I thought perhaps I might have gained a little cosmic redemption, my last horrible airline outing having occurred this past January, five months ago. (Co-inky-dink: I realize as I write this that I haven't traveled by plane or train since that time, either.) But no. At 6:44 p.m. on Wednesday, May 24, the great and powerful Travelocitus, multi-armed (and thus far-reaching), multi-legged (and thus ensuring a visit to at least one major airline hub for even the shortest of trips) god of online travel, saw fit to cast my most recent travel itinerary upon the funeral pyre of glitchless flying.
It's totally my fault, of course. You see, I failed Travelocitus by not paying proper tribute--I arrived at the check-in counter at Harrisburg International Airport only 65 minutes ahead of my scheduled flight rather than the currently recommended three months. Never mind that it only takes a scant 2 minutes to check-in at HIA and another 30 seconds to clear security, so under-utilized is this airfield (not that I'm complaining about the lack of crowding). One must obey the rules, no matter how changeable and byzantine they may be.
So shame on me. Therefore, ol' T'citus saw fit in his fickleness to rain down cosmic ca-ca on my departure from Harrisburg to Kansas City via Chicago O'Hare. In normal circumstances--in other words, ones that don't exist in our currently envisioned universe--from first take-off to final landing, the trip should have taken 5 hours and 51 minutes, or, if you want to be all picky and specific, about 9 hours from the time I left my house until I arrived at my parents' in Lawrence, Kansas.
Instead, to more or less quote ABBA from "The Winner Takes It All," Travelocitus
Rolled the dice/
his mind as cold as ice/
and someone way down here/
lost something dear
That something dear being 18 hours of my life, not to mention scads of dignity, neither of which I will ever recover. Thanks, T-cite!
Like a State of the Union address by our current jefe, the scenario stuck strictly to the oft-repeated script. The flight from Harrisburg was delayed for more than two hours awaiting the arrival of the flight from Chicago; repeated storms in the Chicagoland area prompted the diversion (such an odd, ironic, choice of words) of our plane to Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Woo hoo! Ain't we livin' now!); we arrived in Chicago after 2 a.m. local time, a full 3 hours and 45 minutes after our connecting flight was due to take off from O'Hare; nonetheless, we were directed to gate H15 to catch our connecting flight, a brisk, 10-minute trot from the landing gate; we arrived at the proper gate, but the connecting flight was nowhere to be found, nor was any helpful human being, just an electronic sign encouraging us to "enjoy [our] flight!"
But which flight would that be? And would "enjoy" be restricted solely to the realm of fantasy or might at some point the reality of enjoyment enter the airspace?
We (I say "we" because by this time I'm leading a parade of squeaky, cranky mice through O'Hameln International Airport, who are desperate to pay [back] the piper and get the hell out of this town) found the rebooking center and were rescheduled on the next available flight, which was to leave for Kansas City at 7:45 later that morning. We do get upgraded to first class, at least, so for the brief hour that we're airborne, free orange juice and ice water for everybody, while the great unwashed in steerage enjoy . . . free orange juice and ice water for everybody.
So . . . things to do in Chicago when you're nearly dead from fatigue, your butt is benumbed, and your back is practically broken by the passive-aggressive comfort of airline seating? Not a lot, actually.
Being that O'Hare is one of the country's major airports for both domestic and international flights, I figured surely there would be food everywhere . . . somewhere . . . at least maybe in the form of a vending machine, if nothing else.
Instead, I found every restaurant or food stand in Terminal 3 (which is gi-normous, by the way, housing a partial alphabet soup of gates G, H, K, and L) closed with a cheery "We start serving breakfast at 5:30!" greeting me and several hundred travelers who kept deplaning, boss, deplaning, up to at least 3 a.m.
The only comfort offered--and cold comfort at that--was a lone drinks trolley parceling out icy, caffeinated beverages. Just what I needed in the Tundra-attuned Terminal 3, freezing cold beverages in the Arctic climate of airport air. Coupled with my sleep deprivation, I envisioned a miserable permafrost passing for myself, a Greenlandic grinding to a halt of my circulatory system. Like so many Jack London characters in an Alaskan winter wonderland, I'd get cold and fall asleep, awakening in heaven (or hell, take yer pick)--or at the very least alongside of Walt Disney's head in an Arizona-based cryogenics lab.
This scenario (the Jack London one, not the Walt Disney) may explain the late night inappropriate dispensing of caffeine, however. The airlines want to keep you tanked and revved to prevent your early demise and yet another unpleasant pile of paperwork having to be submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration. As if keeping up with all the reports on travel delays and customer dissatisfaction wasn't enough hassle, heaven forfend the airlines should have to explain the Third World refugee camp status of America's air transportation system.
The caffeine pushing is something of a vain effort, however, for there are a stockyards' worth of carcasses strewn about the gates. (I counted 150 in the G area alone.) While most appear dead to the world, some actually bleat a chorus of approval/disapproval through the medium of unbridled snoring at the grim, London during the Blitz accommodations. For you see, some lucky travelers perturbed Travelocitus even less and were stranded early enough to discover a military-issue cot tucked away in a darkened corner of the terminal.
Others, though, have shoved together rows of seats, making makeshift Craftmatic beds for themselves, or have given up any semblance of class or dignity by falling down in a dead stupor of sleep on the carpeted terminal floor.
Hungering for a pack of Nabs, yearning for an intimate encounter with some Colgate and a toothbrush, craving the electrostatically charged thrills of a night spent entangled in the thin, acrylic embrace of a cheap airline blanket, I didn't know how the evening--rather, morning--would turn out, whether I would actually be on that 7:45 a.m. flight, along with my luggage. But I knew one thing for sure--I was NOT going to sleep on the grime-encrusted ground of Terminal 3, like some daggy ol' sheep at the Pennsylvania Farm Show! No, siree, not me. Ain't gonna happen. Unh-unh. I've put up with a lot of crude crud in my years on this planet, but I'm an American, goldarnit. I don't do refugee camps!
* * *
I awakened at 5 a.m. in time to hear the hordes queueing for coffee and breakfast McGriddle sandwiches at the Terminal 3 McDonald's. Well, smack my Superdome and call me Katrina. I had been asleep on the airport floor for about two hours, having used as a pillow my overnight bag full of books (Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, White Teeth by Zadie Smith) and three-and-a-quarter 1/2-pound Hershey chocolate bars (formerly four 1/2-pound bars, but I got hungry around midnight somewhere over Indiana) for the home folks. I awoke with a minimal amount of drool on said bag but that scratchy throat feeling that bespoke of my spending the last couple of hours snoring my head off to god and country and everyone else burning in the eternal h-e-double-hockey-sticks of Gate K3 at O'Hare International.
Thus, 4:55 a.m., Thursday, May 25, marks a sort of beginning-of-the-end moment for me, a new low watermark in my neverending, always offending quest for mishap and misery.
As if my previous travel misadventures weren't bad enough, as if my efforts at dating and poor gaydar performance weren't depressing enough, as if my aim to be the next Susan Sontag crossed with a sober Brett Butler weren't tragic enough, now I'd hit something of a personal, carpet-on-concrete rockbottom by joining the hoi polloi on the airport groundcover of human degradation.
Where does it go from here? Where will it all end up for poor, poor, pitiful me? Once you've savored the intoxicating elixir of weak carpet cleaning agents and old shoes, once you've explored the alternative meaning of airline gate crashing, once you've slept with hundreds of nameless strangers and gone all orgiastic (or at least ballistic) over their deviated septum vocalizations, how long before you find yourself sloshed and slurring your words on Skid Row? How long before the champagne socialists of San Francisco tsk-tsk-tsk you as they step over your torpored torso in the Tenderloin District? How long before you find yourself double-strawing a methadone-laced chocolate malt with Courtney Love in the soda shop at the Hotel La Rut?
Worse still, how long before you find yourself forced to endure an endless loop of Access Hollywood segments on celebrity procreative activities as air traffic stacks high above the clouds and the cozy, comforting charms of the Midwestern U.S.?
So close to heaven, yet, seduced by the oleaginous charms of Pat O'Brien into caring about the birthing rituals of Brangelina (the couple, not the breakfast cereal), so very far away.
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