Trans/plant/portation

Christmas Day, or rather, the last 45 minutes of it, were spent happily and wearily exchanging presents with my sister, her daughters, my best friend, Susanne, and my sister’s friend. Also in attendance were three dogs, two cats, and a very helpful hot tub in the back yard. Backing up to the morning, though. . .

The snow was coming down sideways. Quite unlike the movie of the same name. We had pulled into a Days Inn near the airport, but it wasn’t the Days Inn we thought it was, it was the bastard younger brother Days Inn, aka the Place to Have One’s Affair. A lovely wall length mirror stood proudly behind the bed, opposite another mirror, so that if desired, one could see oneself into actual infinity, doing whatever it was one chose to do with such an uh, hotel amenity. We did, more excitingly for us, have the benefit of cable television, and could finally catch up with Top Chef, since this was, of course, the first thing a person would want to watch after a week and a half with no television.

I shuffled out to the car and took off the latest 4 inches of snow. Susanne had checked the status of our flight before we headed to the airport 3 miles away. We slip-slided away and walked into the tiny but functional Spokane airport. Sitting on the tarmac, waiting for our flight to take off, we had no idea what lay ahead of us. I thought I was the smartest traveler in Walla Walla County. We sat on the tarmac, waiting to be de-iced, just 5 or 10 minutes, according to the pilot. And we sat. Sat, through the anti-icing, which will just take a few minutes, folks, and then we’ll be on our way. Someone please tell me the difference between de-ice and anti-ice. Isn’t de-icing, by definition, an anti-icing process?

We contined to sit. Our flight, which had been scheduled to take off at 6:15, actually lifted off at 7:30. We landed at Salt Lake City airport at 9:45 (losing an hour to the time zone change), precisely 5 minutes before our connection was due to depart, two gates over. Two gates. Roughly 100 feet apart. I could have teleported myself from our first aircraft to the gate and I would not have been fast enough. On Christmas, knowing 5 people from our flight were scheduled on the connection to JFK, Delta chose to leave the gate. Christ. Mas. An unhelpful gate agent pointed vaguely to the airport in response to my question about where we were now supposed to go. I told them directly that I found them thusly unhelpful and that I needed a more indicative answer, and was told “between gates 3 and 4.”

The space between gates 3 and 4 was not altogether unlike the magical train station stop 9 3/4 to catch the train to Hogwarts. A mythical space that you must find on faith alone. A small red laser told us what no person could:

1. that we had been bestowed with a $7 meal voucher from Delta Airlines, for our trouble

2. that our reassigned tickets would depart for JFK at 4:55pm, or, if you did the math, 7 hours later

My heart and my brain quickly worked out a deal wherein my heart would continue to beat if my brain could find a way out of this morass. In the meantime my face turned a holiday-inspired yet unfriendly shade of red. Susanne told me she would hang out in some chairs about 30 feet away while I talked to the staffer who had already done enough wrong in her job to warrant getting stuck working on Christmas morning.

She looked at our boarding passes, then looked at me with a blank stare that suggested she was actually an android, devoid of all feeling, caring, or sympathy for lowly humans like me. “That’s the next flight to JFK,” she said. She actually sounded like the robot in Small Miracle. See, child actors can make something of themselves! They can be gate attendants working on major holidays!

“That can’t be the next flight,” I argued, “that’s 7 hours from now. My watch had just ticked past 10:03am.

“No, that’s it,” she said.

“Can you at least type something into your keyboard so I feel like you’re looking for me?”

She obliged. “No. Nothing to JFK.”

“Have you looked at other airlines?”

“Yes.”

“What about Newark — EWR?”

“4:55.”

Okay, we were going to have to play 20 questions.

I rattled off other airports. “Philadelphia? IAD? BWI? LaGuardia? National Airport?”

“BWI — 4:55pm, Dulles, 4:35pm, Philly, 5:10pm, we don’t fly to LaGuardia today.”

“Hartford, Albany? There has to be something to the east coast.”

“There’s nothing to the east coast until this evening.” This was punctuated with a sigh. I must be so annoying to her right now.

“Look, I understand you don’t want to be here today,” I began, but she cut me off.

“Oh, I’m only here for the next hour, and then I get to go home.”

“Oh, then we’ll join you for our Christmas,” I exclaimed.

She was having none of it.

“Look,” I said, “my sister had major back surgery two days ago, and is now lying in bed unable to do anything and she needs me. I have to get out there sooner than this. You people sent the plane away early on Christmas! Do something for me here. This $7 meal voucher and flight 7 hours from now is not acceptable.”

She actually shrugged. Apparently not just on Christmas, flights don’t go out of Salt Lake until the late afternoon. I pointed to the people all around us.

“What the hell are they all here for then? They just want to show up early on CHRISTMAS because they love this airport?”

“I don’t know why they’re here.”

Wow. What this woman didn’t know could fill an airplane hangar.

“What about connections to New York? Do you go through Chicago?”

I said Chicago because it wasn’t on the east coast, because it was big, and because I have heard of it before. I said it before thinking about how I’ve run through it before, when I had two good knees and 40 fewer pounds to carry on my body. I regretted it before I said it, and my heart was like, “Brain, you are sucking with this negotiation crap right now!”

She started clicking the keys, mostly for her own amusement. “There’s a flight to O’Hare at 11am, connecting to JFK, arriving at 8:59pm.”

That was 2.5 hours before our other tickets showed we would arrive. I told her to reissue the tickets.

I walked over to Susanne, victorious. We might actually get 6 seconds of actual Christmas with the family. All this knowing that Christ’s birth probably happened in the summer anyway, but whatever. I won.

She looked at me and said quietly, “O’Hare?” Oh dear.

“It’ll be okay,” I promised, with absolutely no means to secure it.

It was, in fact, okay, if you take the version of “not awful, not good” for this use of the word. There were not enough free Delta cookies to make me feel better, even though our flights were on time and uneventful, and Susanne’s checked bag found us at the baggage claim in New York. To add insult to the long line of injury, Delta now no longer carries ginger ale. So now I’m hoping I someday throw up all over their planes because they didn’t have anything on board to quell my nausea, although I’m not nearly as motion-sickness prone as I was in my 20s.

My sister’s friend had sent a Chrysler sedan for us, so we drove up to her house in the roomiest car I could imagine existing at the end of this awful day. And then there was a last car ride from her house to my sister’s, and then we had the picturesque, if not hurried, present exchange moment. A couple of sweet butterscotch shots later, we were in the hot tub, in the crisp Connecticut air, enjoying 23:57 of Christmas. No thanks to the airline industry.

One 22-pound turkey, piles of mashed potatoes, stuffing made from Mom’s recipe, creamed spinach, and New York style cheesecake later, on the next day (which we had “decreed” Christmas), things were in full swing. I kept my sister on top of her pain medication, since she really had had back surgery on December 23, and made such each night I hopped in the tub for soothing my frayed nerves. We took the nieces duckpin bowling, an east coast tradition, wandered around the mall with them, and went to my favorite restaurant, Kings, in New Town (see post from August in the tags).

Michael, Susanne and I drove down to DC a few days later, hoping that 2009 will be good to us. I know the Hindus say that Karma never takes place in the same lifetime, but if there could be some good to come out of the frustration of having a ruined holiday, I am ready for it, I promise.

Let’s hear it for 2009!

This time last year, Susanne was mulling a job offer to move out to what we thought at the time was the West Coast. And what we thought at the time would be a cute little house in a quaint little town with lots of promise of new adventure and experiences. Also last year around now I was finally starting to recover from a surgery and a subsequent major infection. I was itching to get back to the office and sink my teeth into some projects.

our xmas eve abode

We received, in fact, all of our wishes. Susanne took the job, the house sure is cute from the outside, the town is indeed quaint, and we’ve had the new experience of purchasing and installing snow chains. We’ve also sampled some local wines and cuisine, met some new people, had a fun trip cross-country, and seen a major natural wonder up front and close.

Before we left DC, Susanne defended her dissertation and earned her Ph.D., we introduced our families to each other, we got married (twice, in fact), and hosted a whole slew of memorable parties and get-togethers with friends. I at least felt like a successful person loved by many and complete with two ACLs in my knees.

To say this past fall has been a let down would be a large understatement. It’s hard to move anywhere, let alone on the other side of a continent. It’s challenging to walk away from a very secure, well paying job and try to plant stakes with people who don’t know you or your reputation. It’s even more difficult to establish a new home on one good leg, and then you notice that all of these frustrations are combining with each other in this minestrone soup way and you can’t tell which flavor is which anymore, or what is really bugging you. Susanne had to get up to speed on the school, the climate of the college, the students, the new digs, and the increasingly grumpy partner. We have been stressed. We have been searching for the things that can sustain us — getting to know people, exploring our new environment, reveling in the nice things about our new town — but we do get tired and weary.

Spring holds promise. I know now that any such promise will come attached to things I’d rather not have to encounter, but it will be there nonetheless. Nothing so far in this life of mine has gone according to any sort of plan. I’ve learned more by trying to adapt or meet a challenge than I have in attempting to set things up a certain way and ticking off my lists item by item. So I adapt.

I remember the evening of my wedding, dancing with my darling, and thinking about all of what was ahead of us. Not just for 2008, but for 2018, and 28 and 38. There will be so much, and a lot of it won’t be easy, and I know that is tritely put. I am ready for the good things in 2009. They don’t have to come to me, necessarily, I’ll try to make them happen. I do seem to love a good struggle. There must be a fulfilling, good job out there for me. There must be a way to make our circumstances work — if not for 20 years, then maybe a few, in this town of many waters. I resolve to be positive-focused and forward-looking. But those things I thought of last July that I thought I would experience this fall — they haven’t happened, and either I adjust to new expectations, or I push harder to make things happen. In any case, I’m going to approach Spring 2009 differently than I did this fall. With the sense of adventure I felt on my wedding evening. Because life is what it is, and I might as well find a way to enjoy it.

Santa on a plane

Twas the morning of Christmas, and all o’er the land

Was a blanket of white snow, the height of twelve hands.

I brushed off the car with a frustrated grunt

As my fingers went numb and the snow was in lumps.

They clung to the car with the grip of a mule

And I fretted to self that this just wasn’t cool.

We trekked to the airport in the last dark of night

Hoping all would be well with our twosome of flights.

But the plane sat around, all too heavy with ice,

And we missed the connection, now our twosome was thrice.

We saw Spokane and Utah, we spied cities galore,

From Chicago to New York and the cold eastern shore.

With Susanne in her kerchief and I in my cap

There was no settling in for any sort of nap.

What a Christmas to spend in the bland airports four,

But we fin’ly arrived and were traveling no more.

The sibling was nestled all comf in her bed,

Her daughters conversant of sugar plums instead.

We sat in the hot tub and talked of the clatter,

And we knew once again that the chaos did not matter.

I looked to the sky for Santa’s red sleigh,

Saw the stars twinkling at me and thought back on the day.

While Delta was there to annoy us and suck,

The people we love are a source of good luck.

So we rise up and cheer at the end of this night,

Merry Christmas to all and to all a safe flight!

Witch Hazel -- away she goes!

The logic behind spending the night in a hotel near the Portland airport was obvious — we would be near the airport for our flight the next day. For while Susanne and I consider ourselves to be above average intelligence, we surely enjoy a good obvious moment. Sometimes what is right in front of one’s face proves elusive anyway, after all, despite the best intentions. Or road map.

Here is where our careful planning went wrong. More precisely, my careful planning. For while I traced our route from home to Powell’s bookstore, and from Powell’s to the nearest Burgerville, and from there to our airport hotel, I did not plan the route to the actual airport for the next morning. I figured, lazily, “it’s an airport hotel! How far will we have to go!”

Far, it seems, when one winds up driving around in circles. We could actually hear planes landing and taking off while we drove around a dark warehouse district. It would make sense for warehouses to set up near a hub of transportation, it’s true, but can’t these folks plant an airport sign or two?

We started off with a wakeup call at 5 a.m. that wouldn’t stop ringing until we’d picked up both phones in the room. Not sure if that’s brilliant or sadistic. We were operating on the premise that our flight was leaving at 6:45. Now I know the adage, since 9/11, that you’re supposed to leave two hours at the airport to get on your domestic flight, but come on, really?

Yes, Ev. Really.

So we’re driving around clueless at 5:48, knowing we’re right next to the darn airport. 

I come to a T intersection. There’s no street sign. We don’t know which way to go. So we try both options. I thought Susanne would know how to get there. She thought I would know how to get there. To say we were annoyed would be to grossly understate the situation.

I pull into a Howard Johnson’s, hoping I’m still in the city of Portland and haven’t somehow made my way down to Eugene. I hop inside and ask the concierge for the directions to the airport, in a way that clearly identifies me as a harried, stressed out, idiot of a person who is also not from this area. I brace for his answer, thinking the directions will look something like this:

He tells me to take a right out of the parking lot, go down three lights, and make a left.

That’s it?

Even better, the name of the road just outside the parking lot is Airport Way.

I could hear giggling from somewhere. I’m not sure it’s real or not. Or if it’s coming from me.

We make our way to the airport, find the extended parking, and scramble to the shuttle, grabbing our bags and coats. I press blindly at the car lock thingie on my keychain, locking it up as I run to the shuttle.

We made it! Susanne pulls out our itinerary. Our flight’s at 6:30. Not 6:45. 6:30 is in 20 minutes.

We didn’t make it. The Northwest computer laughs at us as we try to check in. The Northwest rep at the counter is really helpful though, and books us on a nonstop flight, getting us into Detroit about half an hour earlier than we would have with our original itinerary. Which, for $200 in changing flights fees . . . is nice?

We settle into the airport for some breakfast, since now we’ll have time for that instead of $3 trail mix and Sierra Mist on the plane. Portland airport has free Wi-Fi. How cool! We pass the time reading useless email and playing Facebook games. Ten minutes before boarding Susanne goes to get an iced tea, and I stress out again as folks are called to board and I don’t see her. Then, unlike in a romantic dream sequence, I see her walking down the corridor, carrying her tea, seeing the queue for the gate, and frowning. Apparently it is Training Day at Starbucks, and we all know how that movie ends. We get on the plane, promptly fall asleep with our necks in such a contorted position that we can not look directly ahead for the rest of the day, and wake up 3.7 hours later in the frigid tundra known as Michigan.

And away we go, on the hour-plus ride to my in-laws. They already knew the way there, fortunately for us.

Because we’re frugal people, Susanne and I booked our Thanksgiving flights in and out of Portland. Okay, so “frugal” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Flights in and out of Walla Walla’s regional airport, after all, run about $500 more than in and out of Portland. So throw in gas and a one-night hotel stay, and we’re still netting a savings. It’s a no-brainer, really.

But Portland holds other interest for us as well. The first two recommendations we had were to go to Powell’s City Block of Books, and Burgerville. Not necessarily in that order. Although as it turns out, that is the order in which we drove. If I’d gotten $5 for each trip over the Morrison Street bridge — I guess I’d have $10. Okay, chalk that up to another money-making idea that won’t work.

Burgerville in SE

Powell’s was pretty amazing. Books were arranged in that special way that only book nerds can manage — color-coded rooms housed major categories like social science, science fiction, etc. I think usability specialists would have a critique along the lines that the colors don’t actually have any intuitive connection to the organization, but maybe only Edward Tufte would care. If you know who Ed Tufte is, you can pay me $5. Hey, I’m looking for income wherever I can get it, and why should I have to send you money just because you can google the guy?

I limped through the orange section’s five aisles of cookbooks. Cookbooks by region. I discovered that fully a third of the Spanish cookbooks are unusable because there are so many fish and shellfish recipes, which Susanne can’t eat. I know it’s got a long coastline, but heck, does Spain think it’s the new Japan? Cookbooks for weddings. Okay, that’s the last thing anyone needs — you’re getting married and you think you should cook your own food? Don’t professional caterers have their own menus? Who’s buying these cookbooks, exactly? Celebrity cookbooks. “Celebrity” here means Food TV celebrities. Who cares? I can watch their shows for free and make what they make. Give me a real celebrity cookbook. Publish Kenny Roger’s cookbook. I want to see blackened, vodka chicken with jackass hangover sauce. I would make that chicken.

Susanne went upstairs to the politics section, looking for books to purchase so she can review them for future classes. So productive, that one. She bought nearly $300 worth, gleeful to be spending from her college allotment. She chatted up the cashier on how nice it is to spend someone else’s money. And of course the cashier quite agreed, growing dollar signs in her pupils that I found disturbing. I looked up at the chalkboard behind her head and saw that Powell’s takes a number of currencies — yen, euros, pounds — and has an updated exchange rate posted (hence the chalk). Let me get this straight — you happen to be in Portland, Oregon, and you see the sign and say hey, let me just pull out these 13,000 yen so I can get a copy of Toni Morrison’s latest! Thank goodness I walk around all day with foreign currency!

After taking our five sagging bags back to the car, we motored on over to Burgerville. There are multiple locations in the city, which I thought was something akin to there being multiple Lebanese Tavernas in the Washington, DC metro region. So I was thinking nice burger place. And then we drove up to the place in a section of town that looked a lot like west Baltimore. Let’s just say that there are a lot of air conditioner repairmen in SE Portland.

We were not expecting Burgerville to be a fast-food chain. It had the basic McDonald’s layout of front door, back door, drive through, and order counter. We sat down to a cheeseburger, a cheesebaconburger, a medium pile of sweet potato fries, and a Black Forest shake.

our Burgerville lunch

And it was very tasty. Indeed. It was just a bit empty, which made it depressing, especially in the midst of the closed-down auto parts shops and pockmarked street just outside. But still, a nearly perfect shake, even if I had to struggle to suck it up a bit, due to the chopped cherries in it. Bigger straw, please. It’s not like a bigger straw is going to make people think you’re trying to be Wendy’s, after all.

Next time we go to Portland we’ll have to find some other treasures. It looked like a fun city. Feel free to leave your recommendations here, and we’ll take them under advisement.

So we’re on our way to Michigan for the Thanksgiving holiday, which means we have to:

Drive through 80 miles of scrubland

Venture all too near the Bad Broccoli Paper Mill

Hack through the underbrush with worn machetes

Use the force to convince otherwise insistent State Troopers that no, they do not want to give us a ticket

Venture dangerously over the dotted middle line to pass slow moving trucks carrying evil potato missiles that threaten to launch themselves at our windshield, which hurtling around the curving Interstate 84 as we drive parallel to the Columbia River

Okay, only some of those things happened. But those potatoes looked menacing. They were from Oregon, so they had something to prove to the potatoes from Idaho. It’s a potato thing, you wouldn’t understand.

The drive was beautiful, with intermittent cirrus clouds drawn wispily across the sky. About an hour west-southwest of Walla Walla we first spotted Mt. Hood, all white-cloaked and almost invisible in the haze. In 38 years on planet Earth, I have never seen anything that tall that still had it’s feet on the ground. The Columbia glimmered back at us, sometimes higher than the road we were on, sometimes choppy with waves pushed by a strong wind, sometimes calm, almost looking like polished metal. I had wondered if the scrub brush and tumbleweeds would slowly give way to what I thought the Pacific Northwest more typically looked like, but I was sorely mistaken. It was like spring in upstate New York — blink and winter’s gone, replaced by tulips and greening lawns. It was just like that — we were in the desert, and in the space on 10 miles, it seemed, we were surrounded by tall conifers and nearly-bare trees, the fading colors of their leaves scattered on the ground like a carpet.

We drove past a few dams, a waterfall that didn’t send its stream all the way down, as if it was too tired to do so, and made our way into Portland, which after spending only a few hours there, seemed like a mix of Seattle style and Baltimore pacing, with several upscale areas to set it apart as its own space. 

Powell’s City Block of Books was pretty amazing: fewer books on five floors than one would think were actually there, but very well organized, unlike the stacks at the Strand in NYC. I am still getting used to the nonverbal nature of Northwesterners. If they’re in your way, do not say, “excuse me.” Lighting oneself on fire would probably be preferable to them. No, you should just stand there, breathing lightly, so as not to take any air they had expected would fill their own lungs. They will move when they see fit. To their credit, most of them give way after 10 second or so. What, are you in a hurry? Tsk tsk, must be from the East Coast.

Susanne went wild in the store, in her calm and intellectual way, of course. Many books piled into the cart, almost as if by magic. Most of them were for school use, but we did walk out with a cookbook on making meals from one’s local farmer’s market (it follows the seasons in a way that seems helpful), the new book by Toni Morrison, and a true crime tome from Ann Rule (I’m kind of addicted to the things).

We stopped next at the highly recommended Burgerville, and I hadn’t realized it was a local fast food chain. It seemed styled in the 1980s, yet was attempting to be retro to the 1950s, so it was kind of a plastic-y, neonized atmosphere, but with a glowing jukebox pumping out Oh Donna. Strange. The burgers were good for fast food, certainly beating out the Ice Burg in W2, but still not quite as good as the bison burger in town. The black forest milkshake however, well that was rather like heaven in a 12 ounce disposable cup. If heaven ever deigned to occur in such a circumstance.

We are now camped out near the airport so we can get on our very early flight tomorrow morning. Because remember, leaving Walla Walla is like walking to England with 20 pound weights strapped to your ankles. There’s a whole lot of ocean in the middle. We will leave at 7 tomorrow morning and touch down in Michigan at 4 in the afternoon, having practically seen no daylight. But there’s a turkey at the end of our tunnel.

Have a great holiday, everyone.

The airline industry is just not what it used to be. I know I’m not saying anything people don’t already know, but reading headlines about paying for each checked bag and not getting a tiny package of two mini-pretzels anymore is also not the same as living with the changes.

Take overhead containers on the planes themselves. There’s just no way to get your overnight bag in them, because everyone else’s overnight bags are already stuffed into them. I bet you could fit an olympic-sized swimming pool in the cargo areas at this point because all of our crap is sitting over our heads. Anything not to pay another $15 for a trip in a flying gas can.

I also want to ask: how much are the airlines saving on the peanuts and pretzels? Okay, okay, the answer is out there — $650,000. This multi-billion dollar industry is hurting, I understand, but when the flights are packed together and you’re hobbling through an airport on one bad leg and one that sounds like a bowl of Rice Crispies, with no time to get even the most depressing burger from Burger King Express (isn’t it already a scaled-down fast food restaurant? what the hell does “express” mean?), a bag of a few pretzels for your 5-hour flight is suddenly critically important. And sure, I could spend $9 on a cup of sulfurized fruit, yogurt, and granola, but the 10 hours of feeling stupid for paying top dollar for crap food doesn’t seem worth it.

After oversleeping past my 3:30 a.m. wake up, I groggily looked at my cell phone and screamed silently as I saw it was now 5:37. My flight was leaving Dulles Airport, site of the personally infamous 2005 Big Toe Mishap, 50 miles away from where I was. I cursed, stumbled to the computer and looked up the Airline’s customer service line. After 45 minutes of trying to explain I wanted to rebook my flight, I was told I had to go to the airport. Note to United Airlines: please redo your “help” protocol so you tell customers this information in the first 5 minutes and not the 45th!

I hopped in the rental car, along with the rest of the Beltway early morning rush hour traffic, and eventually I got to Dulles. I was happy to get on the plane, not so happy for the lack of leg room, and really not happy with my seatmate to the right. Seatmate to the Right had obviously showered not in water, as I hear is standard (see last post), but in tea tree oil and eucalyptus oil. She smelled like she’d screwed a koala, seriously, or like she was taking the best-defense-is-a-good-offense approach to the whole anti-perfume movement. I couldn’t even look out the window because putting my nostrils two inches closer to her body made me overwhelmed with the powerfully bad smell. It was like sitting next to an Aveda store after an earthquake. That flight was 5 and a half hours, people. Five and a half hours of TEA TREE OIL. And just to note — there is no bloody point to huffing tea tree oil, unless you want a bad headache in the middle of your forehead. So boys and girls, just say no to tea tree oil huffing, mkay?

My flight from Seattle to Spokane was less perfumatic, more turbulent. We had a flight attendant who had clearly previously been a performer at Cirque du Soleil, for she had amazing balance and control as the propellor plane dipped and weaved and bounced like it was Oscar de la Hoya in a fight. I could tell we were close to Walla Walla because

1. at 23,000 feet you can practically read the license plates on the cars below

2. I could almost smell the Bad Broccoli Plant

3. the wheat fields began appearing, like such:

wheat fields

Living in Washington for 8 weeks, it was almost familiar, though not really. But now I’m home, olfactory senses intact, big toe unbroken, and back in the arms of my honey.

Next post: getting through the Dulles Airport is a lot harder than it would seem to be.

How nice that cell phones come equipped with alarms you can set. So it was that my little LG Rumor phone woke us up at 5:30 so I could take Susanne to the airport. She’s set to teach tonight, after she flies to Denver, changes planes, lands in Spokane, drives 3 hours to Walla Walla and gets to exhale a couple of times before the debate begins.

I turned around at BWI and drove back to the lovely Michael’s house, checked email, and fell back asleep at 7:30. At 11 I groggily got up, walked through the closet and then connected guest bathroom. Turn on the hot and cold taps to the shower. Shuffle in. Stand under the water, fumbling for the shower gel. Then I transferred into “awake” from the semi-dream space of an odd-hour nap. (I call those “poison naps,” but that’s for another story.)

I am practiced at turning off the hot and cold taps together, for I greatly detest having a last spurt of too-hot or too-cold water just before I’m toweling off. Hey, it’s my shower, I get to be as controlling as I want. So, both taps closed. But water was still coming out the top of the shower. My brain was a little slow in computing that something was wrong. I opened and closed the cold water tap. Still flowing. I noticed that the pipe itself was turning, not just the handle. Uh-oh. Before I could really compute how to fix the problem, the faucet blew out of the wall like a torpedo and suddenly a hard jet of water was slamming across the shower and all over the wall, and then it took the 90 degree angle and raced across the bathroom onto the floor. It looked like this:

The shower unplugged

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. But it was quite the forceful thick stream of water! I called out to Michael’s roommate, who himself took a moment to realize someone was calling his name, and a little desperately. He gently knocked on the bathroom door. I was in the shower holding the water off with my back, draping the curtain over the front of me, in some stupid attempt to preserve my regular level of modesty. 

“Come in!”

He heard the pounding surf and asked what happened. I held up the faucet and four-inch section of pipe.

“Oh, shit,” he said. My thoughts exactly.

I asked him to find the water cut-off for the condo, since trying to put the pipe back in place didn’t work at all, what with the pound force of pressure working against me. I could hear him looking everywhere for the valve, next to the washer/dryer, the water heater, out on the back deck in the utility room. Nowhere. He thought maybe such a thing didn’t exist, but I’ve watched enough Holmes on Homes to know every house in America has a freaking cut-off valve for just such a water crisis. By this point I was standing outside the shower with my hand over the stream directing the water to the back corner of the shower stall, but the level of water was rising faster than the drain could take it away. Watching my left knee I moved a couple of towels onto the drenched floor to sop up the mess.

Michael’s roommate stuck his head back in the bathroom. “I can’t find it anywhere! He was starting to look a bit panicked. “Call Michael,” I shouted over the din. 

“I called his office three times.”

“Cell phone,” I shouted.

“Oh, right!” he shouted back at me.

At this point, 1.2 miles away, Michael saunters into his office, having a busy but productive morning at work. His assistant tells him his phone has been ringing off the hook. Michael also sees a message on his cell, and as he’s checking it, sees that his roommate has also been calling his desk. So he calls back, saying, “Hey there,” in a merry sing-song tone.

“No,” says the roommate, which at that moment became a shortcut for “stop talking and help me find the water cut off valve.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Michael, let me just say here that the word “nonplussed” came into existence in part because of him. For even when he’s livid, he’ll just tell you quietly that he is currently very angry, and that’s about it. If hothead is one polar extreme, Michael is fairly close to the other end.

He calmly directed his roommate as to the location of the cutoff, and I felt the water ease and then cease, dribbling out and then ending like a grizzly bear succumbing to a massive dose of tranquilizers from a scientist’s dart. 

I suppose this means I have not been a very good houseguest, so the plan now is to make a nice supper of lamb shank, roasted tomatoes and orzo, and a mixed green salad. I’ll need the water back on, of course.

Random assessment of things I’ve noticed since leaving W2 and visiting the DC Metro area:

1. It takes a hellishly long time to get out of the eastern half of Washington State, as if a stubborn forcefield is slowing us down, some kind of invisible quicksand we’ve found ourselves in. No, maybe it’s more like when you were a kid at the beach and you stood in the surf and sunk a quarter inch further into the sand with each crested wave. And then thinking that walking out of it when you were buried up to mid-calf would still be easy, but surprisingly wasn’t. It’s kind of like that.

Cute and fresh pumpkin

2. Being away for 8 weeks and coming back isn’t really like returning after 8 years, but enough has changed to make me feel like I’ve lost track of the goings on here. New construction, new coffeeshop (Peregrine has replaced the thieving Murky Coffee on 7th SE), new headlines about people I don’t remember.

3. I’m getting good at rushing through the introductions so I can find out how everyone REALLY is.

4. Space is so much tighter here than in the west, but for this Easterner, tight space = comforting, and loose space = lonesome. I am trying to rewire my brain, but it’s challenging (see #1 for description of challenging).

5. I really miss my friends. I am trying not to see Walla Walla as a space in which I lack friends, income, the joys of a good job, the feeling of being successful and attached to the larger world, but without any friends, income, or job, this is difficult. Lea said to me yesterday that the universe gently suggests to us to take a break when we need one, and when we ignore the gentle suggestions, it pretty much forces us to take that break. I don’t disagree with her. I’m going to do my best to insert a structure into my day, but to give my knee the rehabilitation that it needs, get into my writing whether I’m any good at it or not, be there for Susanne as she adjusts to her new work environment, and see where all of that takes me. Being back in DC for a time has been good so far at helping me see how much stress I’ve lived with while I’ve lived here the past 11 years, and to see that W2 might really be a way to get some decompression from all of that.

6. Getting such decompression requires that I adjust my values from where they’ve been — focus more on family and relationships, and less on the tropes of DC success, which haven’t actually made me happy.

7. I love trees. Driving under canopies, driving through stocky rolling hills knowing I’m never more than 20 miles from a river, lake, or ocean. Hearing crickets at night. I want to find some terrain near where we now live that I can identify with. And I want to find new sounds that are native to W2, or that will make me feel like I’ve come home after a trip away.

8. I love watching Susanne get really into a conversation with someone. She sometimes holds back in the beginning, listening and making her judgments, and then several minutes in she starts the back and forth volley of ideas. I wonder if that’s how she plays tennis.

Eastern Market building

9. People outside DC really don’t understand the comraderie between people who work together to make things happen here. How “mavericks” don’t necessarily make things better, and how “outsiders” need to spend so much time getting to know people here — becoming insiders, essentially — that they don’t actually change the fundamental way the system works. I wish we’d all stop pretending that people who know how to make law and enact policy are bad people be definition. They’re people who are good at their jobs, and there’s nothing wrong with effectively governing a nation.

10. I really wish I’d have gotten to be here for the next inaugural walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe I’ll watch it like a football game that you mute so you don’t have to hear the insipid reporting on the play by play.