The Intersection of Heritage, Career, and Humanity

24 June 2025: Tuesday – Indianapolis, Indiana

Now I sit at the airport, sipping coffee and unwinding. Anxiety had been welling up in me all morning. For days it has been building, actually. Anxiety produced from the confluence of the 900-mile physical R4P challenge—pedaling from Prince George, B.C. to Juneau, AK; the challenge of running the nonprofit with a handful of volunteers and myself; the promotion of R4P; fundraising; tracking expenses; logistics from airline tickets, hotel room bookings, peace blogging; incomplete tasks and unsaid wishes; lack of preparation, exercise, workouts, forgotten steps or purchases—all flowing together to create my first Ride for Peace (R4P). The culmination of my heritage and my being; my education, experience, and career; my humanity, compassion, and peace. And let’s not forget a measure of correcting my mistakes and blunders, ignorance, and immaturity.

Here I am. Happy and content. Hours before takeoff. I had my wife and kids drop me off hours before the flight was scheduled to take off, only to learn that it was delayed 50 minutes. The Delta clerk was very professional and kind. It helped that I was the only customer. He patiently searched for evidence that I had paid for a second bag.

Being the numbskull that I am, I couldn’t remember if I had paid with a credit card.

“How can I find it?” I asked, looking through the app on my phone.

“I just did this,” he said, searching the app on his own phone. “Here…” he walked me through the process.

“Yes, there it is,” he said. “You paid with miles?”

“Yes.” Now I remembered.

When I told him about R4P, he said, “We need a little more of that.”

After checking both bags, he carried my bike box to oversized luggage.

Well, my coffee was cold. Time to dump the cup in the trash and proceed to security. I am beginning to relax and will be even more so when I reach the gate.

Transition to Tolerance

Prince George, BC

As I wind my way through the short, lazy security line, I notice a tiny mom pulling her four-year-old daughter on a riding suitcase. They arrive at the back of the line seconds before me. I can’t lend her a lot of attention because there are apps that I have not checked on my phone for minutes.

We had not been there for more than a minute when the little girl said, “This is taking forever.”

The woman in front of me and I burst into laughter.

“I love it,” the woman said.

“We just got here from Florida,” the mom offered. “I thought this would make her happy.”

“Well, it is,” the little girl said.

“Oh, it is not taking long. We just got here. You be quiet or I am going to make you walk.”

A few minutes later, we arrived at the security checkpoint, and the mom realized she had the rental car keys in her hand.

“Do I have to take these rental keys back to them?” she asked the security officer, who looked puzzled before shrugging.

The mom left the short, lazy line and dragged her daughter away to return the keys.

Hope she has hours before her flight like me.

I bought some wired earphones for my iPhone at an iStore. I have the worst luck with EarPods. I lost one EarPod on a short ferry ride across the Øresund Strait last summer. Since then, I had to chuck two more pairs because one of each pair stopped charging.

I had waited and waited to invest in another pair until today. Everyone knows that you get the best prices when you buy at the airport. I will need them for the ride to listen to a little music or give an interview or talk to Olive, my AI assistant.

At my gate, an Arab man sat talking in Arabic openly on his phone with his own EarPods inserted. He spoke for 20 or 30 minutes. I left and came back once, and he was still talking. He spoke a local dialect that I couldn’t understand. Heck, I doubt I could have understood him even if he had spoken a slow, articulate Modern Standard Arabic. But what struck me was the tolerance of his neighbors. No one raised an eyebrow. No muffled comments. Maybe we were evolving into a slightly more tolerant society.

“Can Craig Davis come to the counter, please? Paging Craig Davis,” said the Delta official not 15 feet from me. I waved, grabbed my iPad, iPhone, and backpack.

“Can I see your passport?” she asked.

“Sure.” I handed it to her.

A minute later, she returned it. “All set. Thank you so much.”

OK, OK, what’s going on? I don’t remember airline officials being so kind since the ’80s. But it wasn’t just them. It was everyone. The lady at the coffee shop. The lady at the iStore. People at security. Maybe they were just having an off day.

As we nudged closer to boarding time, I went to buy Cheez-It crackers, and when I returned, the Arab man was gone, replaced with a Black maintenance man. I offered him some Cheez-Its, which he naturally took and thanked me. I can be really generous with snacks when I want to be.

Three women flight attendants arrived at the gate, minutes before the plane arrived. The Asian and the Hispanic women sat beside me and continued their non-stop conversation. “She just ripped it out of my hand…” the Hispanic flight attendant said.

A transgender flight attendant stood at the counter and spoke to a man in some type of uniform for about five minutes. She had long blond hair, wore high heels, and was bubbly. I recall she’d come half an hour earlier and chatted with the two friendly Delta clerks.

I have to admit that I don’t hate her or what she represents or what I think she represents. Transgender people do not threaten me or my family in any way. In fact, this woman was polite and professional like all the Delta staff I met today in Indy. Aren’t we really supposed to love our brothers like ourselves?

I realized that all of these people I had met today—from the salesman at the Honda store who gave me directions to the parts department, to the parts clerk who ordered a piece for our 11-year-old van, to the Delta officials, and coffee shop woman, and retail clerks, and security and maintenance people—were exceptionally friendly, as if they really enjoyed working with people and their jobs. Am I imagining it?

The passengers from Minneapolis deplaned, and the maintenance people boarded, and the flight attendants boarded, and then Section 6 got called, and I boarded.

There was the transgender woman with the deep voice working in first class. At what point do I learn the right social coding and become fluent in, and sensitive to, the subcultures and transcontinental segments of our society? Of Indigenous populations and other minorities, so that I can live in the same space and not offend?

I remember many years ago, I was director of the Civil Society Division of IREX, a nonprofit on K Street in Washington, DC. My deputy told me that she knew I was from another generation, so she was giving me a pass, but I needed to be more sensitive to gender—that every time I went to the weekly staff meeting, I would give the agenda to a woman to make copies of: tantamount to asking them to make coffee for everyone, I guess. I was not defensive. It was not entirely true. In the past month, I had asked one man to make copies, and the other three were women.

But I felt old. Out of touch with my own culture. From that point forward, I never asked anyone to make copies for me.

When our plane touched down in Minneapolis, I stood up and got my tiny backpack out of the overhead bin and stood there like a fool for ten minutes before I could move. As I disembarked, I noticed an inordinate number of Somalis: cabin cleaners, ground crew, airport officials, retail workers, travelers. I had forgotten that Minnesota is home to a large Somali diaspora.

The Somalis I worked with in East Africa were special people—intelligent, hardworking, honest, protective. They helped and protected me and my family.

I rushed to the next gate, which was only an eight-minute walk, which I proudly made in seven. They were boarding Group 6, and I stepped up.

“Password,” the Delta official said.

“Password?”

“Passport,” she said.

I stepped aside, dug it out of my backpack, and got back in line.

“Thanks, Craig!” she said. Another friendly woman.

Once in the air, I offered Cheez-Its to the elderly lady in the window seat. She politely refused.

About 3.5 hours later, we landed in Vancouver. I was groggy and mildly disoriented. The anxiety had diminished and bled into drowsiness, which allowed me to misread a pair of signs and end up on a moving walkway meant for all non-U.S. citizens. My options were to walk forward and risk being whisked into the wrong immigration line, walk the walk of shame on the moving walkway the wrong way, or jump over the wall onto the U.S. citizen pathway.

Guess which one I chose?

To the delight of an American woman and her four kids, this 65-year-old sleep-deprived cyclist jumped over the moving rail onto a stationary stainless-steel barrier, which made for an awkward landing.

“Some people didn’t read,” the American woman said, enjoying my embarrassment.

“I didn’t read,” I admitted.

The immigration process was largely automated and pleasant. I asked permission to photograph my departure from Immigration, and the official said, “Sure. It’s just the airport.”

I rushed to my gate, got some coffee and chocolate for my supper, and found a charging station with four chairs. An older, gray-haired woman sat reading her tablet on one side with her bag in the other chair, and a younger Asian woman sat across from her with her bag in the fourth chair.

“Can I sit here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she quickly tidied the chair and her side of the table. The gray-haired woman’s phone was charging on my side of the table.

My U.S. phone plan didn’t work here, so I downloaded an eSIM, which took me some doing. I couldn’t get it to work at first, but finally I did.

I offered the Asian Canadian some chocolate, but she declined with a big smile.

The flight from Vancouver to Prince George is 400 miles almost directly north. The plane was all but vacant. No more than 20 passengers, including a woman with two children who moved from the front to the last row of seats. We all tried to snatch some sleep on the 1 hour 5 minute flight. Two Indigenous flight attendants attended us with warmth and diligence, carrying snacks in their arms to distribute and later passing with water the same way.

We landed about midnight, PG time. As we deplaned, I saw my bike on a trolley. About 12 bags arrived. I grabbed mine and went to the taxi stand. One Punjabi taxi driver tried without success to get my big bike box into his back seat. A second Punjabi driver arrived, and we gently secured Lucy in his hatchback and back seat. The young man was 25 years old, energetic, and enthusiastic about life. We spoke in Hindi until I had exhausted my rusty fluency, then we switched to English.

He was a Sikh, too young to remember the horrors of the Khalistan separatist movement of the 1980s. My family and I traveled through the Indian state of Punjab at the time to get from Srinagar to Pakistan.

About a month before our trip, Sikh separatists stopped a bus, divided the Hindus from the Sikhs and Muslims, and shot and killed all of the Hindus. My son was less than a year old when we flew from Srinagar to the Amritsar airport. The Indian military hassled us but let us go because we were in compliance with the law. We hired rickshaws to take us to the border, rented a guest house, and waited two days for the border to open. During this time, Indian intelligence hassled me, but a Hindu food shop owner told him to leave us be, and he did.

“They don’t teach about that [history] in school,” he said. I wondered what the next generation of American historians would teach our children in public school? Would the victors really write the history? Rewrite it? I have no reason not to think so.

Traditional Sikhs don’t cut their hair or beards, but this young man had adopted some of Canadian culture. He’d been in Canada since 2019 and planned to stay three or four more years before returning to his native country to help his aging parents.

When I asked him how Canadians treated him, he said, “Very well.” It was a country that was accommodating. Where honesty and transparency were valued. Women are respected. Sadly, he admitted, India was not. “Women are abused… raped…” No one stops it. In India, nepotism and corruption rule supreme, where the ultra-wealthy abuse the poor.

I told him about the R4P and our mission. He shut off the meter a couple miles from the hotel.

“I will give you a discount,” he said. “You are doing something good for people.”

Another young Punjabi man opened the Super 8 door for me as I carried Lucy-in-a-box to the counter. I went back for my duct-taped saddlebags.

The evening manager was also a Punjabi Sikh. He was as friendly as the others, but he couldn’t find my reservation. I couldn’t find it either. So, I had to contact Super.com, the booking app, and they gave it to me. The manager then found my reservation and gave me a key to Room 148. I walked across the indoor courtyard with 35 pounds of saddlebags and gear on my shoulders, only to find the key didn’t work. I thought I saw a light on inside, but with the glare, I wasn’t sure.

I told the manager about it, he double-checked, and then told me, “No, you have the whole room to yourself.”

I walked back, and the key worked, but the door was latched.

“Hey,” a man yelled.

“I guess this room is taken,” I said. “Sorry.”

By the time I got back to the desk, the very unhappy guest of Room 148 was already on the phone. All I could do was laugh. If I am on a mission for peace, the last thing I could do was get angry at any innocent blunder.

They settled me in Room 155, which is my favorite room, if the truth be known. Who doesn’t like Room 155? It just rolls off the tongue.