6/23/05 Flying to Portland

I sent this out to some friends in June (6/23) when I wrote it. It is from my trip to Portland. But it's so damn good that I want to post it here, as hey, I crack me up. So if you are reading my blog and you've already read the following well then scroll on, it's the same as before, except I have removed the name of my friend.

I wanted to come to Portland, for myself and the adventure of it for sure, but as the time grew closer and I talked to my friend, I knew I was more importantly coming here for her, my dear Unicorn friend. I call her that because she is something beyond typical human in a fragile but powerful sort of way, like I imagine Unicorns to be. At this time in her life she is buried underneath emotional sludge. Last time I was here she was doing fabulously, totally on track in her life and feeling incredible, and it was me who was a shelled-out, exhausted wreck emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, as the high school was only 6 months old and I was the seemingly sole caretaker of an oversized, demanding infant named New Samaritan High School. Last time I was here the weather was cold, it snowed, and I stayed on the couch for 3 days keeping warm and talking and drinking hot tea and sleeping when I felt like it. Visiting her helped to build me back up so I could take on another semester upon my return to AZ.

But this time I am better than I have ever been in my life, and it’s her that is in need of sanctuary. So I am it, bringing me to her, so we can bring her back to herself. Here I am at 2 a.m. on the couch by a large, brown dog, the sound of the small fountain trickling in the corner, the cool, moist air coming in the open window. I’m wrapped in the down comforter.

So tomorrow morning, in the back yard surrounded by wild Oregon greenery, we will have coffee out of pottery mugs. And we will begin to call out my friend from herself. I do so love pottery, it feels like stone to the skin, and the weight of it is lovely and solid in my hand.

But first let’s go back to the real beginning of this adventure – the airport. The flight to Portland looked to be boarding when I arrived at the gate; everyone was standing and the door to the furnace-hot walking tube was open. I felt lucky that pre-boarding had not yet begun, as I was taken to secondary inspection by the FBI. Okay, so they’re not the FBI, they are the TSA I think, but the flight nazis anyhow. They saw the screwdriver set on the x-ray. Yes, the miniature steel death tools in a little black box that I was going to wield on the plane… to open the back of my laptop to install the extra memory. SIGH. It didn’t even cross my mind that the damn things could be an issue.

I could take them… IF I checked them into my bag and checked the bag into cargo. But I wasn’t going to check a bag. Well Christ on a cross, what a total pain in the ass, okay, I’ll let you guys check my bag. And he was nice enough to loosen those two screws on the back of the laptop for me before I loaded them into my now-check-on-bag. Okay “nice enough,” AND the passenger is not allowed to touch the offending items of destruction once TSA has procured them. Apparently at that point in the transaction, the screwdriver set had become a ward of the federal government by power granted through the sub-contractor, TSA. So he was authorized to unscrew, but I wasn’t. Hm. Maybe next time I need a household item repaired I’ll take my repair item and the appropriate power tool through baggage check. Might just be worth the dollar-per-second parking garage fees. But then I find out OHHHH… you aren’t going to check my bag through for me like they do at the gate when it’s too big or when a stroller goes as far as it can go, you’re going to send me all the way back downstairs to the original ticket counter that I breezed by with the boarding pass I had printed that morning on line at I-fly-SWA.com. Well that certainly changes my casual I-can-walk-right-to-the-gate time frame, doesn’t it. But he has given me a conciliatory “fast pass” of sorts to come back through the line expediently when I return.

So back I go to the Southwest main check-in counter downstairs, where I need to wait for the next ticket agent, who tells me “If your bag doesn’t make this flight, then it will be available first thing in the morning.” My head snaps up, and upon checking with her, yes, she is serious, there is a good chance my bag will not make the flight. I imagine being there with no bag AND having my friend drive all the way back to the airport tomorrow just for my damn bag… and I pull the little death weapons out of the bag and say, “Forget it, it’s not worth it, I can buy a new set of these in Portland, and America will fly safely for another day.” I leave the ticketing agent standing at the baggage pass-through furrowing her brow and looking at the small black plastic case she has in her hand, to which as I walk away she is replying, “THIS is what they wanted to have you check your bag for?” And trying to be as not-bitchy as possible because I know none of this bullshit is really exactly any one particular person’s fault, not even Osama Bin Laden’s, I simply throw a “yes” over my shoulder as I zoom back toward the escalator with my un-checked bag.

Now for the love of God, there are seriously about 6 people in this part of the terminal that are actually travelers and not merely TSA employees. But the gal that is our first stop for clearance, who was ironically the SAME gal that was doing the same job in the same chair six minutes ago when I was last here, actually asks to see my I.D. and boarding pass. I smile, pull the same boarding pass and passport she has seen just 6 minutes prior to this, and say dryly, “Yes, it’s all still the same as it was when I was here six minutes ago.” I remind myself that again, this is no one’s fault in particular… And again, back into the plastic tub goes the laptop, after again pulling it out of it’s bag, and again putting that into a separate plastic tub. Again, back into another tub goes the offending bag. (I was actually bracing for a whole new round of inspection because I still have the bag that they sent me out to check, you’d think they’d notice that and get suspicious that I’m trying to pull some funny stuff, but apparently TSA’s policy requiring employee short-term memory loss is not discriminatory – everyone within the department equally forgets everything they have seen. I wonder if perhaps they have a memory flush cue of five minutes and I just missed the deadline… but I digress). Again, off go the tennis shoes, into their own plastic tub too. I really should have worn those flip flops.

So as I began before, when I got to the gate somewhat frazzled and sticky-hot due to the lovely weather we’ve been having, I felt very fortunate that they had not yet started loading, because everyone stood in lines poised to sprint down the furnace tube. I took my place in the “A” line, feeling very web-savvy and new millennium for having checked in on line that morning. 15 minutes later we learn of the air problem on the plane that they are “working on,” and not sure when they will be done. But rest-assured, they’ll keep us posted. An hour later, we boarded. But hey, the air was cranking. It was 9:45 pm. That means arrival into Portland at 12:15. The hour, although irritating, was productive; I did install my memory while I waited (alas, to this moment I have still not officially tightened the screws, and the safety of the guts of my laptop hangs precariously on the edge of gravitational force), played with a few photos, and begin a tutorial in Photoshop.

I couldn’t wait to sleep on the plane. I did, not very deeply, sort of that lucid dream-like thing where you are more asleep than not, but you hear everything around you. I have this nagging ego that prefers to not awaken with my mouth hanging open in that stupid sitting-up-asleep-person-on-a-plane fashion. Keeping myself from fully going under seems to be the only recourse when one is in the seat in front of the emergency exit row, because those seats do not recline. So I give up good rest, but I’m gonna have first shot at getting the hell out that door and sliding down the wing of the plane in an emergency, provided of course that the wing remains attached in said emergency. Anyway, I told the man next to me to please tap me when the fight attendant came by for an order, because after all the waiting preceded by all the rushing preceded by a workday with all the training of new employees, I was ravenously hungry. And Southwest had sent my drink tickets with my free pass, and by God I was going to use a few of these bad boys, because THIS time I had actually remembered to bring them!

My seat companion came through like a champ, as did my flight attendant, and I was set up with two bags of peanuts, three bags of Ritz bites, a diet Sprite and a Bailey’s rocks. (Well come on give me a break, I figured it was like a B-52 on the rocks without the Kahlua and without the Grand Marnier. It was the end of a long day and I approached it as liquid ice cream dessert on the rocks with a kick). So I lean out to pass my four tickets to the flight attendant guy and he says softly with a wink, “This first one’s on us.” Well isn’t that just hunky dory, a free drink! Welcome to vacation. I wasn’t going to seem ungrateful by sharing with him that I really was looking forward to using these tickets. I was only going to get one drink, but now I regroup and decide to use them for round two.

Round two, and again, he refuses my tickets. Okaaaaayy, I need to sleep, I do not need to get wasted by myself at twenty thousand feet at midnight, so I just give up after that and try to go back to sleep. Maybe I’ll try again on my trip home and I’ll get a militant attendant who’s not in the mood to “make my day.” The coupons do expire the last day of this year, and although I do not usually order alcoholic drinks on planes, just for the principle of it I don’t want the freebies to go to waste. However, I am getting the impression that when I explain next year that I couldn’t get anyone at their airline to take them in 2005, Southwest would honor them anyway. They are, afterall, the Luv Airline; I feel so loved. And a little buzzed.

As I disembarked, all I could do was give him a huge smile and a really genuine thank you so he knew that he had succeeded in both making me happy and making sure that I will again fly the friendly skies with SWA.

Tomorrow entails a trip to Powell’s bookstore, the best bookstore on the planet according to some, as long as you particularly go to the downtown Portland location. Four stories of pure literary bliss, complete with a coffee room and free wi-fi connection. Ahhhhhh.