Our Love Story Part 6

Chapter 6: Our Return to the USA

(During my quarantine, I have been sharing a series of stories about how the relationship developed between Esther, a young woman from Switzerland, and me. This is the last chapter. Here are the preceding chapters: Chapter 1: The Encounter, Chapter 2: The Courtship Chapter 3: Meeting the Family  Chapter 4: The Wedding Chapter 5: Our Year in Europe )

We got up early for our train ride to the airport in Zürich, Switzerland. The night before we had loaded our baggage at the luggage drop-off point in the railway station in Bern. From the train they would be loaded directly on to the plane that would take us to New York. For the train trip from Bern to Zürich, we weren’t encumbered with four huge suitcases. That made our sad trip to the airport through the beautiful countryside of Switzerland a bit more relaxing. We arrived in plenty of time for our flight.

After checking in, an announcement came over the PA system that our flight would be delayed for eight hours. EIGHT HOURS! This was during the air controllers’ strike in 1981 when Ronald Reagan fired all the air controllers, and airports in the USA couldn’t handle the normal amount of air traffic. After all the emotions of saying good-bye, and wanting to get on with our lives, we were stuck in Zürich for another eight hours.

Moving internationally was quite a challenge. Over the course of the year we had accumulated a number of things that we wanted to keep, including most of our wedding gifts. To this day we use tableware and some pots that we received. We found the cheapest available international moving company. They provided us with two wooden crates that measured about four feet in height, length and width. We carefully packed everything we wanted to keep into them. They picked them up and shipped them to New York, where we retrieved them later to load into a moving van on the way to Kansas.

Getting rid of our furniture didn’t cause too much consternation. The main items were the living room suite, our beds and the wardrobe. They all went back to Esther’s house. Our beds and mattresses were newer than those at her home, so they replaced the old ones with ours. Whenever we returned to Switzerland, we slept in our own bed! Our couch was located in their closed-in porch and we sat in it frequently in subsequent years enjoying the trickling of the stream running beside their house.

Since we had to give up our apartment before our departure date, we stayed at Esther’s home for the remaining nights. About a month before that we had to share with them our decision to return to the USA. We were sitting at the same table in the living/dining room as we did when we told them we were getting married. It was every bit as difficult to tell them this latest bit of news. Words in Esther’s mother’s warning letter to her during our courtship echoed in my head. “We know he will take you (Esther) away from your homeland and family.” She had been right. There was only one difference. Through our stay in Switzerland, they had gotten to know me, accepted me into the family. Esther’s siblings included me in many of their activities and seemed to enjoy my company.  In some ways that made it easier to tell them we were leaving, but in other ways it made it harder. To soften the blow, I promised them that I would bring their daughter back to her homeland as often as I could. Since I worked in education, I had my summers free. I loved Switzerland as much as she did. I held to that promise. We have returned 15 times over the years, including four full summers with the children, and for a full year after my retirement. Two of those trips were over Christmas with the children.

The home Esther grew up in.

The early morning farewell was very difficult. We gave our good-bye hugs while Esther’s mom held back tears. As we headed for the train station in Bern with Esther’s brother, I took a look back at the family. Tears were streaming down her uncle’s face and I lost it. I am tearing up even now as I write this. Esther held it together better than I. Car to the train station, train to the airport, away we went, leaving behind beautiful mountainous Switzerland for the flat lands of Kansas and new adventures in our married life.

Now we were stuck in Zürich for eight hours. We took a trolley to downtown Zürich and walked around. We invited Esther’s best friend, who was working in Zürich at the time, to lunch. We sat on park benches and watched people walking by and swimming in the Limmat River. We went window shopping without wanting to buy anything. We had a Coupe Dänemark (Swiss chocolate sundae) while looking at our watches about every 15 minutes thinking that an hour had gone by. Finally, the time came to board the plane. We still had nearly nine hours ahead of us till we arrived in New York. We started our adventure at five in the morning and didn’t get to New York until midnight the next day. We would have been underway for 25 hours and were unaware of what other adventures awaited us before we could finally retire for a night’s sleep.

Since Esther was immigrating, we had to go through a special line. The waiting room was teeming with would-be immigrants from Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I overheard some Spanish conversation among the Dominicans stating that they had been waiting over four hours and still hadn’t been processed. We were the only white faces in a sea of black ones. The immigration official with a folder containing Esther’s papers ushered us into the room an put her folder at the bottom of a pile of folders that was at least two feet high. There didn’t seem to be any action taking place. After all, it was midnight. Esther and I exchanged desperate looks. We concluded that we were in for a long haul.

After about 15 minutes, a different immigration officer entered the room and spotted us. “What are you doing here?” he asked, thinking we didn’t belong to the Haitians and Dominicans. “My wife is hoping to immigrate to the USA, I stated, probably looking both tired and anxious. “Where are her papers?” he asked gruffly. I signaled to the two-feet tall stack of folders and pointed to near the bottom. He ruffled through the stack, found our papers and signaled for us to follow him. Relieved, we did, too tired to protest our white privilege. He signed and stamped a few documents and sent on our way.

Our next stop was the normal immigration line at any international airport, that even citizens must pass through when arriving from abroad. The attending officer smiled broadly when I explained that my wife was immigrating and showed him her documents. “I am so glad to see someone coming here from Switzerland,” he stated. “I am so tired of all these g..d…d Haitians and Dominicans coming to ruin our country! I was really taken aback by his prejudice. Again, I was too tired to argue with him. Meekly we slinked away, grateful that we had gotten through that process unscathed.

We hired a cab to take us to a nearby hotel. While we were approaching the hotel, we saw a police helicopter circling around the area with a huge spotlight searching the ground. “What is going on?” we wondered. When we got to the desk of the hotel, the clerk told us that there was a murderer on the loose and they were trying find him. He said it so matter-of-factly, that I was stunned. I can’t imagine what our faces must have looked like. We hurried to our rooms on the fifth floor of a 12-story hotel. We sheepishly entered, looking behind us carefully. When we entered the room, I pulled back all the curtains to be sure the murderer wasn’t hiding in our room. I even checked the bathtub. Satisfied that he wasn’t hiding in our room, we double bolted the door to the hallway and fell into bed exhausted. It was 2:00 am. Our time without a bed had stretched to 27 hours.

“Welcome to the USA,” I said to Esther before we hit the sack. She grinned. We both considered getting on the next plane back to Switzerland, but there too much water passed under the bridge by then.

My father picked us up at the airport in New York. We went to the warehouses of the international moving company and loaded up our goods. Everything passed through customs without a hitch. Our journey back to Kansas through Pennsylvania was rather normal, considering what we had gone through in the previous two days.

We will celebrate 40 years of marriage in December 2020. We had two children, a daughter born in Harrisonburg, VA, and a son in Mexico. The initials of each is MCC. Marisa Carmen Clymer and Mattias Carl Clymer. MCC (Mennonite Central Committee) played a significant role in our lives. Without them, Esther would never have come to the States, and we spent three years serving with them in Mexico, where Mattias was born. We now have four lovely granddaughters. Life has been good. We have been privileged and blessed to experience many exciting things from Switzerland to Hesston, KS, Harrisonburg, VA and Mexico.