I spent a week in California at the end of March. A friend asked me to go along for the fun, her daughter was doing wedding stuff and we could view wedding dresses and venues and flowers. Sounded good to me. And the extra bonus would be spending three days with my niece, Kerstin, and her husband, John Koester, and their dog Andy, in San Francisco. Advice, don't ever pass up a trip to California if you need a coastal trip. I hadn't been there for awhile, mostly touch downs by layover planes in the last few years.
I usually opt for an aisle seat if I can, but I was lucky enough to have a window seat on this return trip and gave up soda and coffee for a four hours seated view to my left. You traverse the heavily populated twin cities metro area dotted with lakes for the first few minutes. And then cross over the flat lands and prairie and hundreds of other lakes of Southern Minnesota. My brother worked for Northwest for years and years, took advantage of those free stand-by flights, and often knew when the plane was flying close to our farm near Comfrey and the Jeffes petroglyphs. My parents and my aunt owned a piece of the Red Rock Ridge for years, passed it on later to us. It was probably the obvious piece of landscape that stuck out like a wave to my brother passing by on a plane. We played on that ridge. We rode horses on the ridge and bikes down the gravel road.
Once past the predictable farmland in MN, you can tell where the land changes in South Dakota showing off badlands and foothills the glaciers so eagerly left in their wake.
We sat on the either side of a very nervous young man, Jehovah Witness I might have wrongfully guessed as he was dressed in the JW garb of street ministers. He gouged me twice in the ribs with his elbows when we were first on the plane. Kept wringing his hands and smacking his forehead. He did not look up for conversation. I can usually assess who wants to talk and who doesn't want to talk in about five seconds sitting next to someone. I fall somewhere in between, thinking if the plane would crash in flight, at least I had said hello to the fellow next to me instead of acting like he didn't exist.
I decided he was even too nervous for a hello, and took a benadryl and drifted blissfully into la la land, although not quite asleep. Surreptitiously I watched him from veiled sleep, was about to ask him if he wanted a pill or three himself when we crossed over the Rockies and that landscape caught my attention for quite awhile.
I love how we have this great spans of land where no one has walked on or built on or cried on or loved on or even died on. There are places on this planet where, once again blissfully, no human foot or fool or foe has touched. It is there where my imagination lets loose to just weather: wind comes here, rain, too, and tons of snow. I had a third cousin who died when I was seventeen and pregnant with my first child. My life was set in stone. Hers was not. She was a free spirit, wild hair, few strings tying her to one place. I had met her once, a wild child with lofty ambitions of seeing the world and saving the world or maybe changing her mind about the last one and just living in the moment while seeing the world. She took a trip with a professor and some other students her first year of college. Small plane. Good conversation, I'm sure...the kind you have when you're just starting college and you have your professor up there on a pedestal with his/her ideas and philosophies and dreams. The plane went down. It took a long time for authorities to find the plane and the bodies. I hope Mary Ellis was holding on those dreams as she met the earth and realized it was time for some other plane.
Usually in the Rockies the clouds snag us and cover up the view. That day it was a bit hazy but clear enough to imagine the rocky life below.
Twice gouged in the side again, I took another benadryl and this time drifted into a near rocky mountain haze of my own. Two hours later, we were coming down out of the sky, I saw the old familiar east bay
hills where I lived for four or five years, caught sight of the San Mateo Bridge.
I always close my eyes when we go in for the landing across the bay. Kerstin's husband John said how many times have you heard of a plane smushing into the bay. None, that I could think of. But I bet there was at least one.
Fairly uneventful flight, save for the jabs in the ribs. When we were getting off the plane, the young man nervously gathered up his stuff, but just as he was heading for the aisle looked down and gave me a sneaky little smile that made me sit up. Huh, I thought. If he didn't want to talk to either of us, his ploy certainly worked.
Later, my friend Suzanne and I wondered if he had acted up on purpose the whole trip out. And that attached to his suit on his lap was a camera. And our nervous glances caught on video for all the world to see.
Probably not. We were just grateful he was not with us on the trip home.
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