Text and images by Elena Siemens
It’s 7:45am, we are in a queue for de-icing. I’m annoyed and anxious: Will it be okay? Will we take off? To distract myself, I take pictures from my window seat.
The de-icing trucks look like dragons spewing hot chemicals – a liquid palette of neon green, yellow, purple, pink. An abstract art composition resembling Jackson Pollock who rejected a brush in favour of dripping paint directly on his canvas.
The real gives way to the surreal. Like Alain De Botton, who found poetry in a “forsaken service station” in the UK (The Art of Travel), I discovered the poetic on the icy runway at YEG. Taking my photos also cut the delay in half. Before I knew it we were in the air.