This last drive, to DIA, is the terminal one. Or it could be, anyway, and there should be that sense of doom about it. Maybe we don’t see each other for another four months, half a year. Maybe I don’t ever see the girl again. But it doesn’t feel that way. After having driven so long and so far, we fall back into our habits, and this is just another part of the road trip.
We come full circle when, after
filling up on gas, Caitlin attempts to steer us in exactly the wrong
direction. As with the opening leg
of the journey, 1,700 miles ago in Middleburg, I have to coax her back on
track, and we have a laugh. And
then, after this, it’s freeway, and we can sit and not think a little while,
just covering ground.
At the Departures kiss-and-ride,
Caitlin helps me with the last minute repacking of my things, which is mostly
just us lingering for the sake of it.
Finally, I strap myself up with my gear, and we part ways. I turn around, for a parting shot.
“Hey, Caitlin.” I steal a line from
Tom Cruise. “I’ll see you in
another life, when we are both cats.”
I do not pull it off nearly as well
as I’d hoped. It’s a good line,
and certainly fitting enough, but it is too practiced. Anyway, hope she thought it was more
suave than I did, it’s the last I’ll see of the girl.
Now begins a painful, thirty-six or
so hour plane flight, on my own, and into the unknown. Well, perhaps not completely
unknown. I know I have a job. And perhaps a place to stay? Other than that, well… Yeah, I guess
there are still a lot of unknowns.
First hiccup comes during the
security screening. “Excuse me,
sir. Would you mind stepping out
of line?”
Shite.
 |
| Snacks for my trip, courtesy the Hoffmaster ladies. |
“Uh… Not that I know of?”
Well, she informs me, x-ray had
shown something with a blade on it in my bag. “It appears to be a corkscrew.”
Eff.
“Yeah, that’s right… Sorry. It’s in that pocket right there." She goes digging through my effects,
and I realize I have all sorts of probably suspicious-seeming stuff. Worst by far, before she gets to the
corkscrew, is my flask, which I’d completely forgotten about and which is
completely full of illicit shine, courtesy that lovable Renaissance man Chris
Plummer. The agent pulls out the
flask, gives it a hearty shake, shrugs and tosses it back into my bag, continuing
to rummage for that corkscrew with it’s tiny, one inch blade, obviously just
waiting to be used by some crazed wine enthusiast to slit throats…
So my prized wine key gets
confiscated. But shine gets
through, which will be important on my leg to Singapore, that twenty-one hour
bitchery of a flight.
The first leg of the flight is a
two and a half hour hop over to LAX on what turns out to be a cramped Frontier Airlines
flight for everyone but myself and the young professional, Austin, with whom I
share the back row of the plane, the two of us spread out over three seats. I’d meant to sleep on the flight, what
with not having gotten much shuteye the night before, and even do doze for the
first half hour, nodding over my current reading, The Proud Highway: The
Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, a
collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s “fear and loathing” letters.
Anyhow, Austin takes up an interest
in the book, and asks if he may flip through it while I sleep. I consent and, upon rousing myself
after a brief power nap, Austin and I use Thompson as a jumping-off point to
have a long, meandering conversation, waxing philosophical. Austin is an overt and talkative type,
a young guy but perhaps a bit older than me, and much better put together. It’s a good talk, and the time passes
quickly.
As we disembark from the plane,
with Austin headed out into the city and me headed to International Departures,
he kindly extends an offer, knowing the general state of my financial affairs.
“Look, I’d like to help out in some
small way. Let me buy you some
snacks or junk food or whatever you want for the flight to Singapore.”
Good Lord, I am such a walking
charity case. Though I hate to
admit it, I can’t deny how much I’ve relied on that whole Blanche Dubois
“kindness of strangers” thing to get where I am now, and I think Austin senses
this. I put up token resistence,
but get a very definitive-sounding “I won’t take no for an answer.”
 |
| A thousand miles of Pacific coast on the underbelly of the continent. |
Austin is on his way to baggage
claims and I’m off to make my connection, so we exchange contact info, shake
hands and linger a minute over the topic of our mutual adoration
of Lana del Rey. Finally, we go
our separate ways, me headed into the belly of the beast, getting lost for a
few hours of layover in LAX, the last American outpost before I go
international.
* *
*
The next day is a walking
nightmare, a weird smearing of insane amounts of bad airline food (five meals
in total, by my reckoning), good in flight movies (The Master, Lincoln,
Raging Bull, The Dark Knight Rises and, to
numb my mind for the last few hours, The Expendables II), shit sleep, cramped quarters and a general sense
of atrophy. There’s an hour-long
stopover in Tokyo, and a four-hour layover in Singapore at three in the
morning, and I sit down and read and watch as, slowly, the airport comes to
life, and the ranks of the few stragglers like me who still have a connection
to make are bolstered by the rest of those headed south.
The last leg of my journey is a
seven hour flight into Adelaide, spent next to a fat Australian who’s not much
for talking, with a Singapore woman’s seat reclined into my lap. It’s so early in the morning that
everyone pulls their shades down to try and get some shuteye. Everyone but me, who hasn’t hardly
slept in days and who’s too strung out to start doing anything about it now,
and who everyone keeps asking to pull his shade down. But to Hell with them, I want to see the damn thing, when it comes roaring into view.
 |
| Ada. |
But even this doesn’t do the
enormity of it justice, and it’s only when we come up the underbelly of the continent
and turn east with the miles of coast and surreal Pacific waters that it sinks
in, and sets my heart racing and me catching my breath like a sucker punch in the gut.
Good Lord, Adelaide comes roaring
into view.
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