Two Christmas journeys in my past involved air travel. They are the reasons I avoid flights around the holidays.
Both were during the years I lived in rural northern Nevada, in a remote desert town that gets a dusting of snow maybe two days each winter. Very different from my home state of Michigan.
The first winter I lived in the desert, I drove 160 miles to Reno to catch a plane to Chicago en route home for Christmas. The journey home was uneventful. The return trip was something else.
I had just settled into my window seat at O’Hare Airport when a young man sat down beside me, placed a shoe box on his lap and buckled his seatbelt. I buckled up for what would be a long ride.
The guy silently made eye contact, then took the top off the shoe box to reveal that it was filled to the brim with a stack of photographs.
He glanced at me, picked up a snapshot and said, “This is my cousin Becky. She’s 12 now, but in this picture she’s 3. That’s her house in the background. They lived a block away from us in Manhattan. Not the one in New York. I mean Manhattan, Illinois. It’s a small town near Joliet. We used to drive there at least once a month to go shopping.”
His monologue about that image continued for at least five minutes. He was free-associating about picture No. 3 when the plane pulled away from the terminal. The takeoff did not interrupt his narration.
He talked nonstop through the nonstop flight to Reno. He never said what his name was, nor asked mine. I never said a word the entire flight. I tried closing my eyes and feigning sleep somewhere over Nebraska, but he just kept talking.
He ran out of pictures as the wheels chirped on the tarmac in Reno. His mouth, however, kept making sounds until he stood up and disappeared down the aisle.
At the baggage carousel, I hid behind other travelers, fearful he might return to haunt me. The long solo drive back to Winnemucca involved no spoken words, for which I was grateful.
Another winter while I lived in sagebrush country, I bought a cheaper flight out of Salt Lake City, which involved a six-hour drive to begin the journey home for the holidays.
Again, the flight east was uneventful. The return trip west was more complicated.
I landed in Chicago to hear that the Salt Lake City airport was fogged in, flights canceled. I waited hours in the O’Hare terminal, hoping the fog would clear at my far-off destination. Eventually, the airline announced it would pay for hotel rooms for delayed passengers, and perhaps we could fly out in the morning.
As the newspaper’s sole printing press operator, I felt an obligation to return on time, or there would be no newspaper. The twice-a-week Humboldt Sun hadn’t missed a day of publication since it launched a decade earlier.
So instead of sleeping peacefully in Chicago, I took the offered option of flying to Denver with the hope I could then catch a shorter flight to Salt Lake. When we landed in Denver, Salt Lake still was locked in by fog. Awaiting a change in the weather, I dozed fitfully on a bench in Stapleton Airport (this was in the 1980s, long before it was replaced by Denver International Airport).
Around 1 a.m., the airline announced Salt Lake still was closed, but it had arranged for me and other delayed passengers to take ground transport. I piled on a bus with other exhausted travelers for a grueling nine-hour ride via Wyoming.
We arrived in Salt Lake about the same time the delayed flight from Chicago landed. I regretted my choice to refuse the free room in the Windy City.
I jumped in my car and headed west through the expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats. After a pit stop in Wells, Nevada, I arrived home around 5 p.m., and immediately fell into bed. I woke up just in time to go to work.
After those two experiences, I haven’t been a fan of holiday air travel.