The world of travel farce is narrow and treacherous. What wouldn’t shake me much in ordinary life level me here. My burrowing animal keeps ramming itself against the rock, convinced more effort will open the rabbit hole to home.
Last night, a dropped call to United, after 45 minutes of waiting for a representative and another 20 of trying to sort out the tangle of getting my Delta ticket, originally a United ticket, back to United, tipped off a long crying jag (which led to me calling Ken and asking him to take off calling the airlines to arrange for my two flights, starting at 6 a.m.).
Two hours later, when Ken called on one phone while talking with Delta on the other to make sure I was cool with a direct, non-stop flight at the reasonable hour of 11 a.m., I started crying so hard I could barely say, “Yes!” as in “Yes, Fredrico, a million times yes. I will marry you!”
Back home this afternoon, I told Ken how I tried to think of the travel challenges as akin to an intensive spiritual retreat focused on letting go. “How did you do with that?” Ken asked. “Not very well,” I told him.
Yet there were moments of almost grace when I relinquished control, particularly when parked on the tarmac in Hartford, CT in a very small plane, completely full, for three and a half hours. I was on the phone for an hour with the airline, the aisles full with a snaking line of people waiting for the bathroom. People’s butts occasionally hit my head as I said to the United rep, “Could you say that again? I couldn’t hear you.” When I hung up, I surrendered to what the women around me were saying, which included repetitions and variations of:
There’s nothing we do, so why worry about it?
It is what it is.
It’s better to be sitting here alive than dead.
Yeah, this is challenging, but we’ve got it better than a lot of people in this world.
And you know, if I miss my connection, it’s not the end of the world.
I just missed my connection, but what you gonna do?
In communal travel mishaps, people tend to take turns being the cheerful one and the freaking out one. As soon as I told people my story (up until that point), the main cheerleader among us got a little depressed, and I repeated to her some of what she said to us earlier.
Soon the pilot announced that we were ready for take-off, back for a third try to land at LaGuardia, but now we had to wait until someone could drain the overflowing toilet to prevent its contents from rushing down the aisles. The whole plane laughed together, and laughed some more when we needed to get de-iced again. Right before take-off for real, the pilot said, “Ladies and Gentlement, federal regulations stipulate that we inform you that if anyone wants to get off the plane at this airport, we can let you off.” The whole plane laughed harder, then we all looked around, as if to say, “No one is leaving this plane, sucker, so stay put.”
We were homing in together, and although I did start crying so hard at La Guardia at the information desk that a young Indian man came up to ask if he could help, I was grateful for help whenever I needed it.
Travel farce turns on plans dissolving, missed connections, the kindness of strangers, taking walks down streets in cities you never expected to visit, shuttles shut down and planes stuck in traffic and much more.
Then of course the story took off, and from the air, the world shone with snow, roads and rivers all the way to Kansas.
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