Suitcase In My Hand

All my life I have loved to travel. As a child I remember day-long “make-believe” games that involved traveling to faraway places (“Bye Mommy – I’m going to England.” “OK honey – be home at 5:15 for dinner.”) I made Pioneer clothes for my Barbie dolls, rigged up Conestoga wagons for them with cardboard boxes, pillowcases, and the old red Flexible Flyer, and hauled them in a Westerly direction. (Be careful what you wish for.)

I loved car trips. I loved trains (still do), and taking the train from Massachusetts to New York City with Mom is a very fond childhood memory. I loved taking the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard.

My immediate family did not share this passion for travel. That was true to a degree that made me wonder if I was left at their doorstep in a reed basket. When I announced at the age of 22 that I was moving to Boston, my father was distraught and said “You might as well be dead!” (Boston was 80 miles away.) Fortunately, we all shared too many other traits to make the reed-basket theory viable. My guess is that wanderlust skipped a generation – but not because both of Dad’s parents somehow managed to get from Italy to New England. One could chalk that up to economic necessity. I think rather of my Mom’s father, Clayt, who in his youth attempted to cross the continent in a Model T -- until it stalled on a railroad track, whereupon Clayt and his friends pulled their sleeping buddy out of the back seat moments before the train sliced the car in half. For years I thought this was one of those highly-exaggerated or apocryphal family stories; however, after my grandmother’s death, I found the newspaper article documenting the event. I also found the obituary of my great-grandfather, Carl, who had lived in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia, among others. Who knew?

When I was 26, a lucrative regular weekend gig gave me my first opportunity to save up a couple thousand dollars. My friends urged me to replace the red AMC Hornet that I was driving around, but instead, I went down to a travel agency and plopped down 400 bucks for a round-trip ticket to London. Never seen it, wanted to see it all my life. I had no particular reason to go, and no one to go with (boyfriend at the time wasn't interested, although three different male guitarist-colleagues offered, on separate occasions, to tag along.) I suspect my parents thought I was nuts; you might have thought I had signed on for a jog across the pond on the Niña, Pinta, or Santa Maria. But I went, and I discovered several things: 1) I am afflicted with an inner ear that makes flying or sailing without Dramamine literally impossible (unless you like throwing up for 6 hours.) 2) I was right; traveling was a blast. 3) Stonehenge is one of the coolest things on the planet.

All of this is a long buildup to the topic of this post, which is actually a rant in disguise. Topic of Rant: traveling is swiftly becoming a large pain in the ass instead of an enjoyable pastime. If you have an unlimited supply of money, time, and patience, you can still enjoy yourself; but if any of those are in short supply, well…spending one’s next vacation farting around in one’s own garden at home starts to look pretty good.

I’m talking especially about air travel, because that’s usually what I have to do, since I live in the American equivalent of Vladivostok. Seriously, are there any airplanes on the American continent that either take off or depart on time anymore? What is the deal? Actually, the deal is that the airlines have fewer flights because of economic necessity, so one thunderstorm or one mechanical problem causes a domino effect.

Then there is Security. Everyone complains about Security, but I’ll tell you, the “thing itself” is not the problem—it’s the absolute refusal of most Americans to either believe or observe simple sentence structures such as “no liquids or gels can be in your hand luggage,” or to figure out no-brainers such as “knee-high lace up boots are a bad idea if you have to remove them while 76 people behind you are late for their flight.” What the hell is wrong with people?

Today I got to Itty-Bitty-International an hour before my flight, only to discover that the flight was delayed and I’d have to take a different connection that was three hours later. Not that big a deal; I’d rather do that than try to catch the original connection in 15 minutes (ever try running from one end of DFW to another in 15 minutes? Not.)

So, I thought, this will be relaxed. I got ready to go through security. This means the following:

1) Check roll-y wheel suitcase. I am too short to hurl it into the overhead efficiently.
2) Unzip boots.
3) Stuff all extraneous adornments in satchel.
4) Take laptop out of satchel and hold in left arm with satchel and pocketbook.
5) Remove jacket and hold in right arm.

The above enables one to get to the security table, grab 2 gray boxes, plop the laptop in one, put the satchel on the conveyor belt, and dump all the other crap into the other box. This takes 10 seconds.

I am in line. There are about 20 people in front of me. First of all, there is a well-dressed lunatic talking to himself. Oh, excuse me – it’s not a lunatic; it’s a BlueTooth Guy. (See recent Blue Tooth Rant on Quantzalcoatl's blog). The overall effect of BlueTooth Guys is essentially the same as being in line with a street person wearing a thousand dollar suit. I get to listen to his conversation whether I want to or not. (Does no one realize that even the slight head-tilt used to speak into a cell phone makes the conversation less audible than shouting into the air with a Borg-like device jammed into your ear?) While I am attempting to ignore him, I notice that the line is moving very slowly. There is a very beautiful, well-coiffed and expensively-dressed young woman in line. She has decided that she needs to carry-on 2 bags and her suitcase. She is wearing a long and heavy wool coat with a fur collar, an assortment of scarves, mittens, doo-dads, and jewelry, and wearing boots. The security people, having obviously spied a certain well-known combination of demographic indicators, make her open her suitcase. Sure enough, she has enough “liquids or gels” in there to start an independent beauty salon. She is in the process of carefully putting all of them in the itty-bitty plastic bags that they provide at Itty Bitty International for people with Itty Bitty Brains who try to take their entire Bathroom with them on a 45-minute trip. They finally get her situated, and the person behind her, who has been standing there for 5 minutes watching all this, is told that she has to take her boots off. She had the previous 5 minutes to take her boots off, but was obviously hoping that the Nice Man would let her wear her rust-colored real-leather spike-heeled crumple-top 400-dollar specials through security, since they would take a very long time to pry off (they did.)

Honestly, people, what is the deal? And it’s not just the women – there was guy in his twenties who also ended up with a grey box full of itty-bitty-plastic bags full of toiletries. After this, you can almost understand why security people get all worked up when they see a guitar case – not because it might have an incendiary device, but because the instrument is likely to be stuffed in there with anything from 350 Travel Size Samples to a live puppy. People are nuts.

Then it’s time to get on the plane, which leads to the following queries:

Question: if you have an assigned seat, and if you don’t have a Stradivarius or a box of Blown Glass Figurines to put in the overhead, why do you need to rush the gate? Why are so many people so desperate to get into a Toothpaste Tube with Wings? Especially at Itty Bitty International, which is mostly limited to Itty Bitty Jets that are basically flying MRI machines. Once on the plane, there’s inevitably someone who farts around in the aisle and holds up 45 people behind him, while he struggles to get his too-big suitcase into the overhead, rummages for the seat-belt, searches the overhead for a pillow, puts his book in the seat pocket, starts to sit down, decides it’s too hot, gets up and takes his coat off, balls up the coat and tries to fit it into the 3 cubic inch space next to his suitcase, and in general does the human equivalent of that thing cats and dogs do when they circle around 25 times before lying down.

Question: This is for people who think that the airplane seat is a giant leather recliner, and that they are the only people on the plane. Do you HAVE to push your seat back so far that my 6 foot 5 inch husband gets his kneecaps dislocated? Ever consider LOOKING behind you to see if you might be slamming someone's laptop shut? (This happened to me today.) Does it cross your mind that shoving your seat back might eject the other person's dinner off their tray table and into their lap? Airlines should simply stop making seats that recline - it's one of the main causes of Air Travel Rage. I am relatively mild-mannered, and I have been tempted to push back as hard as I can (almost did that today during the Laptop Incident.)

Next item: survival tricks.

1) Earplugs. Never fly without them. Never EVER forget them on a flight longer than 4 hours. They are the best defense in the world against screaming babies, shouting cell-phone users, flight attendants who don’t know how to adjust microphone volume, seat partners who keep their iPods so loud that you can hear all the lyrics yourself, people who while away the time playing cards loudly with each other, and big genial Texans with barky laughs who spent the entire flight “visitin.’”

2) Potty time. Go to the bathroom before you get on the plane, and don’t drink a lot during the flight, unless you enjoy relieving yourself in a wildly vibrating gym locker. One of the natural laws of the universe is that turbulence will occur when YOU are on the airplane toilet - doesn't matter who you are or which plane you are on. This phenomenon is caused by a wrinkle in the space-time continuum.

If you’d like to put a little extra shine on these experiences, try taking some Dramamine. Everything is better in slow motion. Also, Dramamine combined with the judicious use of earplugs produces some Very Fine Psychedelic dreams, from which you generally wake with your head hanging at a 45 degree angle and your mouth open.

As I write this, I have just found out that my flight has been delayed two MORE hours. Could be worse – I could have been on the airplane sitting on the runway when this was announced.

Rant Complete. In the interest of leaving my dear readers on a positive note, I would offer the following “good things about traveling:”

1. That fact that the airport I use is an 11-minute drive from my place of work. This is a large contrast from the 65 minute drive I used to have.

2. The new B terminal at DFW. OK, so T-Mobile soaks you for wireless access: there are decent chairs, decent places to eat, an info desk, and Starbucks. (Starbucks are very useful for counteracting the Dramamine effect described above.)

3. Speaking of which: Dramamine. My paternal grandmother, from whom my father and I inherited the inner ear structure, told me that she hung over the side of the boat during the entire trip from Italy to America. I can’t even imagine this misery. I barfed from Boston to Indy once on a plane, and from Portsmouth to Halifax once on a boat, and I’m done with that. Better living through Chemistry.

4. The fact that it takes two hours to cover a distance that required 3 months and one of the aforementioned Conestoga wagons a mere 150 years ago. Above all else, we lose sight of this. No matter how much whining we do about the planes and security and the obnoxious passengers blah blah blah, we’re still not crammed together jouncing around below decks for 4 months. This reminds me of the recent cartoon TV commercial in which a very old man turns an electric light on and off and says something like “Why aren’t you all excited about this? When I saw this at the World’s Fair in 1904, I almost crapped ma' pants.”

Amen. Time to toodle over to the A Terminal.