Episode 3: Transatlantic Syd

00:00

EPISODE 3: Transatlantic Syd

The wheels leave the runway, and I feel the weight drop out from under me. New York falls away, swallowed in haze, and with it, the entire continent of North America.

I’m leaving the United States. No return ticket, no set plan, no idea when I’ll see this place again.

That finality lands harder than I expect.

00:32

Transatlantic flights have a kind of mythos, but this one isn’t about romance or adventure—it’s a severance, the first step onto the long road into the unknown. There’s something unnatural about it: one moment you’re on solid ground, feet planted on a known world. Then, a day later, you’re somewhere else, a completely different patch of earth, a different sun hanging in the sky. It should take weeks, months, years to cross an ocean. Instead, I disappear from one reality and reappear in another, just like that. If I let it.

01:11

I adjust in my seat, watching the twilight stretch over the Atlantic. Inside the cabin, a hundred strangers sit together in silence, a holding pattern of liminality. There’s a girl next to me—thin tattoos down her arm, wide-eyed and still, like a bird perched on a high wire.

Neither of us knows it yet, but we’re about to realize just how much we have in common.

01:49

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

Some people go on a journey to find themselves. I went on a journey to lose myself—and instead find the world.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

02:22

Join me as I hitchhike across the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because this isn’t just about my story. It’s about what happens when you start to wonder what your story could be.

02:40

You don’t need to hitchhike across the world—there are ways you can choose to live with more courage, more curiosity, and more intention, right here, right now.

Let’s go and find out.

03:02

The day before my flight, New York turned into a scene from a disaster film.

A hot wind tore through Union Square. Trash swirled through the air, signs rattled, and the sky—the sky—went pink. Smoke had swept in from the Canadian wildfires, curling around buildings, swallowing rooftops.

03:23

I watched as people pulled their shirts up over their noses. A woman wrapped a scarf around her child’s face like they were evacuating a war zone.

That’s when the feeling hit me: I had to get out.

The city was suffocating, and not just from the smoke. Everything about it was closing in—the weight of waiting, the weight of in between: gone, but not yet on the way.

03:49

A few hours later, I was on a nearly empty bus to a nearly empty airport, watching Manhattan disappear behind me. I was leaving. For real, this time.

Stewart International Airport was eerily quiet. My flight was the only one scheduled that evening. I walked the empty gates, the silence amplifying the reality of my departure. I found a seat by the window, staring out at the gray tarmac blending into the smoky sky. I didn’t want to see the States again for a while. Let it be a long while, I murmured.

04:30

I reach into my backpack and find the foam tooth Baladine gave me. Still strange. Still here. I turn it over in my hands, feeling the spring of the foam, and the natural curvature of one of the body’s strangest pieces. A reminder that I carry more than I think I do—even the inexplicable.

04:55

I sling my bag over my shoulder and move toward the jet bridge.

Flying does something strange to your body. It forces you into a maze of unnatural, placeless movements—waiting in lines, walking in circles, lifting your hands in surrender to security scanners. You hesitate before sitting in the terminal, feeling like you’re taking up the wrong space.

05:20

Then, the final call. Boarding.

The tunnel narrows around me, sealing me in. The faint whine of engines, like a choir of metal and friction, hums from beyond the thin walls. The door looms ahead—the same metal that will soon be lifting us into the sky. I touch it lightly as I step through, half-expecting it to be warm, like something alive.

05:44

Inside: the hushed chaos of the plane. Strangers brush past each other in the aisle, stuffing jackets into overhead bins, kneeling on seats to retrieve misplaced bags. A mass of bodies moving through the final steps of a ritual none of us really wants.

The aisle ahead is a slow-moving river of passengers. And at the end of it—my seat.

06:05

And next to it, a girl about my age.

She isn’t reading. She isn’t scrolling. She’s just waiting. Wide-eyed. Still.

I recognize the look instantly. That preemptive dread of whoever is about to sit next to you for the next six hours.

06:22

I offer a tight-lipped smile, the kind that says, Sorry, it’s me.

Her gaze flicks up. She nods once and shifts slightly to let me in.

I slide into my seat, click my belt, stare straight ahead.

06:35

For a while, we don’t speak.

The plane roars to life. The wheels lift. We climb through thick clouds, and when we break through, the sun is waiting, bright as ever.

Only then does she glance over, measuring me like she’s deciding whether I’m worth talking to.

06:55

I turn. “First time crossing the Atlantic?”

She hesitates. Then, finally:

“Yeah.”

A beat.

“Feels… weird.”

I nod. “I get that.”

07:10

She pulls at the strap of her backpack, like she’s not used to sitting still for this long.

I stick out a hand. “Jonny.”

“Syd.”

She says it like a fact. No flourish, no extra effort.

For a moment, I think that’ll be the end of it. But as the hours stretch on, something shifts. She starts talking. Not all at once—just in pieces, slow and deliberate. She had left home young, spent years moving between friends’ couches, then took off for South America before she was even sure what she was running from. Travel had given her a home, or at least something that felt closer to one than where she had come from.

07:53

As we talk, I realize: I’m not the only one out here leaping into the unknown. Syd is on a long journey, one without a fixed destination or timeline. Her first trip had been an escape. This one? She isn’t sure yet.

Neither of us needs to be out here this time. We aren’t running anymore. But we can’t quite stop, either.

08:21

And piece by piece, I start to realize: this isn’t just any seatmate.

We’re moving in the same direction. Not just across an ocean.

Across something bigger.

08:44

The plane hums on through the night, skimming the dark Atlantic. The overhead lights dim, and most of the passengers close their eyes, drifting into uneasy airplane sleep. But Syd and I keep talking, voices low in the engine’s drone.

09:03

We’re not running anymore, but we both have that itch—something still pulling us forward, some question we haven’t answered yet.

09:15

"So what made you decide to leave again?" I ask.

She hesitates, then exhales, her fingers tracing the rim of her water bottle. “I don’t know yet.

Maybe I just don’t know how to stay.”

That lands. I’m not sure how to stay either.

“I guess we’re both floaters,” I say.

“Or we’re just still growing up.” she says.

09:41

I turn and look at Syd’s face. Her brown eyes are still large, but no longer frightened. I can tell there’s a lot she isn’t telling me.

09:51

Outside the window, a faint glow lines the horizon—the first sign of morning somewhere far below. We’re out over Canada now, Nova Scotia or maybe Newfoundland, the earth just a black void beneath us. Greenland is next.

10:09

Syd starts to talk, now on her own, unprompted. She drops hints of the ongoing story she’s living out, which shares much with my own. Both Syd and I had been through long relationships that ended, leaving us with a different sense of love—less tethered to an ideal than before. We had both grown up religious and had since drifted away.

10:32

It makes me wonder. Maybe I’m more of a type than I thought. Maybe my story isn’t so uncommon. That stings a little. I’d liked to think I was different.

10:46

I’d pictured myself doing this alone, the only one on this plane leaping into the unknown. But here is Syd, mid-twenties, willingly handing herself over to other places, other people. It’s her first time in Europe. What her path will be, I can’t even guess. And she can’t know mine. More than that—we can’t even know our own. We sit there in the dim hum of the cabin, two people seeing no further ahead than the next row of seats.

11:16

So instead, we look back. Through the night, we pull memories from the folds of our minds and hand them to each other, the way you pass sweets across a tray table. Family, exes, shifts in belief, changes of heart—all of it leading here, to this loud and dark flight. Six months from now, we may have new stories to tell. But for now, we share what we’ve got.

11:42

We’ll be back right after this.

The cabin is hushed, somewhere between sleep and waking. I crack open the window shade, and for a moment, my breath catches.

Greenland.

12:02

It doesn’t look real. It looks like something from before time began—a world that has never softened, never been tamed. Endless ice, endless rock. Not rolling hills or gentle slopes, but jagged ridges, carved and broken, as if the earth itself has been struck and left shattered.

12:21

Snow-covered peaks jut up like frozen waves, frozen mid-collapse, crashing into valleys of shadow. Rivers of ice—wide as highways—snake through the valleys, vast glaciers inching forward in a time scale beyond human comprehension. The land is torn and raw, shaped more by the wind than by any hand. A place never meant for people.

12:47

Syd leans over, eyes wide. Neither of us speaks.

Some places don’t invite words. They just swallow them.

12:57

We fly over a cliff edge, where the rock drops suddenly, violently, into nothing—down, down, into a frozen fjord, where the black water lies still as glass, swallowing the reflection of the sky.

13:11

I imagine standing down there. No roads. No help. No chance. I imagine the silence—the kind that doesn’t just surround you, but presses in, fills your lungs, crushes your presence into insignificance. If you’re down there, you don’t last. You don’t even become a memory.

13:32

It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying.

It makes me feel something I’ve been chasing since I left home.

Small.

13:42

Syd exhales, her breath fogging against the window. “Makes you feel small,” she murmurs, as if reading my mind.

I nod. Small, and unprepared.

13:56

We think of the world as mapped, known, tamed. But not this. This is something else. This is a world beyond roads, beyond history, beyond rescue. This is the edge of the world.

And we’re just passing over it, safe in our pressurized metal shell, skimming the surface, spared from the reality of what it would mean to actually be down there.

14:25

The plane rumbles forward, crossing the last of the ice fields. And then, just like that, Greenland is behind us.

Gone as quickly as it came.

14:37

Together, we stare out the window a few minutes more, hoping for another glimpse, another shiver through our spines. But we’re met with only the endless sea.

14:50

The world is bigger than I’ve let myself believe.

I let the window shade fall, but the feeling stays. That sense of scale—not just of the land below, but of our own smallness within it.

15:05

And maybe that’s why meeting someone like Syd matters. Because when you meet someone like this, on the way, haphazardly, you can really allow yourself to feel that fear and dread of the expanse of earth. You can allow yourself because here’s someone next to you feeling the very same thing.

15:26

Syd’s hands rest easy in her lap, her head propped against the seat and the textured plastic bulkhead. Even after these few brief hours, she looks so familiar.

15:39

It’s as if I've met a long-lost sibling in travel, as if long ago the two of us joined in a pact and then had the memory erased. It doesn’t matter that she’s staying in Iceland for a few weeks and I’m flying on to Brussels. Our paths might never cross again, and that’s alright.

15:58

The very knowledge that out there is another ‘me’ who is seeking, struggling, and pushing on—that’s what gives me comfort. I’m not the only one out there chasing the stars.

In the last hour before landing, we try to sleep.

And then we’re on the ground, taxiing down the airstrip in the fog and rain.

16:24

Reykjavik Airport.

Fluorescent lights, gray carpet, the low hum of a thousand tired bodies waiting to leave or arrive. I stretch out on a row of plastic chairs, set an alarm, and close my eyes.

16:40

Taz is back in Manhattan, probably rushing around helping someone move a couch, or in a rehearsal, coaxing out a perfect harmony.

My parents are in Asheville, maybe out by the pond, stoking a bonfire.

And I’m here, waiting for my next flight, a little further from everyone I know.

17:00

It happens so fast, the leaving. One moment, you’re wrapped in the familiar. The next, you’ve slipped free, unmoored, and the world is suddenly wide open.

17:12

Across the terminal, I catch a glimpse of Syd.

She doesn’t see me. She’s moving toward the exit, backpack slung over one shoulder, hood half-up, like she’s not quite ready for the cold outside. She walks with the steady kind of purpose that says you don’t have a plan, but you know you’ll find one.

17:29

For a moment, I think about calling out. A simple “See you around.”

But I let the thought pass.

Not everything needs to be spoken.

And besides—what would I really be saying? See you next time? There probably isn’t a next time.

There’s a this time.

17:53

We’ve talked enough.

She turns a corner and disappears into the crowd.

The image of that thin tattoo running up her arm, starts to wave in my mind. A tough and timid plant, growing, fluttering in the cerulean icelandic breeze.

I exhale.

The first step is done.

We’ve put an ocean between ourselves and where we came from.

But the real journey—the watching of the road approaching and passing away—is still ahead.

18:23

Next time on Go and Find Out—

I climb to an abandoned monastery on the edge of a city. We hop the gate, make our way through the woods, and stand at the ridge overlooking the world below.

But as we turn to leave—

I see something.

Someone.

Just beyond the barbed-wire fence, pale in the moonlight. Moving in step with me.

Not looking at me.

But there.

A ghost? A squatter? A trick of the night?

I don’t know. But something tells me I saw myself.

Next time, I confront the fantasy of living a life on tracks—

and come face to face with the figure in the dark.

19:07

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

19:17

This show is created—and let’s be honest, sometimes completely winged—by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me unless otherwise noted. This episode features field recordings of church organs in France and Czech Republic.

19:30

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I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

19:53

And more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

Alright, that’s all I got. See you next time.

Until then...