Alaska Diary Day One(ish) - Karma's A Bitch

Many people I know claim to be experts at procrastination; some even claim to be procrastination royalty.

Screw that noise – I am procrastination DIVINTY…

From paying an electric bill a couple hours before disconnection, to submitting assignments seconds before it’s due, no matter how high the stakes, I have waiting until the very last possible moment down to an art form. I blame mid-eighties television and You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown’s song Peter Rabbit for making it look so sexy to me as a child.

But for whatever reason, much like Charlie Brown, I DO work best under pressure. Which is why I put off all the final trip preparations until Monday and rose at 4am Tuesday after only a two-hour nap to feverishly finish my tasks before getting myself to the airport to check in for my 11:35 flight at 10:38am.

Fearing that I wouldn’t be there to run my card through the scanner right AT 10:35 I actually called American Airlines to make sure I’d be able to still check in for my flight with a little less than an hour to spare. They told me I had until 11:05. Luckily I didn’t have this knowledge until I was already just 30 minutes away!

My first flight from Orlando to Chicago, O’Hare showed me that the principles of Karma were still alive and well in the universe.

Stuck on an aisle seat (at least the price was GREAT!) I quickly found myself in the very epicenter of a plane-shaking swarm of jubilant teenage German exchange students. I use the term ‘students’ very loosely since they were on a trip through their school, but really it was a vacation with stops in multiple cities around the US.

As I struggled to sleep in the midst of their happy chatter, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a trip I’d been on many years earlier with some of my high school friends. It was a red-eye to Germany via Somewhere in France. We were embarking on a three-week student exchange to Freiburg, Germany. We were sharing our flight with a group of thoroughly exhausted French exchange students who were flying home from their foray into US culture. One of their excessively Drowsy Chaperones had the misfortune of having the seat directly behind mine.

She was trying to sleep, as I’ve since come to learn is customary on a red-eye flight, but HELLO – they shouldn’t have been showing comedic movies like Kirstie Alley’s Sibling Rivalry if they expected us to all just simmer down and go to sleep.

My laugh has gone through more developmental stages than my breasts (which I STILL haven’t forgiven my breasts for) and in the 10th through 12th grades it was probably at it’s most annoying. When I was in a laughing fit, I would start gasping for air but continue to ‘laugh’ on the inhale which catapulted my voice into registers that would have impressed the Metropolitan Opera company, if it weren’t for the fact that these high ‘notes’ coupled with my laughter resulted in the sound similar to that guinea pig running from a hyena that suddenly gets stuck in a tar pit where said guinea pig turns around and laughs at said hyena.

My friends used to laugh at my laughter. The red-eye was no different. I couldn’t tell you what Sibling Rivalry was about, only that my friends and I were so giddy about our pending adventure, the only volume we knew that night was LOUD.

And here I was in that poor French chaperone’s shoes so many years later. At least I didn’t kick the seats of the kids, glare angrily and huff at them. No, I merely shook my head, tried to sleep for an hour or so, and then eventually helped the flight attendant talk to them. She was doing that trick we all learn where she was just talking slowly and loudly but not using words or sentence structure that the kids would recognize, in spite of their impeccable English.

I dusted off some of my archaic German skills and played ‘translator’ for a while and hoped that this would be the last Karmic check I’d have to cash for a while…

Flight number two began in a somewhat promising fashion, but the deck was really stacked against me because I was in a middle seat. I nodded off for the first portion of the flight anyway, but suddenly found myself jolted into wakefulness when beverage service arrived.

I never recovered. I eventually surrendered to the inflight movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which almost put me back to sleep, but then actually became surprisingly engaging late in the second act. Damn British writing…

I thought I’d get some shuteye after it was over, but that was when Window Seat Guy woke up from his blessed slumber and asked what I thought of the film. Without ample rest to override my impulses, my jaded little inner screenwriter surfaced with my honest opinion. Something in my ‘lingo’ must have given away my pending education because his follow-up was, “Are you in the industry?”

Turns out, he sells Cannons to rental houses and does product demos for DPs and directors. Needless to say, there was absolutely no more sleep to acquired on that flight…

Two down one to go.

I was IN Seattle waiting for my final connection. The choices were a bagel and some of Seattle’s Best and blackest liquid energy in cup or some comfort clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl and local micro brew to lull me further into lethargy.

Door Number Two, please!
If you have not had Ivan’s Clam Chowder, I suggest you drop everything of so-called importance in your life and book a flight to Seattle IMMEDIATELY to consume this amazing local delicacy. For true sour dough connoisseurs, your mind will be plagued with the quandary of how to get this creamy nectar of the gods into a proper San Fransisco Pier 39 sour dough round. But delivery methods aside, Ivan’s is a more perfect food than a sweet potato in spite of what nutritionists might want you to believe. I mean, come on, there must be SOME reason so many people live in Seattle, especially now that they have planes and cars…

After leisurely consuming my reward for a day of hectic sleepless travel, I claimed my window seat and surrendered to a nearly two-hour long coma that lasted from before taxi and takeoff until the cabin was being prepared for our final descent.

Honestly, I wanted my first glimpse of Alaska…

The sun was still pretty bright at our cruising altitude but as the plane hurtled toward my final destination for the day we dipped below a blanket of clouds that was so thick, I began to wonder if I’d see any of this rugged state at all.

And finally there it was – shrouded in gray, but perfectly visible. The mountains, the trees, the wonton dipping and cutting of land into peaks, valleys and lakes where glaciers are still shaping the land like an unsatisfied artist who continues adding pigment to a canvas long after it’s been declared by critics to be a masterpiece.

I’ll admit, I’m really hoping for at least one sunny day while I’m here, but even in my barely sentient state, I had to concur, I was diving headfirst into a place of resplendent beauty.

Nearly 14 hours after checking in at MCO, I had finally reached my destination. Waiting for me near the baggage check was ‘the advance party,’ consisting of my brother Donovan, my sister Charlene and four members of her ‘posse’ including her newest masterpiece, my three-week old niece.

We stood there for some time chatting away until finally my brother asked where my luggage was. I motioned to my two carry-ons and told him that was all.

“I love military people,” he said with a big smile that made his face look even more like our father’s than I thought possible.

Charlene and her kids went to run a few errands and Donovan took me to his house to get my luggage offloaded. Then we drove downtown to join the party that makes Alaska the first state in the nation annually to celebrate July 4th – which coincidentally happens to be Donovan’s birthday. The first explosion lit up the night sky at exactly midnight.

I leaned over and said, “Happy Birthday!” and my brother, who I’ve only seen in person on one other occasion when he was just 11 years old, gave me a great big hug that cut through the chill of the damp evening.

We were sitting on the hood of his SUV in a packed parking lot overlooking the water, surrounded by mountains that made each eruption reverberate with an intensity comparable to colonial cannon fire. The thick misty night air caught the smoky black residue and held it in a solid clouded column. Subsequent flares ignited the plume as showers of sparks fell to the earth in no apparent pattern. The result looked like something from a science program about the formation of nebulae. It was beautiful in it’s own way and led our conversation to encompass space exploration.

Eventually we made it home through what might be some of the thickest traffic Juneau experiences during the course of a given year. Donovan opened the birthday present his roommate had waiting for him, an expertly crafted GO game possibly shipped all the way from Japan. I started to fall asleep on the couch to a comedy ventriloquist who wasn’t Jeff Dunham and finally excused myself to go get some sweet, sweet zees.

I’m not sure how late Donovan stayed up, doing some last minute cleaning so that his bachelor pad’s bathroom would be chic-ready for me in the morning. He’s still asleep.

I guess it’s safe to say, in my family, procrastination is truly hereditary;)