Lost in Space and Time (The Checked-Beer Chronicles)
Note: beer does figure into this tale, but you have to let it ripen like a fine barley wine to realize the payoff.
Further note: readers have commented on social media about the typos and grammatical mistakes in this post. I don’t doubt it! I was delirious when I wrote it. So enjoy them as a bit of authenticity.
Even when things run smoothly, airports have a strange effect on the mind. They seem to exist in their own dimension—spectral nodes connected to one another in a semi-reality of fluorescent light and the murmurings of computer-generated announcements. But sometimes things don’t run smoothly and then things get really weird. Let me offer an example.
I settled into a nice aisle seat of a plane bound for New York this morning around 7:30. I begin the east coast swing of my book tour at Carton Brewing tomorrow. At about 8:00, the captain announced that they were cleaning the remnants of a bird off the plane. Whomever parked it the night before failed to notice the gore and wandered off. At 8:22 he announced that a part of the bird had been sucked into the engine. It is common to hit birds, but the morning’s events—discovering part of a carcass lodged in the engine first thing in the morning—were clearly new to this captain. He was surprisingly transparent about about was going on. Mainly, he didn’t know what the protocol was. Some time later he announced we had to deplane. Mechanics need specialized tools to explore bird debris, which Portland actually had—but unfortunately they could find no qualified mechanic to use them. He was flying down from Seattle and wouldn’t arrive until 12:30pm.
Please reschedule your flight.
I caught a lucky break. Although I was flying Delta, they’d managed to find us a flight on Alaska out of Seattle and we’d been booked. Awesome. It took a couple hours to get all that squared away, but by 12:15 we were wheels up on the way to Sea-Tac. I found the new gate in Seattle and we boarded. By 2:20 we’d be off. My aisle seat was gone and I was at the back of the plane, but no matter, I was still going to get to NYC by 10:30pm—reasonable enough.
The plane was full and we were settling down when the new captain, the Alaska captain, made an announcement: we were all going to have to deplane. The airplane had mechanical issues and they were going to have to jack it up and work on it. As Seattleites grumbled about their bad luck, refugees from the first flight started regaling them the details of our sad odyssey.
So now it’s 3 pm local time—two hours after my first plane would have reached New York—and we’re waiting to hear whether it will ever actually leave terminal N. My consciousness is congealing into rubber, and little shafts of multicolor light dance sound the periphery of my vision. I know this state. I’m entering the dissociative state of the airport world. My being is thinning and losing corporeality. Soon I will float around like a spirit trying to get back home.
Now the kicker is that I spent thirty bucks to check a special package: cans of the freshest fresh-hop Oregon beers I could find. The fine and lovely New Jersey-based writer John Holl is putting me up when (if) I ever get there. I thought that would be a fitting gift—a taste of the fleeting delight we near the hop fields enjoy. There’s some chance Delta managed to get that small box on this plane. If we switch planes again (or, god forbid, airlines), I despair anyone will ever see them again. And that would be the real tragedy to this whole situation.
Wish me well. Best case, I’ll be receiving that box at around midnight in the wheezing depths of JFK. But it’s all right. Airports exist outside time and space, so I’ll learn the truth in the bleary bright of a flickering light.
Update: as I finish this, they announced we’ll be boarding “in fifteen or twenty minutes.” It was the second time they announced that. Or was it. Anyway, I’m starting to float away, so