Close Enough

Everybody has an airport story – that excruciating tale of waiting on the runway for four hours that's unique to everyone we know.

They’re among our favorite stories to tell because we’ve rehearsed them so often, perfected their timing and developed their characters. We can perfectly describe both the woman who filled two seats in row three and the man who somehow lost his barf bag. During each of our repeat performances, we remain confident that nobody can compare turbulence to a roller coaster quite like we can. Our accounts typically begin with subtle and understated openings like, “Not long ago I had to fly to . . .” and end with the self-conscious clincher, “well, it was just terrible.”

We usually tell these stories at parties, not because they’re particularly interesting or original, but because someone else opens the door with their own travel nightmare. And even though everyone in the kitchen is bored with the subject as soon as they’ve told their own tale, we’re convinced they’re still listening on the edge of their seats, sitting in an upright and locked position while we finish a monologue about our luggage being lost.

“Well,” we say, “it was just terrible.”

And by the time we’ve finished talking, everyone agrees. That really was just terrible.

**

After a recent trip to visit my family in Nashville, I was scheduled to land at New York’s LaGuardia airport. Half-way through the flight, 40,000 feet over impending doom, the pilot made the following announcement:

“Excuse me ladies and gentlemen. Please pardon the interruption, but we’re experiencing a few technical difficulties we’d like to make you aware of. Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with the plane. But our brakes don’t seem to be working . . . “

Being a man of words, I quickly applied an editorial ear to this announcement and gleaned the following key phrases. One of them feels a bit conspicuous, like it doesn’t belong with the others. You have to bend its corners to make it fit. Can you guess which one?

1. We’re experiencing technical difficulties
2. There’s nothing wrong with the plane
3. Our brakes don’t seem to be working

If we’re (1) experiencing technical difficulties and our (3) brakes don’t seem to be working, then it logically follows that there is something wrong with the plane. Feeding a metal tube full of passengers that small spoonful of sugar does not help the medicine go down.

I wonder if the captain of the Titanic, the pilot of the Hindenburg, or any of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew ever started a speech with “there’s nothing wrong with our ship, but...”

Consider a mother panda telling her tear stained daughter, “sweetheart, there’s no need to worry. We’re not going extinct... but there’s a reason you don’t have any friends.”

Or Santa mentioning during a staff meeting, “you all know that global warming is a complete ho-ho-hoax... but I was thinking that maybe we should make our uniforms with shorter sleeves next year.”

Or a Native American man saying to his son, “the nice white people said they don’t want our land... but if you were going to pack your four favorite things into a box, which four things would you choose?”

The “but” serves the same purpose in these speeches as it does on the human body. It’s just fleshy nonsense that does nothing but cushion an impending blow to your backside.

After the announcement, a wave of quiet panic swept through the cabin. The woman filling two seats in aisle three tightened her already strained seatbelt. A man holding a curious smelling sack excused himself from row twelve. While most of the passengers wondered why oxygen masks hadn’t already fallen from the ceiling, the passenger sitting in my seat wondered how the pilot discovered our brakes weren’t working.

Did he tap the left pedal and notice a sluggish response? Considering that objects in motion tend to stay in motion, would that really be cause for alarm? I suspect that driving a 400 ton passenger jet is not unlike managing a nuclear conflict – once it’s started, it’s probably difficult to stop – and for good reason. Principals like inertia, momentum, and gravity dictate that stopping suddenly at several thousand feet is an exceptionally bad idea. To be no longer moving forward is to be quickly moving downward. Stories of airplanes stopping suddenly usually end with words like “crash” and “tragedy.”

The pilot, however, wanted us to stop not immediately, but sometime shortly after reaching the airport. Unfortunately, the airport was as much of a problem as our broken airplane. The runways at New York’s LaGuardia Airport are apparently too short for a 400 ton jet hitting the ground at 160 mph to stop using only its emergency brakes. Errant planes at LaGuardia coast off the end of the pavement and drop into the East River, never to be seen again.

In an effort to save 200 passengers the trouble of using their seat cushions as flotation devices, our pilot radioed the tower and requested that our flight be re-routed to New York’s JFK airport, where the runways are longer and don’t force emergency brakes to work under such impossible deadlines.

Geographically, the change wasn’t significant. It wasn’t as if LaGuardia closed unexpectedly and forced planes to land in Los Angeles, 3000 miles away. Our flight was simply re-routed from one side of the city to the other. Only twelve miles apart, LaGuardia and JFK are as close to each other as a person’s elbows are to his knees. The same taxis, trains and shuttles connect them both to New York’s mid-section, home to the city’s Empire State Belly Button – one of the largest outies in the world.

Despite our broken brakes, several passengers seemed concerned not that we might experience a rough landing, but that the inflatable slide might dump us out at the wrong airport.

A college student pressed her call button and asked the already frazzled stewardess, “But what about our luggage? I mean, how are we supposed to get our bags?”

The stewardess paused and inhaled deeply through her nose. “The pilot thought it would be best if we all arrived together,” she said, “so he had your luggage re-routed to JFK as well.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “good.”

**

When our plane finally bumped onto the runway, several people jerked awake from long in-flight naps. They wondered why their fellow passengers applauded and cheered when the plane finally pulled to a stop. Were the lights and sirens escorting us down the runway celebrating ours as the one-millionth landing? Would there be prizes? Would we each be awarded a free membership in the mile-high club?

As old men stretched and young women collected their belongings, the pilot made his second big announcement of the evening. First he confirmed that we had just landed safely at JFK, stopping well before the end of the runway. He then announced that the airline had arranged for a shuttle to take us to LaGuardia.

A few tourists smiled, obviously believing this was good news.

The rest of us wondered, why would we ride a crowded bus to LaGuardia when for $2 the subway will take us from here to anywhere we want to go?

“Must we take the shuttle,” a passenger asked. “Will it be possible to retrieve our luggage and leave from here?”

“No,” came the reply. “According to FAA regulations, all luggage must be loaded onto the new airplane that will fly us to LaGuardia.”

Airplane? Fly? Had the airline that charged $25 for each of our bags and would soon deny us a small cup of free soda really arranged for an airplane to fly us the final 12 miles to LaGuardia?

According to the pilot whom we applauded only moments before, the answer was yes. He assured us, however, that this would be a relatively simple process:

As soon as our replacement plane landed (45 minutes) and it’s passengers unloaded (20 minutes), the cabin would be cleaned (15 minutes) and our luggage would be transferred while we re-boarded the new plane (30 minutes). We would then wait for clearance to take off (25 minutes) before we flew the final 12 miles to LaGuardia.

In other words, it would take the new airplane over two hours to shuttle us 12 miles.

A handicapped toddler could carry our luggage to LaGuardia faster than that.

This news raised the terror alert on our flight from an ever-present orange to a more realistic red. Even the love-starved co-ed with a boyfriend waiting at the wrong airport threatened to join our mutiny against the shuttle. In our solidarity, we would not allow the airline to hold our luggage hostage. We would not fall victim to their ill-conceived customer service. We would not add two needless hours to this already nightmarish trip.

Like Moses and Martin Luther King, Jr., we fought for our freedom.

“We have a right to ride the subway,” we cried.
“You can’t force us to the back of a bus!”
“Let our luggage go!”

When a stewardess started to cry, however, everything settled down quite a bit.

In reality, the angry passengers who complained did it mostly to each other. Their shouts were little more than the mumblings of tired and passive-aggressive passengers. A man in first class might have threatened to sharpen his seat-belt buckle into a shiv, but to my knowledge he never followed through with his plan.

Eventually, the jetway extended. Overhead compartments emptied as passengers shuffled to the front of the plane. A gate agent met us in the terminal. “Your luggage will be delivered to carousel three,” he said. “You win. You’re all free to go home.”

“But why,” he asked. “Why all the commotion? LaGuardia’s not that far away.”

An exhausted mother turned and smiled, wearily. “Sometimes,” she said, “when you don’t land where you thought you would – close is close enough.”

**

Once upon a time I would have called this attitude “under achieving.” I would have argued that as people built with divine purpose, we weren’t meant to smile wearily when life stops 12 miles short of where we think it should.

But that was back when things like potential and possibility seemed more definite than they really are – when the future was clear because it was still far away.

Now that the future is right in front of me, it’s terribly hazy.

Now I find myself asking my God and my resume’ to shuttle me safely to where I think I belong – to a patch of greener grass that I always assumed was mine. But maybe it isn’t mine. Maybe it never was. Maybe this patch of greener grass was grown for me.

Sometimes, when you don’t land where you thought you would, close is close enough.