Flight of fancy

If Colleen Wade hadn‘t been in the ‘wrong seat’ on a plane flight, she might never have met the love of her life. By Gillian Tucker.

Put it down to travel nerves, airline rules or a simple twist of fate, but none of this would have happened if Colleen Wade had only remembered to book her usual window seat. As it happened, she had forgotten. And that was why she found herself in a cramped middle seat in the centre aisle of the plane. With 30 hours of travel ahead and a week’s worth of work to catch up, she asked politely if they would move her. After all, this was business class and she was a Gold Card holder. But the answer had been a firm nein. Passengers were not allowed to change seats. She tried pleading. Just this once, couldn’t they bend the rules? This time the flight attendant’s nein was steely. Colleen had little choice but to hunker down and focus on the mountain of emails waiting for her on her laptop.

Lost in work, she was barely aware of other passengers, except to note a young man busy stowing his briefcase in the overhead locker near her. Then he took the seat alongside her. Colleen had a sudden brainwave. Perhaps he could intercede for her with the crew. Turning to him she asked: “Do you speak German?” The young man looked at her. His eyes were very blue. “No,” he said, with a surprised expression. Colleen told him she wanted to change seats but the flight crew refused to speak English to her. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she realised her gaffe. She hadn’t meant to imply he was the reason, but that’s how it sounded. Pink with embarrassment, she quickly retreated behind her earphones. 

To make matters worse, she hadn’t really wanted to do this trip in the first place. Yet she had to show her new company what she was made of. “I’d only been working in the US for a couple of weeks when I was asked to go to Lagos in Nigeria to help launch a wireless network for a client,” she explains. Colleen had come to the United States after making her name in Australia working for Optus Communications in Sydney. There, she’d been headhunted for a job in California because of her expertise in wireless technology. But the new position in San Diego had come with risks as well as rewards, and one of them was the demand to build up new markets in ‘exotic’ locales such as Africa.

The project she was about to embark on was short-term, yet Colleen had felt uneasy about it from the start. Even the Australian Government advised registering with its embassy there before setting foot in Nigeria. Then there had been the endless paper chase for a visa and vaccinations, as well as the very real threat of contracting malaria while she was in the country. Before she left San Diego, she’d telephoned her mother in Australia to ease her anxiety. “Big companies would never send you to places that were dangerous – would they?” her mother had asked. The question had echoed in her mind. “I was a fool to think companies really cared about the safety of their personnel,” she says, and that morning, waiting for her boarding call in the lounge at Los Angeles International Airport, she had thought briefly about returning to San Diego, packing her bags and going home to Sydney where she’d be safe. At that very moment she heard her flight called and that was when she found she’d drawn the dreaded middle seat. In the rush of putting together her travel plans, she had forgotten to pre-book her usual window seat.

“When you graduate to the dubious distinction of ‘frequent flyer’,” she explains, “seat assignment becomes as important as the air you breathe.” The middle seat is the ‘Go to Jail’ card. “There’s too little room to work in, no individual armrests and if you need access to carry-on luggage, you have to stash it under your feet.” Not to mention the undignified scramble if you need to stretch your legs. Colleen had been up since four that morning, taken a breakfast meeting with her new boss, caught the shuttle from San Diego and then waited two hours to board her flight to Frankfurt. From there, she could look forward to a six-hour flight to Lagos. It was only nine in the morning and already she was exhausted. 

Just then she felt a tap on her shoulder. The young man next to her was handing her a glass of champagne. “I think you need this,” he said.  Colleen heard herself sigh with relief. Perhaps this would take the edge off her tension. The man asked in a soft accent if she was travelling to Frankfurt on business. Colleen heard herself break a sacred rule: avoid talking to fellow passengers. “It gets in the way of work,” she explains. But something in the man’s voice prompted her to reply. No, she told him, Frankfurt was a stopover. Then she was going on to Lagos for business. He also travelled regularly on business, he told her, and was intrigued she was going to Africa. He added that he had just settled in Los Angeles from Sweden and was still finding his way around. Colleen laughed at the coincidence and couldn’t help smiling when he talked about the country’s “jie-jantic freeway system”. “That’s when I turned to look at him for the first time,” she says, and again she was struck by the blue of his eyes. “And I loved the cologne he was wearing,” she remembers. Before she could stop herself, she found herself sharing anecdotes about coming to live in the US and from then on the two could not stop talking. They laughed together about culture differences and found a hundred small things to agree on. “We talked for 12 straight hours,” says Colleen. But as much as she enjoyed the time, she was careful to keep her emotions in check. The man who had introduced himself as Klas Bäck wore a ring on his wedding finger and Colleen knew that meant he was out of bounds.

In Frankfurt, the two exchanged business cards and Klas made her promise to let him know how her project went. Then he walked away to the conference he was attending at a castle in Germany while Colleen counted her Power Bars and wondered whether they would see her through her African adventure.

Just as she feared, Lagos was a city of extremes. “I saw wealth beyond my wildest imagination,” she recalls “and 20 metres away people sleeping next to latrines.” She spent a month in the city, much of the time trapped in the dark of her hotel room because the generator had broken down. Lying on her hotel bed, she says, “I couldn’t help thinking about what I’d seen during the day – young men pulling apart cell towers for the metal and electronic components and guns pointed in my direction by militia men.” To soften these images, she turned to the memory of meeting Klas. She couldn’t forget his soft Swedish accent or the blue of his eyes. The 12 hours they had spent together seemed a lifetime away. In Lagos, the people she worked with were, for the most part, well educated and often spoke two or three languages. But the chaos on the roads, illicit business conducted in the open, the stifling heat and ever-present fear of falling ill from the food she ate, all took their toll on Colleen. She decided to bring forward her departure date. “I was prepared to leave without my luggage just to get home again,” she says. To cap the nightmare, she found someone had transacted $40,000 worth of fraud on her Diner’s Club card while she was in the country.

Even so, the first thing she did when she reached home was check her email. To her surprise, there was a message from ‘the guy she had met on the plane’. She was happy to hear from him, but because he was married she kept her reply light, briefly filling him in on her adventures in Nigeria. 

The next day he sent another email and several more over the following weeks. Then, five months after they had first met, Klas invited Colleen to visit him in Los Angeles for the Easter break. “I was confused and too shy to ask about ‘Mrs Swede’,” says Colleen, “but anything was better than spending time on my own at Easter away from my family.” With some anxiety, she made the decision to go. When she told her sister in Australia about the invitation, she was advised to hide a spare key in her car to make a getaway “in case he was a madman”. To this day, Colleen remembers the spot on the freeway where she almost turned back to San Diego. But something drew her on and she met Klas in Los Angeles for lunch. The first thing she noticed was that he still wore his ring. Plucking up her courage, Colleen asked him about his wife. He laughed and told her the ring signified his graduation from university. “In Sweden, most graduates wear their rings on that finger,” he explained. For the first time, Colleen allowed herself to realise she had fallen a tiny bit in love with him.

She was light-headed when she returned to San Diego and thrilled when Klas invited her the following week to visit Joshua Tree National Park with him. She jumped at the chance, but had to leave early to pack for a week in London. On the morning she was to fly out, Klas called to suggest they meet in London on Wednesday. Colleen was unable to find the time and Klas suggested instead that she make a side trip to Stockholm for the weekend. “In a matter of minutes, I had a ticket on the last flight out that Friday afternoon,” she recalls. 

“Nothing romantic had taken place at this point,” she confides. And when she arrived in Sweden to be greeted not only by Klas, but also by one of his male companions, she thought, ‘Oh, he just wants to be friends’. That assumption was swiftly knocked on the head when Klas dropped off his friend in the city – he’d just happened to bump into him at the airport. Then he took Colleen to a spa where he’d arranged a massage for her while he was at work. “That evening over dinner,” Colleen recalls, “all we did was gaze into each other’s eyes. That was the weekend we sealed our relationship.” The couple has since returned many times to the same restaurant to reminisce about that evening. 

In 2001, almost three years to the day after meeting in the ‘wrong’ seat, Colleen and Klas were married in California.

“I knew during our first weekend in Stockholm that this was the woman I was going to marry,” says Klas. “We had been on the same wavelength from the word go, and I knew how happy I would be to grow old with her.” He goes on to say: “I had the great fortune to corner her in the middle seat without escape for 12 hours. You can really get to know a lot about someone in that time.” Today the couple lives in Hermosa Beach, California, with their two “Swozzies”, Oscar, four, and Oliver, two. The boys attend a Swedish pre-school but are also regular travellers to Australia – enough to know not all birds are kookaburras and not all dogs, dingoes. For those who are as fiercely organised as Colleen, there might be a moral tucked away in her tale. Firstly, never argue with flight attendants. Secondly, it’s okay not to be super efficient at all times, because who knows what a simple twist of fate has in store for you?

 

Photography: Nick Hudson. Hair & make-up: Amy Grabow.