...Or Wherever Your Final Destination May Be Taking You

The downside of traveling, as I see it, is the traveling part, especially if it involves airports. We sampled three different airlines and all of them thanked us for flying with them, as well they might. First up was Frontier Airlines, which was remarkably cheap, unless you want a seat, which is extra. Snacks are extra, and juice is extra, and when you pay for a beer with a credit card, there's a screen in which you are encouraged to tip the flight attendants, who are otherwise complimentary. There's a little coin slot on the arm rest to recline the seat at a dollar an inch for a half hour. Vaseline for your kneecaps is available for purchase, and the safety demo explains which way to swipe your credit card when the oxygen masks come down. For an additional $7.99, they will agree not to hand you the teeny bag of crispy mini wheat pucks. We had a nice flight seated next to a nun in full regalia, who was delighted to discover she'd won a wager with the sisters when she said she'd be able to snag a cup of water for free. Which she did. Could be the crew was just hedging their bets.

Fiji Air was actually our favorite.

Next came Porter Airlines, our favorite, serving a free beer-like product, and depositing us promptly in Billy Bob Airport. This is located on a small island to keep us under surveillance, but someone has dug an escape tunnel, at the end of which you can take an elevator to Toronto. So that's how we encountered Toronto: from underneath, so you could see its underpants. We had been smoothly and expeditiously decanted through customs, preparing us in no way for the return trip.

For that leg, we did arrive 2-1/2 hours early and used every second of it in customs, involving a glacial trudge through a maze with no cheese at the end. The United States doesn't want us back. We keep asking for health care and diplomacy.

Fortunately, this time we were flying United, so the plane was late. It was late, and it was either at gate F66 or F60, depending on whether you believed the departures board or the boarding pass, although nobody at either gate was familiar with our flight. They suggested we check in at Customer Service, which is where you get serviced. Customer Service featured two ticket agents and forty or so customers being processed at the rate of twenty minutes per, so we made friends with our immediate neighbors in line and settled in for the long haul in the hopes one of the ticket agents knew where our plane was. Two hours later we were first in line and discovered we had been rebooked for Portland, arriving at a quarter past never, via Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, on a plane that was in a gate a half mile away and leaving in ten minutes, according to the comedian who updates the departures board. I kicked Dave into high gear and we streaked through the airport down ever-darker hallways knocking down old ladies until we slammed into a dead-end before our gate had shown up. There was a glass door. There was light behind it. I pushed at the door, it resisted, I pushed harder, and the door started shrieking whoop whoop whoop and I spun around and bellowed SHIT! to a polite assemblage of waiting passengers, some of whom might have been Canadian, so I apologize.

"Where's Gate 98?" I asked, in a much reduced voice. The crowd responded kindly. All the gates up to 95 had proceeded in order but the end of the hallway had a little sign--a chalkboard, perhaps--with "96 97 98" scribbled on it. Also, the plane was late. Another hour plodded by, neatly corresponding with the layover time we were supposed to have in D.C., and eventually we boarded the plane, arrived in the nation's capital, picked up our new boarding passes for the following morning, and shuttled off to a Best Western for a nice four hours' sleep five hundred miles farther away from our destination.

Three o'clock came early. Security was a breeze, and we were funneled onto an airplane and bumped along the tarmac in the dark for a bit while the pilot looked for a parking spot. Fifteen minutes later he came on the intercom. Bing. "Folks..." he began.

This is never good.

A butterfly had flapped its wings in the Amazon and grounded air traffic in the Midwest, so the FAA had given them a new flight plan, and it was taking them a while to enter it into the jet's brain, but they'd be on the move shortly.

Bing. Well, folks, the new flight plan added an hour to the flight--neatly corresponding with our layover time in San Francisco--and they didn't  have enough gas, so they were going back to the gate to fuel up.

But folks? The San Francisco flight was miraculously delayed while they retrieved a plastic bag from the engine. We're back! Home! The plane politely stayed in the air until the runway showed up, it's sunny and warm, and we'd stocked the beer fridge before we left. We anticipate Christmas cards from the people in line with us at Customer Service in Toronto. It's a wonderful world.

The Community Baby

Faithful readers might recall that air travel is not my best thing. It isn't even down the hall from my best thing. They said it couldn't be done, but I once missed a connecting flight during a five-hour layover by falling asleep in a gate in the wrong terminal. Air travel and I have agreed to hate each other.


Still, my recent trip to Boston seemed auspicious. I had booked my first-ever cross-country trip that was non-stop, on an airline I hadn't tried, and it was a cheap ticket besides. I sat in a middle seat between an old, small, translucent gentleman, and a younger opaque fellow who studied a PowerPoint presentation on financial planning for six hours. Neither one had any body odor, if by "body odor" we are referring only to a surface fug, and not something manufactured on the spot internally using only beef jerky and a team of bacteria. So things were looking up. As I sat down, I noticed a small sign printed under the window that said "seats in this row do not recline," which was disturbing. I chose to see this sign as a directive to adjust attitude, and sat up in mandatory primness imagining that all the rest of the rows said "seats in this row do not recline all that much." It helped. 

The flight was fine, the pilots hit the ground with the restraint they get the big bucks for, and I was in a good state of mind for the return trip. And that is when several miracles occurred. I arrived at the correct gate in time to visit the IPA dispensary across the way, unpacked my new used laptop, located a wireless connection, figured out how to suck out some Internet all by myself and had a Facebook chat with my sweetheart. Somewhere, pigs flew and weasels learned to play Parcheesi. So things were looking up.


I sauntered over to the gate and inquired whether my Alaska miles could be credited to my Delta account, and they made it happen. Just then a woman came up and said she had been talking to someone--she pointed towards an old woman trembling behind a massive baby stroller--who had never flown before, let alone with an infant, and could use some help. The counter people peeled out and began to speak to the old woman with kind voices, one shouldering the baby and the other folding up the stroller and seeing it to the plane. The old woman was rigid and mute with terror, and the personnel were respectful and reassuring, easing her on board.


She and the baby, of course, were installed in the row behind me.

My seat mates were two jolly Boston men who looked like they might be capable of both odors and excessive noise, and exhibited neither. So things were looking up.


We may have been two-thirds of the way across the country before the infant behind us reminded everyone he was there. The old woman, still more or less paralyzed, was not able to be a comfort to him. Within a minute, the Alaska Air flight attendant, Mr. Kelly Morrow, scooped up the child and bobbled him up and down, entertaining him with his shiny name tag for a good ten minutes before he had to distribute sodas. He produced for me a hot sandwich that was amazingly not bad. The infant rediscovered his lungs a bit later.

Two rows up, a beautiful woman asked to hold him, took over the easily-consoled baby and wrapped him in a dashing faux-leopard blanket. He was adjusted to full-view cooing position and handed around the plane. An old man in the next row demonstrated his foot-tickling expertise. The baby body-surfed around the cabin.


Flight attendant Kelly dropped to one knee to check on Grandma, who revealed that she was, in fact, great-Grandma, and had had all her lower teeth removed the day before. This is a really hard thing for anybody, taking a baby across country, especially on your first flight. You're doing a wonderful job. Was anyone planning to meet you at Portland? Her daughter and granddaughter were, yes. Do you know where they were planning to meet you? Not exactly, no. Worry bloomed on the old woman's face. How many parts to an airport were there? Kelly extracted some phone numbers and went to call the family and make sure they were coming, and find out where he might personally escort her. The baby was briefly returned.

At the next squall, the beautiful woman jumped up and asked for diapers and baby wipes along with the baby. She disappeared for a while and came back with the child pink and resplendent in leopard fur, and the old woman's neighbors distracted her with chat and cheer during the landing. Someone retrieved her bag from the overhead bin, someone else carried it, someone held the aisle clear for great-Grandma and her escort Mr. Morrow, and there was a general blessing of hand-pats and foot-tickles all around. I believe back in row twenty a collection was being taken for the baby's college fund. And someone who is not comfortable with or attracted to babies and had nothing else to contribute decided to pen an essay.

Things That Fall Out Of The Sky

It was getting on the middle of August, time for the annual Perseids meteor shower. Dave and I are always holding out hope for a celestial doozy, something you could read the newspaper by, something just this side of a war zone. The way I see it, a person's got to die some time, and there are a lot worse ways to go about it than to be hailed on by flaming space rocks. We bring our best attitudes, lying in the lawn chairs, pointing our marshmallows towards the sky. Hey, optimism is free. But although Portland, Oregon is a pretty terrific city, it's still a city, and if one is to really appreciate a meteor shower, it's best to go a little ways out of town.

So we went to Maine.

Sadly, this involved air travel. Air travel can produce horrors for even the most intrepid traveler, and I am notably trepid. Even my most routine trips have a way of going sideways. All I had to do in this case was get myself deposited in Boston and I would be scooped up and carried off by loving friends with cars, brains and everything. I would be ferried about without a care. Linder or Walter would take care of everything. Just get to Boston.

Not long ago, Dave and I had attempted to fly to Portland, Maine, where Linder and Walter were planning to retrieve us. At that time, they probably were unaware of our unique proclivity for disaster, and were merrily on their way to fetch us when we woke up on the floor of the LaGuardia airport, in the wrong gate, having missed our connecting flight to Maine by a good hour. Not many people with a five-hour layover miss their connecting flights. Not many people can fall asleep on the floor at LaGuardia. Not many square feet of floor at LaGuardia are devoid of bird poop.

We had a crumpled piece of paper with Linder and Walter's cell numbers on it and frantically threw quarters into a phone at the terminal, which hoovered them up like a slot machine. The poor phone had not seen action in years and was clearly starving to death. It balked and barked and finally held onto a tenuous connection long enough for us to reach our friends and save them another hour of driving. One much-later flight, a taxi ride, a stint on Greyhound and about twelve hours later, we were scooped up at Boston and all of us tried beerily to put the day behind us.

So on this occasion Walter reviewed the arrangements by e-mail and asked, in a hopeless postscript, if we had somehow managed to acquire our own cell phones in the intervening year. (Even in e-mail his query had a certain bleakness to it, as though he were a musician on the Titanic examining the bass fiddle for buoyancy.) Of course, we hadn't.

We boarded the plane without incident, set up shop in 27B and 27C, and peered nervously at the passengers coming up the aisle. And there, lurching towards us straight out of a Gahan Wilson cartoon, wide, squid-eyed, and unhinged, was the proud tenant of seat 27A, who wedged himself in and began to expand. It was only two hours to Salt Lake City--not so very long a time to sit with my shoulders bunched up under my ears. On the next leg, however, I was delighted to discover that the window seat was occupied by a small woman, neat and narrow, who slotted herself into the seat with enough room left over for her entire aura, and who smelled like nothing at all. Ah! There she sat, just she and her romping little rhinovirus, which she presented in aerosol form for the next four hours.

Boston. Just make it to Boston. The sky was clear as we began our descent, right on time. There wasn't a cloud in it, except one really turgid one right on the runway, looking like something the tarmac burped up all on its own. The plane abruptly plunged into darkness and when the runway finally appeared, about ten yards below, it was not the section of runway the pilot had in mind. The engines roared and the plane clambered back up to the sky and headed away. After a few minutes the pilot chimed on, cheery. "Well, folks," he said predictably, "that little cloud back there wanted to give us a little trouble, so the tower has given us leave to circle around for a little while until it clears up. But don't worry--we'll get you folks back on the ground in another five minutes, one way or the other."

"Another five minutes" does not actually mean the five minutes coming right up, but rather a whole different five-minutes about an hour into the future. Also? There's only one way I'm interested in getting back on the ground. Not the other.