when adventure comes knocking

When we were last together on Sunday, I was sitting in the Los Angeles Airport at 5:30 in the morning -- almost by myself.

My flight to Seattle was almost as lonely. Alaska's first class seats are arranged in a 2-2 configuration. But the virus has altered that formula. Seating is now 1-0-0-1. That means that half of the seats in First class remain unsold. 

That is how my flight to Seattle went -- with only six of us in the cabin.

It seemed as if everything was moving along just as it had been boringly planned. That was about to change for me. I was going to get the adventure I had hoped for.

When we landed in Seattle, my telephone informed me my flight to Redmond had been cancelled. I knew the reason why. From Los Angeles to Seattle, we saw nothing but smoke. There was not a single break until we were within 500 feet of landing in Seattle. That type of visibility presents problems for large aluminum tubes hurtling toward the ground at high speeds -- what we call airplanes.

There was a line of about fifty passengers waiting at the Alaska customer service desk. All with the same problem. Delayed or cancelled flights.

All flights to Redmond were cancelled. Alaska had booked me on an alternative route. I would fly back to San Francisco with the hope that the Redmond flight from there could make it through the smoke, though I was told the possibility was extremely low.

Rather than backtrack that far into California, I asked the service representative to check if there was a possibility that not all Portland flights had been cancelled. She found one. But she told me I would lose my first class seat. I took it.

The flight was short. Just an hour. But it was pregnant with social commentary. The coach cabin was jammed with refugees from cancelled flights. But I could see into the first class cabin. Those passengers had not been required to give up their sanitary ways. Thoughts of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie came to mind. Talk about social distancing.

But that was not my sole Marxist pondering of the day. After we landed, the flight attendant chirpily asked us to practice social distancing by not standing up before the people in the row ahead of us had moved 6 feet down the aisle. After we had been seated cheek to cheek for over an hour. "History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce."

And you already know what happened next, if you have been following the subtle arc this tale is taking. The last flight to Redmond from Portland had been cancelled while I was still in the air.

My options were limited. I could rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Bend -- or I could re-book my flight to Monday morning and spend the night in Portland. I chose the latter solely because I had been up since almost 3 in the morning and driving through smoke is not the wisest course when fatigue is your co-pilot.

Portland looked like London with smoke the consistency of Victorian fog. You could easily imagine Jack the Ripper lunging from his cover in a dark alley. It was a wise choice to wait.

But this morning the smoke was no better. I took the hotel shuttle to the airport fully knowing that bad news awaited me. I was wrong. My flight had been delayed, but it was not cancelled. As I walked away from the counter, I noticed the clerk had made a mistake on my boarding pass.

In the two minutes it took me to get back to her, my destiny had changed. The clerk informed me my flight was now cancelled with no prospect of later flights. I retrieved my luggage, paid Hertz the price of a first class ticket from Manzanillo to Los Angeles, and I was on my way through the smoke of scores of Oregon forest fires.

When one or two forest fires are burning in the summer here, you can actually see the plume of smoke and occasionally the tongues of fires devouring old and new growth without a pang of conscience. Not today. It was simply smoke. Everywhere.

No grand vistas. No insights into mother nature's grandest works. Not even a good view of oncoming traffic.

Fortunately, I did not get caught up in any evacuation traffic because there was very little traffic. It appears that others were not interested in joining my adventure through the great smokey mountains.

I love solving riddles. Getting from place to place is usually child's play. Not this week-end. It has turned out to be quite the interesting time. It is too bad that it comes at others' costs.

And a cost it is. Not calculating the loss of natural resources caused by these fires, they have burned homes, portions of cities, whole towns, and they have taken lives. The smoke is a nuisance for everyone. But there are others who have given up far more to these bonfires of the vanities. At least, one of the fires was caused by lightning. Others are still under investigation for their unusual frequency and origin.

The bottom line is I am now ensconced amongst my family. Together we can weather a lot. Even the weather.