Making up for lost sanity

Whoever coined "The joy is in the journey" obviously never flew American Airlines. But "home" feels homier than ever

“Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses."

— David Whyte

On Thursday afternoon at 2:48 Eastern Daylight Time, I was standing before an alleged information kiosk in the always-chaotic chaotic Ronald Reagan National Airport, newly plunged into a state of rage so pure and defeatist it was practically meditative. I was pondering, with great hunger if no real intent, just how bad an idea it would be to leap over the American Airlines customer service desk and begin attacking people—two in particular—with a ballpoint pen, the most lethal-looking makeshift weapon I could see on the countertop though the thickening haze of my own despair.

I decided that this option, while ill-advised in practically any public place, would be an especially bad choice in an airport. The odds of a suddenly wanted person escaping from these properties are zero, and I would never be able to convince anyone in a court of law that I had been in the grip of literally uncontrollable anger, because everyone in an airport has that same excuse—especially during COVID-19, which God assured me in the shower yesterday is scheduled to last forever plus a bonus week. It has never more certain that anyone who looks happy in a commercial airport either just got laid somehow, is piss-drunk, or both.

After my Monday flight was canceled, the next one on offer, split into three legs, was Thursday at 6:30 a.m. This meant leaving Boulder on a bus at 3:27 a.m., which meant leaving home at 2:45 a.m. to walk about two kilometers with my luggage, fortuitously consisting of a single backpack and an unruly mood-mixture of anticipation and resentment. This combination is not unusual for me, but it was greatly amplified as I clambered onto the bus with a dozen or so other human-zombie hybrids.

The flights to Charlotte and D.C. were uneventful and arrived on time. But I got to D.C. at 2:28 p.m. for a 3:00 p.m. departure for Manchester, so I knew I had to hurry to the gate. Despite doing exactly that, the gate agents had closed the door to the jetway. And despite my explaining to the two assholes at the information desk that they were obligated to let me on the plane because this still-solvable mess was the result their scheduling issue, they basically laughed and said, “The next one leaves at 10:25.”

I know that in the world in which airline employees operate, routinely dissolving some seven and a half hours of some harried stranger’s life is just a fact of their own everyday lives, because there’s always another plane sometime, and every jilted passenger has a sob story for why they were late to their gate. But the plane I had paid to be on was still sitting on the ground, and the only response I got from these two clowns—who may as well have consisted of two shit-filled heads planted atop one inert, uniformed body—was “the door is closed.” When I told them “Doors can be opened,” their glares suggested I’d just bragged about banging one of their daughters.

I was almost too dumbfounded by how checked out of their jobs these two fuck-arounds were to get properly pissed at them; it was like something right out of a Seinfeld episode. Almost. Hence the vivid fantasy that included flinging myself over the desk (in one lightning-swift, ninja-style motion inaccessible to tired 51-year-olds…maybe) and stabbing people in the face with a pen with piston-like speed and force until everyone involved was either deceased or in cuffs. At the same time, I knew that an airport simply isn’t a good place to try such a stunt or even hint that you might be mulling it over. So I just ate the invisible 10-pound shit sandwich—free airport food!—found a seat in a corner, and fired off a complaint e-mail that probably would have kept me off the next plane, too, if anyone at American Airlines had read it in the seven-plus hours I was sitting in the terminal.

I’m certain I have never been more irate at customer-service personnel in any industry my life. And I probably don’t need to worry about them reading fuck-all considering how many people hate airlines enough to send them the electronic-verbal equivalent of a bloody, sliced-off human ear folded into the shape of a human hand offering an extended middle finger.

As long as I eventually made it, I told myself, all would be okay. I hadn’t missed anything at the other end yet, even if that terminus seemed to be receding toward Newfoundland faster than any commercial jetliner could approach it.

After I dispatched my love letter to the airline, I contacted the Turo guy I was renting a car from in Manchester, and for the second time in four days told him I had to reschedule the pick-up. I landed in New Hampshire just before midnight and was in my guest bedroom in Concord at a little after 1 a.m. With the two-hour time difference, I had spent about 21 hours in transit after nothing more than a short nap on Wednesday night.

Friday made up for all of this. In the morning, I met up with one of my oldest running friends, now a college coach, at the car dealership where he was getting some work done on his vehicle and had one of those gab sessions that somehow becomes more coherent and linear with every unavoidable, spastic conversational tangent.

I then met my parents and sister for a late lunch in the town of Northwood. This was the first time the four of us—the whole nuclear family—has been together at least ten years.

This is why I would have hitchhiked up the Eastern Seaboard to get to New Hampshire if necessary.

I got back to my Concord lodgings and did an 8-mile run in the dark, enjoying anew hints of the taste of my afternoon burger-and-fries repast. Scanning the East Concord lawns with my headlamp, I was quickly reminded of some of the differences between most of New Hampshire and the part of Colorado in which I live. Instead of those multipurpose BLM signs Boulderites buy online and post mostly to look good, I saw stuff like hand-painted wooden signs along the lines of FUCK JOE BIDEN AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM that were undoubtedly posted in one hundred percent sincerity. There is ample value in knowing what people are thinking before trying to impress them with bullshit, a concept most first-time visitors to northern New England have difficulty adapting to.

Saturday morning brought the promise of the New Hampshire High School Cross-Country Meet of Champions in Nashua, about 40 miles to the south on the Massachusetts border. I squeezed in a 25-minute run—I was running on fumes, but excitement helped negate some of that—and then met Dave Dunham at a coffee shop near the race site at noon. As in the previous day’s meeting with a different friend from my “real” running days, we caught up on the usual things, marveling over the fact that some people manage to become good in their dotage despite never being standouts as younger runners by simply not aging as quickly as others for apparently genetic reasons.

Dave is on crutches for a bit, but he was still moving faster than I was and was outwardly unbothered by his latest encounter with a surgeon’s blade. Some of the details about certain constancies change, but that’s really it.

I’ll save details about the meet itself for another post, but you can watch videos of the girls’ and boys’ races and hear me adding occasional, mostly germane babble in the background. Observing how the NewHampshireCrossCountry.com team assembles these productions using video from ten different camera locations (but only three different, obviously portable cameras) was almost like watching a second race unfold.

When I got back to Concord, I headed off with my host to his daughter’s 28th birthday party. I’ll skip describing most of what I saw there because, well, not all states have the same laws yet. I didn’t feel at all out of place being one of the only two of maybe twenty party attendees born before 1990. I left smelling as if I had just slept in a pile of burning hemp, but no big deal—I’d be able to sleep in until 5 a.m.

This morning—it’s Sunday, right?—I met up at 6 a.m. with a crew of guys who greet you as one of their own whether it’s been a week or a decade since the last ass-early group run you joined them for. We wound up doing twelve miles in calm, 25-degree weather, and it was by far the hilliest and longest run I have done in over three years. During a mile-long climb that gains about 400 vertical feet, we warded off our collective ennui by remarking how much worse it would be if Daylight Savings Time hadn’t just ended and we couldn’t see where the top was. Despite this run being mostly in the town of Bow, just south of Concord, I hadn’t been on these roads on foot since the 1980s.

On the downhill, once we were an hour in and tired and growing progressively dumber by the step, the conversation turned toward things middle-aged men notice most while wandering around in supermarkets. I’ll keep you all in suspense about the granular details, even though several of you were there.

Because I started the trip three days later than planned and a week isn’t a lot of time anyway, I’ve been tempted to delay my return until the end of the week. (With recent history as I guide, I may not be given a choice.) But I miss Rosie, and, not really to my surprise, I miss many of my two-legged comrades in Boulder too. It may not seem like a big deal to have your presence legitimately desired by multiple people in multiple places, but when your worldview tends toward the sullenly apocalyptic, that matters a lot. I spend a lot of time in my thirties and beyond traveling to faraway places as much to escape where I was as to be where I was going; that’s no longer the case, but my brain is still lagging behind in some ways.

In each of the three weeks before I got here, I logged about 70 miles. Almost all of that mileage was low-end aerobic pitter-pattering, but with so many of my friends dealing with serious injuries, I’m starting to feel as if not getting myself into a race is like sitting on a $500 gift card that expires on some unknown date between a few months and a year from now. If I don’t, I know that in a few years, or whenever I find myself too chronically beat up to rally past a jogging clip anymore, I’ll regret not having given it one more shot when I still could than I’ll regret any of the lousy times I’m almost assured of recording.

This isn’t an entirely new idea, just an increasingly urgent one, so I probably won’t mention considering racing anymore until I’ve actually done it. You know how a lot of people put off quitting a bad habit like smoking for one more day, week, whatever? I do that with track sessions. Next week, never the current one, is always the ideal time to start adding race prep to basic aerobic fitness.

But I’m not thinking primarily about how those maybe-races might turn out. I’m thinking about the amazing variety of people the big batch of races I ran in my younger life allowed me to meet. Really amazing. And my parents are a part of that, because none of this running crap was my idea.

I may not like the traveling part anymore—who wants to wear the same mask for 15 hours in a row?—but I like knowing that I enjoy being in multiple places around a variety of people. That shouldn’t be so astonishing, but it’s fine, even great, that it is.

Gratitude. I hope you people know how much I really do love some of you, because it’s not something I would ever publicly express.