Chapter III — Ground Operations
Every fictional universe, no matter how improbable, eventually collides with a piece of reality sturdy enough to support it.
Ours arrived folded inside a Garuda Indonesia leaflet.
Among the illustrations intended for little passengers and their parents appeared an orangutan wearing the uniform of the airline’s ground operations. He was surrounded by baggage carts, service vehicles and aircraft rather than seated in a cockpit or waving politely from the cabin door. It was a small drawing, almost certainly forgotten by everyone involved in its design shortly after it entered production. Had it accompanied another child on another flight, it might have ended its life in a waste-paper basket before reaching the hotel.
Instead, I met Mr. Gutang, a ground force specialist (not the guy who mishandled your luggage). Because I still have no clear explanation why my father has been always so proud of him, overreacting to his merits and sometimes inventing tittles and qualifications that he just doen’t have.
He loaded baggage, operated machinery, knew every service road behind the terminal and possessed that particular mixture of efficiency and irreverence found only among people whose work begins long before passengers arrive and ends long after they have gone home.
Pilots receive applause, cabin crew receive smiles, but an airport would survive neither weather nor holiday traffic without the anonymous army that keeps luggage, fuel, catering and aircraft moving in quiet coordination. Mr. Gutang always considered himself fortunate to belong to that army.
His career, admittedly, had not begun there.
He was born in Borneo, where orangutans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years in forests whose scale is difficult to imagine until one has stood beneath them.
The very name orang utan, borrowed from Malay and Indonesian, translates as “person of the forest”
A description whose elegance is matched only by its sadness now that so much of that forest has disappeared beneath logging roads, mines and plantations. Mr. Gutang rarely discusses the village where he was born. It no longer exists, and memory, though generous in many respects, cannot rebuild landscapes that greed has erased. to tell you the truth something terrible happened to that baby orangutang and his family. Not even him have a clear memory of what happened.
Indonesia was his new destination, he was raised by some late relatives and later his hard work gained him a position inside the ground force department of Garuda.
Ground operations proved an honest profession for an orangutan accustomed to lifting things heavier than himself, and it was there that he acquired a reputation for solving logistical problems that others preferred to avoid. Supervisors noticed, promotions followed, Portuguese appeared in his vocabulary under circumstances that nobody has yet satisfactorily explained, and before long he had become exactly the sort of colleague every airport hopes to have nearby when a thunderstorm, a delayed aircraft and three hundred impatient passengers decide to arrive simultaneously.
The rest, as is often said with suspicious optimism, belongs to another story.
Do not ,miss the four chapter of the series.