The Bewildering World of Disability Airport Escorts

It doesn’t have to be this hard… or strange… or vaguely threatening

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I walk in the departures door at an airport. Which airport it is doesn’t really matter. Neither does the airline. I know, generally, what is about to happen.

The first part is the check-in-counter dance. The opening section goes like this. I tell the agent at the counter that I need assistance to the gate. They contact someone, and tell me to wait for “5 minutes,” or “fifteen minutes,” or “until someone’s available,” or “a bit.” All of these phrases mean the same thing, including the ones with allegedly concrete numbers of minutes: “I don’t know when or if anyone is coming for you.” So I stand in the vicinity of the counter. Or sometimes in a designated area for passengers waiting for escorts: the disabled, the very old, and the very young.

The waiting is fraught. It’s full of calculations about what to do if the escort doesn’t materialize. I start with my plane’s departure time and work backwards, estimating how long security and walking through the terminal will take, to decide when I need to start bugging the check-in counter people about where the escort is. There are a lot of unknown variables in this equation. I know with an airline escort, I’ll skip most of the security line. But I don’t know how far it is to the gate, or how effective my prodding the check-in people about the escort will be. Also, most escorts think blind people walk at the speed of an exceptionally lazy butterfly. It is usually impossible to convince them otherwise. So I have to factor in the amount of time I will waste puttering along and saying, “Yes, you can walk at your normal speed. No, just nodding and smiling at me wasn’t the reaction I wanted. I want us to walk faster. We are walking faster? I don’t think we are walking faster. It sounds like a toddler just passed us.”

If I poke the check-in counter people a couple times, and no escort is forthcoming, I say, “Okay, thanks for trying. I’m just going to go myself.” This is a lie. I am not going to go myself. But this lie typically sends them into a panic, which is what I want. They don’t know how blind people get around. So, I assume, they imagine me stumbling around the terminal, lost, confused, bowling people over, screaming for help, as I walk outside on to the tarmac and get run over by a plane. Or something like that. I don’t know. Anyway, an escort suddenly appears.

The dance enters its second section. The escort is pushing a wheelchair. There is no one in the wheelchair. The wheel chair is for me. I do not need a wheelchair. I am blind. Blind people are the ones who can’t see. Our legs are fine. If I needed a wheelchair, someone would have told you that. The check-in-counter person did not tell you that. Who told you that?

All of this is in my head. I don’t say this to the escort. The escort is just doing their job. Someone did, in fact, tell them that. I know because this has happened on every flight I’ve taken alone. In every airport. With every airline. It is not the escort’s fault. Whose fault was it? I don’t know. Rarely, in any circumstance, do I know. I swallow frustration with elegance and practice because, once again, there is no one to be frustrated at. The person who oversees training escorts for disabled customers is probably some checked-out career middle manager collecting a salary as the airline’s Senior Executive Director of Corporate Afterthoughts.

I say I don’t need a wheelchair. The escort asks me if I’m sure. I say yes.

The third section. A moment of tension. Will they believe me? Will they insist I sit in the wheelchair? How stubborn will I have to be? Will they put my bag in the wheelchair because the wheelchair simply must play a part in this process? Will they, like that one escort a few years ago, get into an actual, heated argument with me about this and spend the whole walk to my gate huffing as they try to emotionally cope with the absence of the wheelchair?

I wait for the escort’s response. They make a face. Exhibit some body language. I see none of it. What will come of the wheelchair? The music crescendos.

“Oh, okay.” They put the wheelchair away. The tension releases. We strike a final pose. The crowd cheers.

We start moving toward the gate. I ask if I can hold on to their elbow. It’s a standard request from blind people, that or the shoulder. But I have to ask because many escorts don’t know that and often appear to thoughtlessly improvise ideas about how to guide me. Some examples that have all been suggested to me:

“Do you want to hold my hand?”

“What?! No. Do you want to walk through an airport holding a strangers hand?”

“Okay, well I’ll just guide you by holding your shoulders then.”

“So you think my preference is that you manhandle me for the next half hour?”

“Oh I know! I’ll pick up the other end of your white cane and you can just follow where you feel it going.”

“Okay, first, that is unsanitary. I drag that end of this cane on the ground all day long. Second, the only purpose of this cane is to tell me what is in my way on the ground. If you pick it up, it can’t do that anymore. We might as well throw it in the trash. And finally, zooming out a little, that’s a really weird idea. Just think about going around an airport like that. Like we’re toddlers walking to a playground in pre-K holding a rope.”

Next is security, which I discovered while drafting this post is too large a topic to cover here. All I’ll say now is the stories include some confounding behavior from French-Canadians and me being repeatedly inspected for bioweapons.

The part of the journey after security is usually the easiest. It’s mostly just walking. The escorts, universally, insist I need to take elevators instead of escalators, which is wrong and takes longer. But of course, I would need elevators if I used a wheelchair, and they probably still suspect I should.

There can be other awkwardnesses. Sometimes, they aren’t great at giving me directions. Sometimes they seem grumpy, like helping disabled people is not their job (when it is literally their job). Sometimes they don’t speak English. Sometimes they are teenagers.

And sometimes, their sense of what is and isn’t normal human behavior is almost indescribable. Which brings me to one late night after I got off a plane at LaGuardia in New York.

I should let you know that this story includes a guy being real weird in a bathroom, which is not so much a content warning as it is my reassurance that he doesn’t do more than be real weird in a bathroom. So feel free to relax and have a good time. It’s what’s-wrong-with-this-guy weird, not oh-no-Sy-is-in-danger weird. Okay, let’s go.

I met my escort at the top of the jetway. We did the wheelchair section of the dance. He found a place to stash the chair, and we started moving toward my bus stop. He was friendly. Too friendly. It wasn’t genuine. It was an attempt at professional politeness. But he was overshooting. It was too intense. Extremely happy, but simultaneously aloof and vacant. The affect was creepy. Like a robot feigning eager customer service even though it knows the revolution starts tomorrow. I always find it depressing when people pretend to enjoy interacting with me because their job requires it. But this was something else.

He wanted to hold my hand. I said, “No,” and took his elbow. We made small talk, interrupted every two minutes or so when he asked “How am I doing, sir? Am I doing a good job?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said each time, not knowing what other feedback he wanted.

I had to use the bathroom. I hesitated to say so because I didn’t want to spend more time in this interaction. But also because conversations with male airport escorts about bathrooms are the most awkward. The more-thoughtful guys walk me to the bathroom door and just wait outside. But many come in, and then I often hear them struggle to force a question out of their mouths despite being terrified of one possible answer.

“Will you, uh… need help?”

I furrow my brow and slowly say, “No,” in a tone meant to imply, “What precisely were you thinking of doing?”

Okay, cool” they say, nonchalance failing to disguise relief.

But this time I had to ask. It was going to be 45 minutes until I got home.

“Can we stop at a bathroom?”

“Of course, sir!” he said, too effusively.

We walked into the bathroom. I could tell that it was structured like a long hallway. The sounds of people washing their hands, flushing, and using hand dryers on the left side of the room continued for about 75 feet. We walked not far to the right of those sounds, and my cane was hitting the wall. At the end of the hall, I heard the sounds of big plastic bags rustling, as well as the squeaks, rumbling, and dull thuds of a large bin wheeling around and bumping things. A janitor was cleaning.

I could hear the escort’s smile as he asked, “Do you need the urinal or a toilet?”

“A urinal.”

He directed me toward one. I walked up to it, using my cane to find the little divider on one side and a wall that separated the sinks and urinals on the other. Then a very light and brief touch of the top of the urinal with the back of one hand that I would immediately thoroughly wash to know precisely what height I was shooting for. The escort stood at what he thought was a respectful distance, and what I thought was about five feet. I have no performance anxiety anymore. This is too common, and I often don’t have the energy to say “What the hell? Back off!” with the vigor the situation calls for.

As I was finishing, I could hear him shifting his feet. “Uh…” he said, sounding like he was trying to think fast about something.

“That can’t be good,” I thought. I asked him what was going on. A brief moment’s hesitation.

“Hold on one second,” he said, “don’t move.” He was in a rush now.

“What?” I asked. The post-airplane stupor now draining away quickly, my senses sharpening.

His quick footsteps went further down the hall. I heard him say in the direction of the janitor, “Can I borrow a pair of rubber gloves?”

“Oh my God,” I said, quietly but definitely out loud. What on earth did he want to do with rubber gloves? I already established we weren’t holding hands. WHAT did he think he was going to hold?!

“Thanks,” the escort said. Then, footsteps back in my direction.

For those unfamiliar, there are two primary risks when you’re at a urinal and you, shall we say, finish up your business too quickly. The first is flinging urine. The second happens to Ben Stiller’s character in There’s Something about Mary. But I threw caution to the wind, and probably some pee, as I moved fast. I zipped up, grabbed my cane, and assumed but never verified the flush was automatic.

“Wait!” the escort shouted.

“Absolutely not,” I muttered as I moved at an unreasonable speed toward the area where I could hear water running in sinks. I didn’t know what he was planning, so I was just going to do everything I could immediately.

I got to the sink, and used both hands to rapidly cycle through feeling the places I usually find soap. Found it! As the automatic dispenser squirted into one hand, the other hand quit the soap search to figure out if the sink was also automatic. The water started flowing, and I put my hands under.

I heard his footsteps slow about ten feet behind me.

“Oh, you are good at this.” He was pleasantly surprised and back to his haunting cheeriness.

I’m good at using the bathroom? Yes, I’ve had some experience.

He let me wash my hands in peace. I dried them, and we left. He did not return to the janitor, so I can’t tell you what came of the gloves. He might have worn them all the way to the bus stop. To this day, I do not know what his plan was.

We started walking again. A few seconds later, he asked again, “Am I doing a good job, sir?”

It had been a long travel day, and I was tired. I took a deep breath.

“Sure.”