The terminals at Zurich International Airport are long, wide, and new. Despite the ample size, it’s hard to make it from one end to the other without dodging suitcases, strollers, and the cross-currents of humanity flowing over the concourse to gates, bathrooms, and connections.
But not on this day.
Instead of crowds, the concourse was vast and empty. You could skip, dance, or run from one end to the other—your path was an open highway, except for a single huddle of people in the distance.
It was July 2021; the second wave of COVID was behind us, and we were about halfway through the worst of the pandemic. Much of the world remained shut down, including the United States, but if you didn’t have family scattered around the globe or, like most people during the pandemic, wanted nothing to do with overseas travel, you might not have noticed that beginning in March of 2020, the US instituted a travel ban. It stayed in place for 20 months, during which the US refused foreign travelers from 33 countries, including members of the European Union, where I was.
As a result, when we finally decided to venture back to the US after having been away for nearly two years, the country remained closed to all but vaccinated, COVID-negative citizens. However, an exception to the travel ban allowed non-US citizens who could prove they had minor children in the States or were married to a US citizen to enter the country, but we’ll get to the hell of that in a moment.
My family is split between France, Switzerland and the US. We are seasoned long-haul travelers; my son has more stamps in his passport than years on the planet. We have seen and flown it all: tiny puddle jumpers that circle until elephants amble off red dirt runways, emergency landings in war zones the Department of State [strongly] suggested we avoid. But we have never seen anything like this: a major international airport devoid of travelers.
From one end to the other, the airport feels staged and artificial, as if plucked from a post-apocalyptic movie set: shuttles, empty; walkways, empty; passport control, empty. It’s the end of the world, and we are what remains: the surviving plague refugees desperate to catch the last flight out. A flight you pray will take you and yours; otherwise, this is it. You are not getting home.
Totally not creepy at all.
Borders are not fluid or permeable; they are hard lines with locked doors that open and close at the will of the men and women with guns on either side. You think it’s all one big happy global village, and then a pandemic comes along. It’s a matter of weeks before all those doors slam shut, and you’re stuck on one side or the other for what, in this case, turned out to be a very long time.
Any expectation that global travel was a given—that you could go anywhere and get back home again—was in tatters. Jet travel was an indispensable part of the calculus of your life if you were going to jump continents, and a global pandemic shoots that straight to hell.
The consequences of your choice to move, not just across town, but an ocean, two continents and thousands of miles away, now stand between you and ever seeing home again. It’s not like you’re going to swim or walk.
You thought you were entitled to go home—that you could and would always be able to get home. Yet, there is no absolute right to cross a border, not even your own. The idea that you could be locked out and unable to return to your home country is quite the shocker; a worm of panic wriggles in your gut at the loss of control and the normal, enough that many people I know moved back to their home countries as soon as they could. The fear of being locked out was too much.
When we arrived at the empty terminal, my teenage son and I were on our way to San Francisco for a long-overdue visit. We’d made the hard choice to leave my French husband behind (see: travel ban), a decision I initially questioned but would soon be grateful for. At our gate, we joined the little puddle of people spilled onto the shiny, untrodden floors. This was the only flight on the entire concourse and the only flight to the US, not just that day but that week. And getting on it was not a given; are your papers in order?
The number of required travel documents and the lack of clear guidelines from the airlines or the Trump administration made it complicated—and was likely an intentional way to discourage non-citizens from entering. Three widely spaced stations were set up to pre-screen us and sort through our paperwork. It was slow and time-consuming. The gate agents were anxious; they were being asked to serve as health officers and border police, not what they signed up for. I held my breath as the gate agent checked our COVID tests,1 vaccination certificates, visas and passports.
When he handed us our boarding passes, I exhaled. I was relieved to the point of tears, but I kept it together, not wanting to add to the multiple family dramas playing out all around us.
A man stood off to the side on his cell phone. His anxious, middle school-aged daughters watched with worried faces as he tried to explain to someone on the other end of the line where to find the missing documents. I overheard that he’s desperate for the children’s US birth certificates—proof that he, a non-citizen, is their father and can enter the country with them.
“Look in the box, no, not in the hall -- in the bedroom. The box. No, THE BOX!”
If whoever was hunting for the documents didn’t find them, they wouldn’t get on that plane. One of the girls started to cry. I knew just how she felt. This was awful.
He wasn’t the only one on the phone. Half a dozen people around me were doing the exact same thing. I moved myself and my son away from the scene; plenty of other places to sit and wait for boarding to start where the air didn’t vibrate with stress. Plus, we’re the lucky ones, and I don’t want to wave my good fortune under the noses of anyone who didn’t get the golden ticket.
Take a seat. Any seat.
Years ago, my husband and I were hiking in the south of France and passed by the ruins of the plague wall, the Mur de Peste. A border erected by Louis XV in 1720 to stop an outbreak of the bubonic plague from spreading from the ports in Marseille northward. Lined with guard towers, the soldiers had orders to fire—on what, I wondered, the virus?
So, how did that wall work out? About as well as the travel ban.
More than 300 years later, entire cities in China, Italy, and Korea were cordoned off, and cruise ships isolated in ports. Imagine the poor souls marooned for 27 days off the coast of Japan when all passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess were quarantined in February 2020, at the start of the pandemic—put under travel restrictions and prevented from returning to the U.S. for another 14 days even after they had left the boat.2
A dear friend, originally from Spain but who lives in New Zealand (which had a total travel ban that included its own citizens), was unable to get back to his father in Barcelona before he died from COVID in a nursing home. My friend was trapped because if he left New Zealand, the authorities wouldn’t let him back in—back to his family and his life. So, he stayed and never saw his father again.
I wonder if, in the rush to put the hardships of the pandemic behind us, we are pretending we hold the keys to the kingdom. Can you imagine yourself on the cruise ship quarantined in Tokyo Bay, a million miles from home and with no way to return?
The hard lesson is that there is no absolute right to repatriate. Like the ruins of Louis' plague wall, my memory of these events is crumbling, but it remains an artifact of a lesson I do not want to forget.
Families reunite after the travel ban is lifted.
The logistics of getting the required 24-hour test before your flight were a logistical nightmare. For example, if you got your results back at noon on Monday, but your flight was on Tuesday at 8:00 PM, you, my friend, were bang out of luck.
A chilling account of what it was like on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. https://www.wired.com/story/diamond-princess-coronavirus-covid-19-tokyo-bay/
Such a rich and atmospheric piece of writing, Elizabeth- vividly takes the reader back to that anxious time.
OH it was definitely a nightmare over in SE Asia too. I'm an American expat who's been living overseas since 2009 and we'd seen the Swine flu and the Bird flu, other scares with temperature checks during travel, but Covid was a whole other ball game. People started forming Facebook groups like "Australians stuck in Thailand," that kind of thing. I hated the stress of trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. Several of my friends traveled back to the US and had to quarantine and buy ridiculous insurance upon returning to SE Asia.