A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Stuck In Transit 

About forty minutes outside of Edmonton I felt the WestJet flight begin its descent. My ears popped. Ann and I had been aloft for four and a half hours. The Crooked 9 beckoned. Our own bed. More importantly, a merciful cigarette before we collected our checked luggage. Then the pilot announced that WS 619 might be diverted to Calgary because another aircraft was disabled on the YEG runway. Fortunately, he added, no one was hurt.

I didn’t care about other people in that moment. Oblivious to the elderly woman seated by the window and sharing my armrest and the litters of children in rows in front, behind and beside us, I said, “Fuck!” Possibly a titch too audibly. Our homecoming was already a week behind schedule.

We had flown Air Canada earlier in the month to Prince Edward Island. Our intention was to spend eight days with my sister Anne and her husband Al at their farmhouse overlooking Darnley Basin (the view from our bedroom window, including the billowing curtains, was essentially Wyeth’s Wind from the Sea) in Baltic, about ten minutes from the village of Kensington. Ann and I had not been east for a few years. Our national airline, a former Crown Corporation, blessed Ann and me with an extended stay.

You ain’t nuthin’ but a waitress in the sky. Evolving nomenclature has rendered the Replacements and Coffee, Tea or Me? moot. Air Canada’s flight attendants walked off the job protesting ten months of fruitless collective bargaining. Their union then defied a federal back-to-work order. Ann and I got jammed on departure day. The sticky issue was, in industry jargon, ground pay. We did not realize that flight attendants are akin to disc jockeys, paid for air time only. To us, should you be sporting company laundry, whether you’re in an airport concourse, a jetway or a jet, you should be paid for your time. Too many jobs come with hidden duties outside of the official Human Remains description. We’ve all been there. And the union had a lever: domestic travel demand has exploded due to the sorry state of affairs south of the Medicine Line in Trumpistan. It’s no crime to play the hand you’re dealt.

We were inconvenienced. And discombobulated because Ann and I always flip our switches on the day before we’re scheduled to leave someplace else. We start packing. But we were also serene (a state I visit too infrequently). There was no hotel room to vacate. No panic. Just more time to be had on a front porch overlooking a beautiful garden featuring trees named for my brother (Bob’s ashes in the root ball) and my father. Anne said our mother might get a crab (Ha!). My sister and I are the last of our immediate family. Old stories retold from new perspectives; time has passed, a generation is passing. Careening conversations, rants and wit amid sublime company. Al the scientist concocting Margaritas and Corpse Reviver No. 2s at five o’clock.

It's not hard to be a good guest, of course it really helps if you’re welcomed. Ann and I have a strategy. We contribute any way we can without disrupting our hosts’ established routines. Ann cooks. I clean. We try to blend in, otherwise we stay out of the way. We never turn up with special needs, rockstar riders. Diet? Yeah, we enjoy eating. Let us look after this restaurant meal or grocery order. No demands. No complaints.

Ann is the rational half of our dual dynamic. The sensible one. Following the pilot’s announcement, she checked the WestJet app on her iPhone. All YEG outbound flights had been delayed by an hour at least. However, the airport authority declared that the runway would be operational by nine p.m. The time showing on Ann’s phone was eight-fifty. We were cutting another unexpected and much more unpleasant stranding awfully close. 

Most of my advertising career as a production manager was illusory: I under-promised and over-delivered. I suppose my three failed marriages were the reverse. I asked a passing stewardess (Sorry!) if she’d heard any insider information from the cockpit. So polite, so gracious, such an enchanting know-nothing smile. That cigarette dangling in front of me had become some sort of twisted cat toy. An additional hour to dwell on an unavailable nicotine hit. Then I thought, “If I was running Edmonton International, I’d broadcast 'runway clear by nine' knowing my emergency crew would and could do the job by eight, eight-thirty. Give us all a little space to maneuver, unlike these expensive last-minute economy seats.”

Hitchcock never made a movie this suspenseful.        

                                      

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