Day01 == Departures and Arrivals

In order to make the flight from Charlotte, I had to wake up at 8 a.m. after having gotten to sleep long after midnight. I didn't like it.


And then I had to spend another 120 minutes administering my winter boots.

When I got to Charlotte-Douglas airport, I found this happening:

Anyway, I felt a little trepidation about flying...this was only my second time since 9/11 flying, so it was reassuring to see that the military might of the United States of America was accompanying me on this flight:

The flight ended up being OK. Here's what I wrote about it afterwards, at 4:40 p.m. CST today:

"I’m sitting in Houston’s Bush International Airport waiting for the last hour of my stay here to drain away. This place is so big that I can’t place it on the spectrum. It’s bigger than any building that I’ve ever heard of. They use trains to get around it. This building is big enough to warrant its own train tracks.

I found a corner of the terminal waiting-area mostly hidden from the bustle of the main thoroughfare by a column of sheet metal decorated by patterns of tear-drop dents. I lose my balance every time I look at it, because the tear-drops blur together like a Magic Eye puzzle into a perspective-defying optical illusion. I probably shouldn’t be sitting right next to it, but it’s the farthest spot from everyone else and I like it.

I just watched Fargo for the first time. This entire thousand-dollar adventure was worth it just for the opportunity to sit by myself and watch that movie. I’ve seen one or two other Coen brothers films, but the only one I can really remember much of is O Brother, Where Art Thou? I really like O Brother, but Fargo finally fits into place in my head. It seems to be the companion movie to Pulp Fiction, in that both are movies from the ’90s that stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Hollywood classics on all the big critics’ lists. I really want to see No Country For Old Men now.

I have about an hour before my flight is scheduled to depart. My gear is stretched out beside me like a pseudopod, taking up two extra seats. I had to take off my coats (count: three, but two are zipped together into one bulky layer), but I am already starting to get chilly in nothing but the airport air conditioning. I’m about five hours from stepping off the plane in Anchorage, and I’m just now realizing what a stupid idea this was. I am going to freeze. I am going to freeze to death up there. Why did you all let me do this? I could have watched Fargo at home.

I largely slept on the flight from Charlotte to Houston, but I was awake for what was probably the only interesting thing that happened all flight. Luckily, I was in the window seat, with the aisle seat occupied by a lovely old lady who was bringing five bags full of cookies to her children and grandchildren. She proved my aegis for the crisis. I was listening to music and staring out of the window at some weird lakes that looked like shiny cephalopod profiles when commotion at my right elbow made me pause my mp3 player. A large-shouldered fellow in a black jacket and a baseball cap was going crazy in the aisle next to me. Our lone stewardess was wearing a polite smile and wrestling the man upright. He seemed to be trying to collapse. Some helpful person (I couldn’t tell if he was a passenger or an airline employee) was holding him up from the front, while our stewardess tried to gain control of the situation from behind. I asked my elderly cookie-bearing friend what was wrong, but she didn’t know. She did help out, though, by grabbing the man’s jacket at the elbow until an adjacent seat could be vacated for him. I gathered that he had an attack of some altitude-induced palsy. He was sweating a lot behind the ear, and I never saw the whites of his eyes. After the volunteer squad got him to a seat, he immediately calmed down, and seemed relieved. I don’t know how he came to be standing in the aisle next to me. I’m glad I didn’t have to move.

Now it’s raining outside. I want to find things to take pictures of, but I am too afraid to leave my stuff here while being too lazy to pack it up with me. I did jog around the corner briefly to check the flight status just now, and I took a surreptitious picture of a lady wearing what could have been nothing other than a necklace composed of Christmas tree lights of alternating green, red and blue. After I took the picture, I got a suspicious look from a young pasty girl listening to her iPod a few seats down. I don’t know who she thinks she is. I bet she was listening to Nickelback.

My flight is about 40 minutes away, so I am going to pack all my stuff into my backpack and laptop case and re-administer the complicated network of zippers, pull-ties and looped clasps that constitutes my warm weather jacketing. This is because I have to pee. I think the bathroom is underneath a giant gaping swordfish’s head. Time to find out."

Now I'm sitting in a hostel near downtown Anchorage. It's 2:21 a.m. here, and the temperature is -9°F. Weather.com made me laugh just now. You know how forecasts often include the "X degrees, but it FEELS like X minus 10 degrees..."? Well, on the Weather.com page for Anchorage right now, the listing says:

-9°F
Feels Like
N/A°F

It is always a good sign when the perceptible conditions outside are not describable or comparable to anything within our measurement system.

My flight from Houston to here was uneventful. As we were boarding, the passenger who was to sit in the row behind mine made about twelve jokes about how fat he was. ("Oh no, who's the unlucky one who gets to sit next to the fatty?" "I saw your eyes widen when I walked up -- it's OK! I'm the fat one!" ad infinitum) I slept almost from the moment I sat down until we were an hour or so into the six-hour flight. I read some Moby-Dick, I read some The Name of the Rose, and I watched the last half of Shrek the Third on my adolescent neighbor's portable DVD player. Her mom, Kelley [sic], was a very nice woman who intermediated between my picky diet and the scrolling snack trolly, as well as giving me a few heads up regarding spots of interest around Anchorage (she's from here). To top it off, as I was waiting for my red suitcase to swing around the baggage carousel, she came and found me to give me her phone number in case I needed anything while I was here. Seriously! Now I feel bad about contemplating sticking a piece of paper in her sleeping daughter's mouth just to see if they'd kick me off the plane.

As difficult as it is to find a comfortable position to sleep on an airplane, some have it a lot worse...

As we approached Anchorage by air, the view through the window transformed from sheer blackness punctuated by a single light at the tip of the wing to a dazzling array of color pressing against the night. Anchorage looked like a flat Christmas tree after every box of lights from the attic has been untangled and strewn around it. I know frequent travelers are probably inured to the sight of a metropolis lit up at night, but to me it was stunning. But even though the city at night is a spectacle, but it was only the third coolest thing I saw as we came in to land.


Before you get to Anchorage (Alaska's largest city), you first have to cross the mountains. We flew right over the top, but I can imagine how great a natural barrier they'd be to anyone of more limited earthly conveyance. I had been fiddling with my mp3 player when I looked up and realized that what I had taken to be clouds on my peripheral were really the peaks of endless numbers of white mountain ranges. I was amazed, and still am. I've never really seen mountains before, I guess. I mean, I've seen a mountain, but never mountains. These were enormous and heaped up like frozen whipped cream. I felt disoriented because there was no way for me to tell how big they were, and thus no way to tell how far up from them I was. At first, looking down, it seemed that I could drop a rope of only a hundred feet or so and reach the higher of the peaks below me. Then I realized what the little black dot following underneath us was. The plane's shadow was about the size of a penny, which meant that we were still ridiculously high. I have no pictures of this, because it was too dark out, but if my mouth were a video lens, I'd have an uninterrupted feed of the landscape. The flight over the mountains alone has made this trip worth it. I stared agape until we passed them and came upon the illuminated network of Anchorage.

The other of the three coolest things I've ever seen appeared after our pilot had made his first pass by Anchorage and was looping back around for the landing. Airplanes of this size being hard to turn on a dime, we had to cut a wide circle out over the water, which afforde me as close a view as I'm ever likely to get of multitudes of ice floes in the night. Without much light, they looked like pale patches on a dark background, but when the plane angled sharply for the turn, some lights from the machine's belly fell across the water directly beneath my window, and all of a sudden what had been dull pale irregularities in the blackness lit up like electrified metal shavings. It didn't look real at all, and it was over in only a few minutes, but the shininess of the ice floes under the light of our airplane is not the kind of beauty I could predict. It was amazing to witness, and I couldn't think of anything else for like an hour. Not even the Ted Stevens International Airport Official Welcoming Polar Bear could distract me...


After paying for my first ever taxi ($12.50 for four miles??!) I humped all my gear up the stairs to the lobby of the Qupqugiaq Inn. This is a weird place. It's a lot nicer than the last hostel I stayed in (Chicago's International Hostel, 2005) in that it's more like a hotel than a summer camp, but it's still incredibly laid back (and cheap -- $214 for two weeks!) and they have an ethernet jack right outside my room. I don't really know my roommates at all much beyond their names: Peter (who went to college with a guy from Winston-Salem), Chino (who lives in Alaska working at a Lowe's Home Improvement store after getting married here two years ago) and Jose (who is significantly older than the rest of us). One thing I'll find out soon -- which of them like having their picture taken by a stranger and which don't.

As soon as I took a shower, I threw on as much of my warm weather gear as I could in under 11 minutes and started walking to Wal-Mart, ostensibly to buy an ethernet cable and some food, but mostly because I wanted to see Anchorage and I didn't want to wait until morning.

Anchorage is cold.

And it turns out that when you wrap up such as to fight this coldness, your (my) glasses fog up all the time. After spending half an hour or so in Wal-Mart eating bagels smeared with peanut butter, I started walking home. While walking through the parking lot, a voice came on the booming external speakers to announce, in a peevish tone, "Attention: break is over for all employees. Break is over for all employees, so get back to work." Not much longer after hearing that, I had to take off my glasses and walk home blind because my breathing fogged them over too badly to see anything. But it was worth it to walk around a mostly empty city in the middle of the night in the middle of winter (in the middle of negative nine degrees).



Then I came home and went to sleep goodnight!