Start Blog, Leave Town

Wyoming Mts
Originally uploaded by Hodgram.

Yesterday I flew from Charlotte to Seattle. I am getting an early jump on retirement by just picking up -- on a whim, more or less -- and flying across the country to visit one of our daughters, her husband and their two children. It feels almost... irresponsible.

Fortunately, I have been adequately punished. Flying the Cincinatti to Seattle leg was physical torture (albeit a feast for the eyes). I am trying to imagine how much money and how many person-hours were spent designing a seating plan so extraordinarily uncomfortable. Granted, I am over 6 feet 3 inches tall, and granted the man next to me was a stocky soul whose left elbow spent most of the journey firmly planted in my ribs. But as far as I could tell, the only people on board not suffering some form of discomfort were children, nearly all of whom were too absorbed in their gameboys to notice much of anything else.

Oh, and as part of the seat design, Delta has created a single center aisle for the 737-800 (is that the number of seats??!!) that is just exactly wide enough for two slender people to have a rather intimate experience as they pass one another going to and from the bathrooms in the rear. I was going to say that no doubt it was designed to be exactly two inches wider than the beverage cart (do not even think about going to the bathroom while drinks and snacks are being served), but then I realized that the beverage cart was designed to be exactly two inches narrower than the aisle.

During the course of the flight I managed to drop a pouch containing my fancy new earphones (which really work, by the way) and my bluetooth headset on the floor under my seat. There was no way I could contort my own body to get a hand or even a foot to the areas where it might have gotten to; fortunately, the slender librarian from State College, PA, who had the aisle seat next to the big guy next to me, bravely dove to the floor and recovered my treasure.

I left my copy of Blue Arabesque, a marvelous memoir by the Minnesota writer Pat Hampl, in the pocket on the seat in front of me. Fortunately, I had finished it. If you are flying a Delta 737 between Seattle and Cincinatti in the next day or so and are seated in Row 23, Seat A, take a look. It is a hidden treasure for someone.

Despite their best efforts, though, Delta could not completely destroy the pleasure of flying yesterday. We flew through a cloudless sky almost all the way to Seattle (which was almost completely socked in, of course), and view like the one above were plentiful. I am alowing myself to imagine that the river toward the lower left corner of the shot is the Yellowstone. I find it oddly comforting that there are still vast stretches of this country that are all but uninhabitable by human beings. Though Lord knows, as I read every day, there is nothing on this planet we cannot alter for the worse, even without going near it.

The search for sanity made no progress yesterday, obviously.