BALTIMORE, MD-

Air travel stories are like dreams—they’re only interesting if you’re in them.  This information should be one of those things people tell you at some turning point in life: your Bar Mitzvah, your coming out ball, your wedding day.

            But I’m going to ignore my own advice and tell you my air travel story.  You are not in this story, so you might want to stop reading now.  Then again, this story might be your story the next time you fly.

            The way out: Christmas day, my twelve-year-old daughter, Ella, and I left Baltimore for Santa Barbara to visit my mother.  I thought no one would fly on Christmas Day.  So did the airport: there were only three x-ray machines operating in the entire D terminal.  By the time we made it through we had to board, no time to buy food or drinks.  Blah blah blah, I won’t go on here.  You know, if you’ve flown lately, or if you’ve flown USAir lately, that they no longer serve free drinks (not even water!) or snacks (the meal is long gone) and there is no movie unless you’re flying overseas.

            We were both starving, but I assured Ella that we’d buy hoards of food in Phoenix during our layover.

            The landing in Phoenix went on for at least twenty roller-coaster minutes.  I felt ill and put on my blue nausea wristbands that usually work for this type of thing.  Ella felt sick, too.  It was one of those long drawn-out moments where you’re just waiting for it to be over: like bad sex, or a tedious movie in a fifty-degree theater when you forgot to bring a sweater.  I felt the wheels come out below us and was so happy, so so happy, that it was almost over and we could get off the plane, get food, walk a bit.  Then, just as the end felt near, the plane pitched up.  Straight up.  Top Gun up.  Or Right Stuff up.  It felt like we were zooming at triple speed.  Within seconds we were far above the clouds, just flying.  The captain came on the speaker and said, “I’m sorry if I scared you-”  (proof to me that he was scared) “but there was a plane on the runway where we were supposed to land.”  Ella looked at me and said, “So, we almost landed on another plane?” I nodded.  I didn’t want to get into the details of what would have happened had our landing not been aborted at the last minute.

            We circled for about twenty minutes, then after another twenty-minute nauseating landing, we were on the ground.  Ella and I had fifteen minutes to get to our next flight.  We were at the end of the B terminal and needed to get to the farthest point from there (according to the airport map in the back of USAirways Magazine), the end of the A terminal.  There would be no time to pick up food.  We ran, hauling our suitcases (you have to pay to check them now, but you know that already, don’t you?), laptops, bags with books, drawing pads, and sudoko puzzles.  It was a fifteen-minute run and when we got there the gate was closed.  A woman at the desk called the captain who opened the plane up again so we could board.  His Christmas gift to us, he said.

            Okay, you’re not in this next part of the story either, and it’s still about air travel, so I’ll make it quick.  The landing in Santa Barbara was so bumpy that even the flight attendant was sick.  I swear.  I had my nausea bracelets on, unbuttoned my coat, had the air on my face and was searching for a place to vomit (the kid behind me used what appeared to be the only vomit bag on the plane).  I was about to unbuckle and run to the toilet when we landed.  I was saved. 

            Here’s more of my air travel story, skip this part if you’d like, you’re not in it again: On New Years Eve we were supposed to fly back.  My mother, who doesn’t carry a charged cell phone, dropped off me and Ella at the airport and kissed us goodbye.  After an hour and half wait in the check in line (there’s no online or self check in for USAir in the Santa Barbara airport), we were bumped.  There were no other airlines that could get us home to Baltimore.  We were rescheduled for the six a.m. flight the next day. 

Ella and I left the tiny, stucco Spanish-style terminal and sat outside on a bench.  I knew my mother was out running errands and that she would then return to the house and have a nap with her phone on do-not-disturb mode.  I called the house anyway.  There were about thirty dollars in my wallet and a few credit cards.  The cab ride to my mother’s would be about fifty dollars.  Who knows if Santa Barbara cabs take credit cards—it’s not a town where anyone takes a cab.  I was exhausted, and didn’t want to figure out how we would get back to my mother’s, so I sat on a bench and turned my back to the sun so I could feel the heat on my hair and shoulders.  Ella sat beside me.  She reached into one of our two bags of food (we had learned our lesson about food on the way in) and pulled out some clementines.  We didn’t really talk, just sat and enjoyed the warmth and the perfectly sweet oranges. 

An old woman sat beside me: neatly dressed, salon hair, tidy slacks, shirt tucked in.

 “Is there a club here?” she asked me, nodding at the people milling around the lawn in front of the terminal.

“No,” I said.  “Everyone got bumped.”

“Is that the club house?” she asked a few minutes later.  I looked at the arches that framed the exterior walkways, the red tile roof, the magenta flowers blooming at the foot of the busy, green trees. 

“It just looks like a clubhouse,” I said.  “It’s the airport terminal.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Santa Barbara,” she said.  Then she looked at her husband who stood at the curb as if he were waiting for their ride and said, “That’s right, isn’t it?  We live in Santa Barbara, right?”

I was happy I knew where I was.  Happy to have something to eat.  Content to sit in the glowing California heat.  Only minutes later, my mother walked up.  She had finished her errands and was stopping by on her way home.  She claimed it was ESP.  I think she saw how long the line was when we arrived and knew we weren’t making it on any flight.

The next morning, my mother woke me at four to get ready for our six a.m. flight. I got out of bed and dressed.  Then I opened my computer to shut it down, but decided to check my email first.  There was junk mail, a couple Google alerts, and an email from USAirways.  My flight was cancelled; we were rescheduled to a 12:45 flight.  I went back to bed.  My mother went back to bed, too.  Ella never woke up.

            I’m now on the flight from Phoenix to Baltimore with about an hour and a half to go.  Since we took off from Santa Barbara this afternoon I’ve revised two chapters of my novel, read a couple chapters in my book (The Brief and Wondrous Life of OscarWao), and completed the crossword in the back of USAirways magazine.  Ella made an animated short on her computer (a unicorn and Ella’s best friend, Ellie, meet somewhere.  Ellie is astounded.  The unicorn is unfazed.)  She read a couple chapters of her novel (Next Summer), wrote a song for her friend Annie, took pictures of us on my computer, did a sudoko, and is now drawing on paper napkins.  We ate Balance bars, fruit leathers, five clementines, a bag of  beef jerky, half a bag of dried, salted edamame, fruit flavored Mentos and gum.

              I want to read again but, I swear this is true, the lights in our row just blew a fuse and crackled off.  Instead of reading, I’m going to sit back and think (my right arm in my lap as the person beside me has taken full control of the arm rest).  I want to recapture in my mind a trip my mother and I took alone to New York from California when I was a couple years younger than Ella.   The men on the plane wore jackets and ties, my mother and I wore dresses; our bags were huge, checked, carried away.  Once in our seats, we were handed a menu and chose the meal we’d have during the flight.  Our silverware had Pan Am embossed on the handle.  Our napkins were cloth and our flight attendants wore hats.  I wrote in the red leather travel diary my mother had bought just for our trip.  The journal was every bit as elegant as the flight.  I wish I had it now so I could see what I had written.  I remember that I had folded the airline menu and tucked into the back pages, an artifact like any other from a lost time.

Tags: armrest bullies, Ella, Jessica Anya Blau, legroom, Phoenix, Santa Barbara, USAIRWAYS, vomit bags

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.