February 8. 2006 - The Homeward Journey

February 8. 2006 - The Homeward Journey

It's Sunday afternoon, January 29th. I'm waiting on Southwest Airlines flight 1085 Mineta International Airport, San Jose, California, outbound for Los Angeles Tom Bradley International Airport at 2:00 PM Pacific Standard time. I’m in the boarding area of gate A3 in possession of a boarding pass marked “A” thus insuring that I’ll be in the first third of the plane in an aisle seat, as is my preference, unless I opt for the rear hoping to gain a row to myself or at least a row with an empty middle seat. Today, the reason for my trip is occupying my thoughts and I’ve not been concentrating on what’s going on around me since IM dropped me off at the curb of Terminal A in front of the Southwest baggage check-in area, a mob scene of travelers queued up to offload bags. I passed the bedlam by and walked up the stairs to avoid an escalator full of travelers and beat most of them to a near-empty queue at the Southwest ticket counter. I check my one piece of luggage, get my boarding pass and then queue up in a security check point in front of gate A3. The queue is backed up to the Southwest counter. After waiting for a relatively short period considering the disarray of the two x-ray screening lines, I emerge at the front of the queue; place my notebook and my ASICs running shoes on the x-ray inspection treadmill and walk through the screening portal—no buzz as the only metal I have is by watch and small belt buckle. I collect my laptop, a slab Dell Latitude D505 slip it back into my Targus carrying case and lace up my ASICs. The guy standing beside the row of seats where I’m putting on my shoes is questioning why he had been selected to have his luggage looked through by a security gate guard. The guard replies that it was routine since the x-ray had picked up something not clearly discernable as banned or allowed and not to worry, it would take only a few second to verify the suspected item.

I leave before the search is completed and take a seat in the boarding lounge for Gate A3. The seating area is sparsely populated but I know this will change as the flight departure time gets closer. I’m a full hour ahead of the takeoff time. I set about opening a Wayport wireless hot-spot daily access ($6.95). By the time the registration and payment process completes—these servers are really slow—I finally get on and launch my company’s virtual private network (VPN) connection to access my Outlook e-mail server. Once linked in I send a note to my boss saying that I had to take an urgent flight home due to a family emergency. I had left a voice mail but wanted to follow-up with an e-mail to have a record of my request for accounting purposes. I also make some work related requests and press send. I click the send-receive operation then log off oblivious of what’s been happening around me as I sat absorbed in my computer screen. In that time, the “equipment”, a Boeing 737, to carry me on the first leg of my trip has arrived and disgorged its passengers. Meanwhile the three lines of passengers for my flight had queued up in lanes A, B, and C. I have to make my way to the end of lane A.

This is the first leg of a flight that will take me to my parent’s home in El Paso, Texas—I’m connecting with Southwest Flight 1577 in Los Angeles: the salmon beginning his homeward migration to the place that has had a lifelong pull on him, drawing him back periodically to reassure himself that his link to the past, to the early years of the 20th Century, remains vital and intact and, perhaps more important, that there remains one generation between him and the end of days. Lane A begins to move and we slowly file aboard the Boeing 737, the captain jumping the queue, smiling and saying “excuse me” every few lengths of the line until he clears the jetway and makes his way on board the plane turning left into the cockpit. He passes me as I near the end of the jetway and I board less than a minute after he enters. Down the center aisle of the 737 past the front row, I see an open aisle seat in row 2 on the port side of the aircraft. I take the seat, stow my laptop in the small space below the seat in front of me and strap myself in. The line behind me flows past jerkily toward the rear of the plane and it takes another ten to fifteen minutes before the ground crew comes aboard asking for a final seat count. The cabin crew had been walking down the aisle counting all the filled seats—or do they count the empty seats and subtract from a maximum total?—and return with a count: 98 I hear the cabin crew pass on to the ground representative.

A short time later, we push back from the terminal and the plane reverses at a right angle to the terminal onto the taxiway for runway right. The 737 begins to taxi heading for the end of the tarmac. The PA system blares the official notices that precede every airplane flight since I can remember. “This is a non-smoking flight… There are six exits aboard this Boeing 737…” I tune out the patter, which on Southwest is peppered with sardonic humor. Mercifully it concludes with the Captain’s voice declaring that we’ve been cleared for take off and that cabin attendants should take their seats. A minute or so later, the captain turns the nimble plane into a u-turn that brings us to the end of runway right, whereupon he rev’s the twin Pratt & Whitney engines to maximum thrust and we begin our pell-mell rush toward the end of the airfield the wheel recording each crack in the concrete with a noisy bang. As we pass the control tower at Mineta International, midway down the runway, the plane’s lift breaks the hold that keeps us terrestrial and we begin to rapidly pull up away from the fast approaching runway end and lightly traveled Highway 101 below. Somewhere nearing the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, we begin a U turn, in a steep spiral upward to gain altitude that will put us out of the flight path of oncoming northbound aircraft queuing up to land at Mineta, well south of Gilroy and Salinas. By the time we reach the 101-Interstate 85 Junction south of San Jose we are well on our way to our 33,000-ft cruising altitude,. We’re above cottony clouds drifting over the farmland and suburbs of Morgan Hill. The clouds are the remnants of a cold front that dropped a spattering of rain on the Bay Area after midnight.

As we reach our cruising altitude, more obligatory patter over the PA system about seat belts and freedom to move about the cabin. I’m distracted by the sight of the shimmering silvery surface of the Pacific visible out of the windows on the starboard side of the plane, reflecting the early-afternoon sun, orbiting low on the winter horizon as it makes its way toward Hawaii and the Asian continent beyond.

My journey is tinged with apprehension as I’m en route to visit my ailing mother, now a decade short of a hundreds years of age. She’s resting in an intensive care unit at William Beaumont General Hospital in El Paso near the base of the Franklin Mountains. Mom is no stranger to this military hospital. In her youth, she convalesced when my three sisters and I were all adolescents. The visit was etched in my memory because of the bag of candy my father gave us to assuage our hunger—strange what memories come to mind from childhood. Back then the hospital was largely fatigue-colored wooden barracks providing the various wards. My grandmother convalesced here too for a brief stay that sadly ended in her demise at the young age of 48. It was this same hospital that our still-born sister CA came into the world only to leave it as soon as she arrived.

The hospital is the lifeline for many World War II and Viet Nam era veterans and their dependents, my father and mother among them. Several years ago, the hospital found a blood infection in my mother that threatened to take her life, a malady that took months to diagnose and cure. She endured all these stays with the stoic resolve of a willful spirit, refusing to succumb. In recent times, she’s been in and out of the hospital to treat her acute high blood pressure no doubt the product of her chronic anxiety over the well being of her children, grand children and more recently her great grand children. Every natural disaster that afflicted California demanded a phone call to El Paso to assure her, her progeny was safe.

Sometime the year before last she was admitted to William Beaumont with acute shortness of breath. She had suffered a mild heart attack. I rushed home fearful that this might have been seriously debilitating. Though she was weakened by the assault, she pulled through with the doctors performing an angioplasty to clear a restricted artery. Remarkably, her heart had not been severely damaged though it was beating faster than the doctors would have liked. They decided not to put her through the dangerous procedure of stopping the heart and restarting it to return it to a more normal rhythm. The alternative was to slow the rhythm with a daily regimen of drugs. In recent times she has grown weary of that chemical regimen, her lifeline. She bounced back and was able to resume her daily routine, even managing to walk daily in the company of my sister or father though only a few blocks away from home and returning.

I had seen her at Christmas and she had contracted the cold or flu or whatever was affecting the western states this winter season. Both parents had been given flu shots and the ailment produced none of the classic flu symptoms, just a persistent cough that gave my mother fits at time. She managed to get herself back to health, getting over the ailment and returning to a routine that seemed normal. Then suddenly I get a call on Sunday morning the week before last at 10:00 o’clock. I had decided to delay my Sunday morning run, otherwise, I would not have been home to receive the call from my eldest sister, who has borne a great deal of the burden of my elderly parent’s ailments. Her call was to tell me my mother had been taken to intensive care after suffering another heart attack and was about to undergo another angioplasty. I immediately began making arrangements to find a flight out as we spoke by phone and I surfed the Southwest Airlines web site for available options. I told her I would be home by 7:30 this evening. She would be there to pick me up.

The Southwest Boeing 737 began its descent into the LA Basin over the Santa Monica Mountains: a low transverse range that runs approximately 40 miles west from Point Mugu in Ventura County east into the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. You drive over the range going south on 101 to get into LA from Ventura County. The PA chatter began again, something about beginning the initial descent… I watched the landscape of the Los Angeles Megalopolis pass swiftly below while the pilot made a number of turns that took us eastward to get into the landing pattern for LAX. He soon came on to tell the flight crew to take their seats and prepare for an on-time arrival. He then brought the 737 down in a perfect landing and was no sooner on the ground than making a left turn to exit on to the taxi way rushing toward the Southwest terminal. When the plane stops at the terminal and the jetway is extended to the plane’s forward compartment door, the passengers, me included streamed out and entered the chaos of the gate area within the bowels of the terminal. We were like seed cast into a wind tunnel with a series of exits which each would take at his or her or their own discretion. I was halfway home and anxious to be on my way.