At Large in Ballard by Peggy Sturdivant

I made my way to the back of the 747 flight from Amsterdam to Seattle, last seat on the aisle, nearly in the galley, hoping no one would claim the single seat to my left. On the outbound flight I had become caregiver to a Ukrainian grandmother, walking her to the toilet, opening the packets of her meal - everything except praying aloud with her during take-off. It is exhausting to be so foolish as to travel to Switzerland and back for just three full days: the time zones hold nine hours hostage and the flight time exceeds 24 hours. I needed to rest.

Then he arrived, a tall blonde young man, so clean-cut as to appear too young to shave. He looked 17-18 at most, with pink cheeks and teeth as white as in a magazine ad; my traveling companion for the next 11 hours who I would come to think of as my not so little Dutch boy.

When I left Ballard by way of Caf/ Besalu I thought that I was leaving my maternal side at home, despite carrying generous amounts of guilt about traveling without my daughter. I'd been offered a windfall of a trip on my partner's frequent flyer miles, one that would catapult me from Ballard's Thursday into Zurich's Friday, and deposit me back in Ballard just 126 hours later. It's still new to me to travel without first an infant seat, then a bored child and now a shy teenager who relies on me to place myself between her and any stranger. Leaving my daughter in the watchful eyes of various neighbors I anticipated only that I would be in a constant motion of planes, trains and Alpine gondola's, that I would need a German phrasebook and walking shoes, not that I would need to take along so many of my mothering instincts.

I thought the young man would distance himself from me with headphones and in-flight entertainment but Richard was not an American teenager or blas/ world traveler - he was a young man from Holland on his way to America for the first time. Long before a flight attendant mistook us for mother and son I had taken him under my wing from the first time that he looked to me to explain rapidly spoken English.

Eleven hours is a long time to maintain so much enthusiasm for a destination but over the course of the journey across the Arctic Circle his excitement started to become catching as I launched into a crash course on American and Pacific Northwest culture. He tracked the entire flight visually, his shade open to the despair of neighboring movie-watchers. Even the clouds were spectacular for him. He was childlike in his enjoyment of a hot meal served at an odd hour and being able to watch movies while "on the job." He tried to pay for the complementary beverage and looked affronted when I told him he could purchase beer or wine - as if he would do such a thing. He told me about his job installing navigational systems on ships, how he would be in Seattle for six days and might have one day to explore. He asked me for the time nearly every hour, recounting for me what he would be doing in Holland and how he would be in bed asleep when it was 11 p.m. back at home.

I drew him a map of Seattle and tried to explain why the seats were bigger in First Class. We worked our way through the paperwork required for Homeland Security. He looked betrayed when I posed their questions: are you a habitual drug user, do you have a communicable disease, have you ever engaged in terrorist activities? When I stretched my legs I brought him water because it was so much harder for him to disentangle his long legs. When the flight attendants' questions confused him, I translated. I wondered if he knew how handsome he was and that across many continents his bone structure, sweet face and Dutch accent would make hearts flutter even as he came to look more like a sleepy teenager, watching cartoons on the small video monitor.

Sitting next to the young man from Holland I thought about being American. Most of the time I'm distracted by local problems, overlooking their universality. Urban sprawl and urban density, growing food and fuel costs, public school deficits, local elections, condo conversions, climate change in just the Northwest not to mention the Alps, the single family demolition on one block, rows of townhouses on the next, more traffic, less parking, the long line of people on Northwest 24th waiting for the Ballard Food Bank to open. How to prepare Richard for America when I struggle to understand just one neighborhood within just one city?

Ballard is in the flight path of so many airlines during their descent. I hoped we would fly over Ballard so that I could show my seatmate where I lived, having put the Locks and Aurora Bridge on my hand drawn map. I wanted to show him the sailboats along Shilshole and green roof on the Ballard library, the park at the end of the street and the backyard gardens so that he could see my piece of America. What is he expecting of this country that so dominates popular culture? But our path took us over Lake Washington instead, over Renton and then Boeing parking lots. Richard took digital after digital of the grid of buildings and hint of Cascades. "America," he crowed, "America."

We parted ways by an escalator, where he would need to go to left for visitors, and I to the right. We shook hands. His cheeks were flushed as though feverish from the long hot flight and being up past his healthy Holland bedtime.

"All the people in the world," he said, "and I was so lucky as to sit next to you." I could only smile and tell myself that it was time to stop trying to protect him. It had been so easy to be kind to him, to have him rekindle my enthusiasm for home at 36,000 feet - far above the daily realities of the homeless beneath the Ballard Bridge and the incivilities of life. For eleven hours I had placed myself between this man-child and strangers just as with my own child but it was time to let him leave the nest and discover America for himself.

Peggy's e-mail is atlargeinballard@yahoo.com. She writes additional pieces for the Seattle PI's Ballard webtown at http:/blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ballard