Departures: East to the West: Part 2

Three degrees of Dave Otsuka, squared... Scenic Denver (airport)... Grumpiness-assisted elitism... Scenic Santa Fe (airport)...

On the Plane

I hadn't paid much attention to the young woman who sat down in the seat next to mine, except to hope that she wasn't going to raise a ruckus over my missing breakfast. She was talking with a friend of hers across the aisle, but I wasn't paying attention. I kept reading, ignoring the conversation beside me, a habit useful when one's commute involves riding a bus full of med students. Since Dave was sitting on my other side, he was further away from her than I was, so I was surprised when he revealed that he'd picked up some of her conversation. He addressed her, and said he hadn't especially meant to listen in on her conversation, but he had. And this person she and her friend were talking about, this person was a friend of Dave's, someone he'd gone to law school with. It turns out that Dave had been law school friends with this guy who was the (perhaps former) boyfriend of a friend of this woman sitting on the other side of me, who also turned out to be a lawyer. This was kind of spooky. It was doubly spooky because this was the second friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-David-Otsuka phenomenon I'd encountered in the last couple of days.

When we'd been setting up meeting arrangements on Friday, Dave had mentioned that he was trying to recruit one Tracy Loftesness, sister to David Loftesness, my friend and coworker. I'd mentioned this to David, and he'd remembered that his sister had been asking him (David) if he (David) knew me (me). I'd experienced the frisson of the paranoid who discovers that people have, in fact, been talking about him behind his back.

I thought back to the missing breakfast incident, and wondered if this lady had been really been ready to complain to a flight attendant about my missing meal--perhaps this was some lawyerly instinct. Dave had noticed that her breakfast looked different, and asked her about it. She said it was cous-cous. Cous-cous? We'd got boring old pancakes and sausage. Asked how she'd swung this, she replied that she was a vegetarian. Dave said he wasn't, but was thinking of becoming one, especially if it meant he got cous-cous. It occurred to me that perhaps I should start telling airlines about my food limitations. Let them know I'm on an all cous-cous diet, maybe.

Denver

When we de-planed at Denver, Bryan was waiting for us at the gate. He'd flown in to Denver from Chicago a few hours before. Together, we walked to the gate where our connecting flight to Santa Fe would take off. There was no sign of Brendan--he was supposed to be flying in from Los Angeles. Hungry, we got some Mexican food at a little place in the airport. The Mexican food that you get in the Denver airport is exactly what you'd expect.

We walked up to the gate, showed off our boarding passes, and walked to, not a plane, but another gate. Brendan was waiting for us there. Our plane wasn't exactly leaving from gate 61, it was leaving from gate 61-K, one of gate 61's several sub-gates. We walked though gate 61-K, which turned out to be a door that led outside. There we saw sky, tarmac, and a prop-driven plane; its door was hanging down, doing double-duty as the stairway that we would climb to enter the plane.

Photo: My travelling companions: Bryan, Brendan, and Dave

I mounted the stairs, entered the plane. Once, a few years ago, I managed to clonk my head on an airplane doorway while boarding. This time I remembered to duck my head while entering, but still clonked my head--the plane's ceiling was kind of low. Ow. There were only two seats per row, one on either side of the aisle. It was a small plane, I guess.

I mean, the plane didn't even have any flight attendant. The co-pilot said that we should knock on the cockpit door if we needed anything. When the safety instruction recording played, we would have to figure it out on our own, without any smiling attendant to show us how the complicated seat belt worked.

As I made my way to my seat near the rear of the plane, tilting my head so as not to clonk it on the ceiling, I heard Dave talking to two girls in the back row. "It looks like he's going to have to come all the way back." They laughed. I sat down across the aisle from Dave. After me came Brendan. He was also sitting in the back row, the only three-seat row. He would be sitting shoulder to shoulder with these two girls, who quickly revealed themselves to be spritzheads out of Chicago. There was an amusing exchange--to get to his seat, Brendan was going to have to step over one of the girls, the one sitting in the center seat. At first she tried getting up to help make way, managing to block him in the process. Then she giggled and sat down, laughing and reflecting aloud on the difficulty of the problem. Ideas were exchanged on this topic, and conversation declined from there. I followed it at first, listening, interjecting comments, and handing around cookies, but after a while allowed myself to drift away and look out the window. It was kind of sad--these two had travelled quite a bit. They'd visited all sorts of foreign countries. But when asked what they'd liked, the reply would be "Oh, the tower there was nice." "There were those mountains there; they were pretty." Things were nice. Things were pretty. If travel had broadened their minds, I shudder to think what they'd been like a few years ago.

The view from the window was pretty and nice. On the way to Denver, we'd flown over deserts, and I'd been amazed at the pinwheel swirls of the dunes. Now I looked down on scrubby desert again, with dramatic mountains rising. I looked at scarce streams, out-of-place lakes, and dams. I looked down on a smokestack with a flame rising from its top, and beheld the flame's flickering, crescent-shaped shadow. As we approached Santa Fe, the plane tilted way over for the approach, and I found myself looking down at a desert vista that filled the window. I looked down at a speckling of chapparal and dirty plants on a surface of pale dirt. I realized that I was in the West.

Santa Fe Airport

We clambered off the plane and into the Santa Fe airport. The airport was small, and looked as if it was made out of adobe. It couldn't really be made out of adobe. I rubbed my eyes. It still looked like adobe. I decided it must be a kind of fake adobe, and I decided to call it faux-dobe. It was a small airport--there wasn't a separate counter for the gate and the ticket counter--there was just the one counter. Just a counter, a waiting room, a diner, restrooms, a gate out back to where the planes would pull up, and a front door to where the cars were parked. Dave set about calling up the car rental place; I marvelled that he was so calm and effective when I was so grumpy and sleepy.

We went outside to wait for the van from the rental agency to pick us up. There was a dusty parking lot. There were a couple of low buildings. Behind us was the airport building, replete, I now saw, with a faux-dobe control tower. The sun shone down, but not oppresively; it was warm, but pleasant. I thought that Santa Fe must be pretty nice; then I looked around at all the dust and figured maybe I didn't know the whole story.

The van from the car-rental place showed up, we piled in, we began the long ride into Santa Fe. We drove a while, and found ourselves on what I thought of as the outskirts, but turned out to be the town proper. I thought of Santa Fe as a big place, perhaps because it's one of the few places in New Mexico that I've heard of. But it's not a big place at all. It's a dense cluster of boutiquy shops surrounded by an ugly sprawl of squat, dusty faux-dobe buildings. We were riding through these now. I saw squat, ugly warehouses. I saw a faux-dobe house of detention. I saw dusty alleyways between dusty buildings.

At least a good song was playing on the radio. It sounded like ska. That was better than I hoped for on the radio in New Mexico, one of these middle states. I peeked at the radio, trying to figure out what it was tuned to. The driver noticed my glance; either she figured I was looking at the radio because I didn't like what was playing, or else my glance made her realize that she didn't like what was playing. She changed the channel to something awful.

At the car-rental temple, Dave went through an ancient ritual, begging the acolytes for the key which would allow him to control our vehicle, making supplications for insurance (a sort of vehicular indulgence), and learning the Order's Mystery of the Airport Drop-off, by which we might leave the car at the airport--miles from the rental place--and escape the wrath of the gods for a paltry $25 offering.

Me, I wandered out to the parking lot and looked around. Here were adobe buildings colored coral and turquoise, just like all that New-Mexico-style decoration which had been in vogue for a while. I'd liked those decorations. Yet these buildings were ugly; their colors didn't really go that well with the dust. Still, I wondered what it was like for a region's distinctive architecture to be affordable in modern times. Like, I associate Victorians with San Francisco, but of course no-one builds those any more--they're kind of expensive. But adobe was obviously cheap. These adobe buildings were not trying to look good. Unlike Victorians, one didn't only get to see those buildings which someone had deemed worthy of preservation. They were warehouses; they were auto-body shops.

I picked up a real-estate magazine in the rental temple lobby. Flipping through it, it seems like the cheap houses are all adobe--it's only at the more expensive price levels that one finds a wider variety of materials and styles. Santa Fe prides itself on its artistic heritage, and the interior shots of the houses in these house ads show lots of paintings on the walls. One wonders if the paintings are included with the house upon purchase--if so, perhaps the purchaser should demand a discount. Actually, a lot of houses in the magazine look all right. They haven't been painted such strange colors; they don't clash with the color of the ever-present dust. This is wise.

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