I landed at Oakland airport on Friday night only five hours
late, arriving from Denver, not on my original itinerary. There were small
indications of trouble on that plane from the outset - a fat man in a loud
aloha shirt who kept bawling inanities, a problem with one of the two toilets,
the one at the front. We were told it was out of action, then - as lines grew
long and twitchy at the back - that we could use it on condition we did not do
"number 2" because of low water pressure. "Don't make me go in
there and check what you did," said the humorist in the cabin crew.
Three hours into the flight a small, elderly woman stood in
the open door of the defective toilet gesturing for help. She was having
trouble breathing. The flight attendants swung into action, clearing a seat at
the front for her across the aisle from me, working with inhalers and oxygen
tanks, parsing her limited English and her dozen boxes of pills to try to
understand her medical condition. The lady was very scared. When her lips
turned blue the decision was made to divert our flight to Denver.
The EMTs were on the spot and wheeled the breathless woman
away. We were promised a quick turnaround but - wait. Our plane was considered
overweight because we hadn't burned enough fuel in our shortened flight; the
mechanics were worried we had stressed the frame. And that toilet needed to be
fixed.
After a period of confusion we were given a new plane but no
departure time. Snow was coming down hard and the clock was ticking on how long
the crew would be allowed to remain on duty before a mandatory 8 hour break.
After we boarded the new plane. we spent an awful hour on
the tarmac de-icing and getting conflicting information. The blowhard in the
aloha shirt kept yelling, "We'll be grounded! We'll never leave
Denver!" He followed up these shouts with manic laughter. I finally leaned
over and requested that he stop these predictions; they weren't funny any more.
He wasn't happy with me but two minutes after he stopped announcing we would be
grounded the captain came on the intercom to tell us we had been cleared for
takeoff. After we got airborne, we were informed from the cabin that we had
been "two minutes" away from being told we could not leave Denver
that night.
Not as eerie as another of my adventures in the Bardo of Air
Travel, titles "What to Do When You Might Be Dead in Denver" that I
included in my collection Mysterious
Realities. But eerie enough. I had a new rowmate on the new plane, and we
were sharing the empty seat between us - the only empty seat on the plane - to
hold books and bottled water. When I put down my in-flight reading, a late
collection of the strange stories of Jorge Luis Borges titled The Book of Sand, she laid what looked
like a copy of a chapter from an academic book across it.
I asked, "How do you think your text is getting along
with Borges?" She had never heard of Borges, one of my favorite writers,
so I had to explain how, in jeweled short-form fantasy, the Argentine writer
takes us into the largest questions about reality. She now disclosed that her
text - on personality cults and institutions in Latin America - was homework
for a paper she is writing for a master's program. Argentina, Borges's country,
is one of the case studies. And the political history of Latin America can be as
fantastic as his stories.
The conversation took another unlikely and synchronistic
turn. My rowmate told me she had met the woman who developed a way to calm
cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse by keeping them moving on a serpentine path.
My mind was thrown back to a visit I made to a ranch in Mato Grosso decades ago
before Temple Grandin’s work was widely known. I watched cows being driven up
zigzag ramps to the platform where a slaughterer waited to crown them with a
sledgehammer. I described this to my rowmate.
The death blow might now be delivered in a different way, but – we agreed –the approach was similar. Like snaking round and round to get on a ride at Disneyworld. Or waiting in line to get on an airplane that might or might not follow its flight plan.
The death blow might now be delivered in a different way, but – we agreed –the approach was similar. Like snaking round and round to get on a ride at Disneyworld. Or waiting in line to get on an airplane that might or might not follow its flight plan.
Image: Serpentine chute for cattle on the way to slaughter
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