got up.

At least I’d had the foresight to research train schedules ahead of time and knew there was an early train departing around 5:00 AM.  There would be two transfers involved to get me to Innsbruck.  If I missed any of them, there would be no time to catch up and I’d have no choice but to return to Frankfurt, mission unaccomplished.  A train even a few hours later would not connect to anything that would get me there before nightfall.  It was go now, or forget the whole thing.

So here I was, having flown a military charter as a captain for United the day prior all the way from Frankfurt to Kuwait and back with over ten hours of flight time and several hours on the ground waiting for the troops to arrive for the flight back, barely able to keep my eyes open, heading full-speed into my rather colorful past.

I hoped I’d find my host family still alive and in the same house, but realized I could easily be making this fourteen-hour trip in vain.  Still, as I gazed out the window, I thought how surprised they would be to see me and to read what adventures had befallen me.  It would be worth it just to see their faces again.

As my train raced on, deeper and deeper into the mountains, my mind wandered to events which happened since 1985.  That’s the year the narrative in my book stopped, the year I was hired by United Airlines, the year my dream of becoming a pilot for United was realized, the year I knew all my hard work and disappointments along the way were worth it.

It was also the worst year of my life.