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Weather, or not Heading Home, It's a Bumpy RideBy Rick Horowitz
I'd actually heard the word. Far down the airport corridor last Sunday afternoon, there was a TV monitor, and a man on the monitor was standing in front of a map, and the word that he said -- the word that I heard, even from that far away -- was "tornado." And I still got on the plane. The planes. Nashville to St. Louis, then St. Louis to Milwaukee. I'd cocked a half-attentive ear at the word, but never quite mustered the energy to do the next sensible thing, to walk the hundred feet or so down the hall to find out when. Or where. Or how many. Or how strong. Not at all. I'd simply heard the word and filed it away somewhere safe and stupid. What mattered was this: I'd been on the road long enough, and I wanted to go home. These are the thoughts that occur to you on a Sunday afternoon at cruising altitude, when you're not cruising as much as you're dodging and weaving, when you have no idea of all the damage being done down below, when your smallish aircraft is being ever-so-slightly tossed around up there -- a sudden climb, a sudden drop, with the constant possibility of worse to come. "You OK?" I say to the woman sitting next to me on the first flight. She's doing fine, she says. She was in an even smaller plane, a little Cessna, just days ago, she says, and the pilot set the controls to simulate turbulence. It was fine, she says; turbulence doesn't bother her. "And you?" she wonders. "I'm OK," I tell her. Which, to my astonishment, is nearly accurate. I'm less frantic than I am philosophical; I'd had an opportunity, after all, to skip this flight. They'd oversold it, and they had no seat for me. I could have left it at that and taken my chances on making some later flight. But I'd been on the road long enough, and I was tired, and I wanted to go home. So I'd put myself on the waiting list -- it was my decision, nobody forced me to do it -- and the waiting list eventually produced a seat: the very last seat, in the very last row. Which gave me something else to worry about besides the bumps and bounces: Assuming the pilot could bring this thing down safely in St. Louis, was I going to make my connection? I'd already been through the St. Louis airport twice that week, and each time I'd had to walk from one terminal to a different terminal, in a different part of the universe. I'd had enough time between flights on both my earlier visits, but this was a much tighter connection, and from the very last seat in the very last row, it would take forever to get off the plane. If my arrival gate wasn't very close to my departure gate, I was going to have a serious problem. Or so I told myself. More likely, it was a way to keep from focusing on those other serious problems -- the fact, for instance, that we were still bouncing even as we started our "final descent," or the fact that our landing gear was already down and we still hadn't caught the first glimpse of land through the gray soup that surrounded us. Finally the ground appeared, and seconds later, a runway. Then we were on the runway and at the gate and off the plane and speedwalking down the hall and -- Suddenly I had plenty of time. My plane to Milwaukee hadn't even arrived yet. It had been delayed by bad weather -- damaging winds, the desk agent said, and large hail. Mine was hardly the only flight that had been delayed, and they'd been canceling other flights throughout the day. Some of the people at my gate had been waiting there for six, seven, eight hours. And the flight to Milwaukee was also oversold, just as the other one had been, only this time I had a seat. They were looking for a volunteer to step aside until the following morning, and they were offering a $250 travel voucher, plus a free night at the Sheraton, plus dinner, plus breakfast. Not a bad deal, but I'd been on the road long enough, and I was tired, and I was coming down with something, and I just wanted to go home. Let someone else volunteer. These are the things you'll think about on a Sunday evening at cruising altitude, with thick black clouds piled high in the sky, and lightning bursting all around you. Posted 5/7/03. Get
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Rick Horowitz
