L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

Pt. 2: Tale of Woe and Tarmac

August 23, 2008 on 7:18 pm | In General Musing, Travel |

They say the rear-most seats are safest in a crash. This turned out to be of more than academic interest. But I get ahead of myself. My seat on the plane was so far back that I could enjoy a refreshing “blue mist” shower whenever someone flushed in the lavatory.

The woman in the window seat on my left was doing medium level sudokus. In pen. I was alarmed at first, but other than that she seemed completely sane and even friendly. On my right was young man doing crossword puzzles. In pen. Did I miss the notice about no pencils on airplanes? In trained hands, I’m sure a Ticonderoga #2 could be a deadly weapon.

We taxied to the runway. Familiar thrum of energy as the engines engage and the plane rumbles up to speed. Then we stopped. Some time later, a second attempt. Another stop. And we sit, waiting. Eventually, an announcement from the captain: One of the two engine generators is “having a problem” and we need to taxi back to the terminal so maintenance can look at it. Everyone groans. I wave goodbye to my connection in Detroit.

Three hours later, I’ve learned a number of things.

• Airplane seats shrink. It’s magic!
• Starbucks turkey rollups, despite a price that would suggest the meat has been lovingly carved with gilded knives from the breast of Howard Schultz himself, make one nostalgic for grade school paste.
• If you curl your thumb and forefinger into a little circle, you can make a camera obscura to project an image of the overhead light on your tray table. Try it!
• Penn Jillette is not quite the novelist he thinks he is (more on this later)

The captain comes back on the PA: Repeated attempts to fix the generator have failed. So they’ve decided they didn’t really need two generators after all and the hell with it. Let’s go to Detroit! Oh, and by the way, there are major thunderstorms in the area so we’re going to take a meandering lazy river route across the country “just to be safe.”

Another thirty minutes and we’re miraculously airborne and wondering which engine we should be watching for smoke.

The flight attendant cheerily announces that when we get to Detroit (or Indianapolis or Chicago or wherever the deadly storms are thinnest), everyone gets a meal voucher (not true). This makes me feel so much better. They should be comping us beers on the plane at the very least but we don’t get so much as a peanut.

Suddenly I have a craving for more paste.

See more like that one:

• Hand me that Dutchman
• Squeeze Play
• No Sailor Moon
• Feets Don't Fail Me Now
• File Not Found