"Mountains! ... I Had No Idea"
You get to know people pretty good when you're stuck in the car with them for two and half hours.
No matter how safe I drive, I’m more likely to be involved in an accident. That’s just stats.
Things didn’t start out so great with the sisters. Joan, the younger one – I assumed she was younger, though her hair was dyed and in some ways she wasn’t as sharp as her sister – said she’d been waiting for me.
This was probably true, and I wasn’t happy about it. I take pride in getting to the airport early, before the plane lands, even, but this time I was delayed by my own boss who wouldn’t stop talking to me (including telling me they were a mother-daughter duo instead of sisters) and a button I pushed inside the fancy car I was driving.
There’s nothing more to say about the latter except it pushed the seat go forward until my chest was pressed against the steering wheel. I like to exaggerate but that’s not what I’m doing now. While the seat moved forward, the steering wheel telescoped out toward me, so there I was, starting to feel like I might die this way or, at the very least, need to initiate a workers’ comp claim for punctured lungs.
Though I couldn’t have been tardy by more than two minutes, Joan wasn’t happy about it either. She acted annoyed, like she didn’t expect to have to wait for anyone. Including Ellen, her 90-year-old sister who’d come in on a different flight from an entirely different city.
“We have to pee,” Joan said at the curb, as I was loading their suitcases into the trunk. “We,” meaning Ellen.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m not in a hurry.”
“Well, I am,” said Joan.
Her impatience might have bothered me if I wasn’t 57 years old and hadn’t been dealing with all kinds of personalities over the past year. And somehow too – subconsciously, I think – the knowledge that that’s just how some people – a.k.a. me – behave when they’re anxious and stressed by airline travel.
When they returned from the restroom, there was a brief, minor conflict between the sisters about who was going to sit where. After it was settled, and Ellen loaded into the backseat, Joan looked at me and rolled her eyes.
Oh yes, I thought, these two were definitely siblings.
The mood changed almost immediately as we drove away from the airport. They quickly reviewed the highlights of their flights to Spokane, and pretty soon they were on common ground, identifying and empathizing with each other. I already liked them.
When you leave Spokane Internationals Airport, you get a magnificent view of Mt. Spokane. It’s almost as if this were intended by the people who decided to put the airport here.
I love this view – it reminds me I’m a Westerner now – and I’m always disappointed that people don’t notice it. The airline crews are too busy looking at their phones or talking about prickly passengers.
You can imagine how happy I was when I heard one of the sisters say…
“Mountains!”
“Those are the Selkirks,” I said. “The tallest one is Mt. Spokane.”
“Beautiful,” said Ellen. “I had no idea.”
(to be continued)