Seat-belted into that Great and Frenzied Bathroom in the Sky

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein 

That must surely be the explanation.  I am insane.  I keep purchasing airline tickets, and keep expecting to arrive at my destination at the advertised time.  Sick, foolish, delusional me.  But if I am thusly afflicted, the disease appears to be contagious and epidemic.  We are crowding airports by the bejillions, sacrificing otherwise perfectly useful hours and larger and larger sums of money for the privilege of subjecting ourselves to degradation, humiliation, aggravation and disappointment on the illusory promise of "travel".  Just enough actual transport does occur to keep us tantalized enough to risk it again, but the bargain turns out to be more Faustian than rational.  I looked around in the Detroit airport in our layover between "flights" and felt this sickening realization of the depths of depravity to which this kind of "travel" reduces otherwise intelligent human beings.  All around us people were driveling nonsense into cell-phone conversations, somehow lobotomized by the process into forgetting that people were all around them listening in.  And running -- as though for their lives; dashing red-faced down escalators, pushing and shoving their way through the crowds, brainwashed to believe it might accrue to them some credit or measure of advantage. 

And of course it's utterly one-sided.  I never see airline personnel running.  If the "traveler" is even minutes late, the penalties are draconian.  But the airline recognizes no reciprocal constraint.  Maybe they will fly; maybe they won't -- and maybe it will happen at this or that gate.  They can't really say for sure.  But if they deign to make a go of it, you had better be there on the spot, ready to sardine yourself into that tube that may or may not eventually pull up its wheels.  Even the rubrics are Orwellian "double-speak" -- those fabled "on time departures" and "on time arrivals" the airlines strive so vigorously to achieve defined in no material way that bears any real resemblance to the time the passengers actually leave the ground or disembark from the plane.  Despite the second chances and benefits of the doubt that we seem continuously willing to extend to the airline industry, I've got to imagine that satisfaction rates are somewhere in the nether regions east of the decimal point on a scale of 1 - 10.  Insanity.

Our most recent outbreak of this disease occurred at the hands of Delta Airlines -- but not really; it was actually at the hands of Mesaba Airlines, the slow drip affiliate partner of Delta that "serves" our airport.  "Mesaba" I think being the native airline word translated, "Maybe; Maybe not."  I have always been amazed at how precisely to the minute airlines advertise departures and arrivals -- "6:21 a.m."; "8:03 p.m."  And I suppose their planes do take off and land at particular minutes -- they just make no guarantees as to the day on which it might happen, or whether it will be the a.m. or p.m. listed in the schedule.  

The truth of the matter is that we had a wonderful -- beautiful -- vacation in Vermont, with only two exceptions:  getting there, and getting home.  While adjectives flow effusively painting the memories of leaves and mountainsides and waterfalls and streams, I'll not even struggle to look for the words to actually describe the transportational debacle bookending either side.  "Numbing" is the only one that comes to mind.  One of these days I will realize how grateful I should be that I arrived home only 4 hours later than promised, just as I should appreciate beginning my vacation a mere 7 hours late.  I shouldn't complain about the smell of vomit left behind from a previous passenger's airsickness that meant flying home in the equivalent of a fraternity house bathroom on Sunday morning.  And to their credit, they did "serve" us that proud little pouch of peanuts with an accompanying thimble of pop, though I didn't dare consume them, lest my forced wedge into the Lilliputian "seat" become irreversible.  


Perhaps such experiences are leading me to the next big learning from all this reading and study I have been doing on the subject of terroir -- the taste of place and the importance of being intimately connected to a particular place.  The lesson could well be that I should stay closer to this place; that any considered destination which can't be reached within a reasonable time-frame by car should be the limited and well-vetted exception, rather than the matter-of-fact norm.  

Such a lifestyle may well be less exotic, but will surely involve less aggravation.  And restore me to some measure of sanity.