EAST MONTPELIER – This coming Saturday morning, a Boeing 737 Max 8 bound for Denver will be taking off (or at least is scheduled to be taking off) from Logan Airport at 7:19 a.m. This means that my intrepid traveling companion, Bea, and I need to be at the United Airlines desk by 5:30 a.m. This means the cab taking us to the airport will be showing up in Nahant about 4:30. This means out of bed by 3:45 and breakfast later in the terminal.
The repercussions run backward for well over a day. The short description of Saturday is, as my kid used to say in the Coast Guard, on deck at O dark in the morning.
After a change in Denver, it’s off to Grand Junction about an hour later (I hope). Once there, we pick up a car that’s been reserved (I hope) and drive a couple of hours to Moab, Utah, where there’s a room reserved for us (I hope) at the local Marriott.
You can no doubt pick up my anxiety in all those hopes. The computerized web of logistics governing the travel of two elderly folks (one in a wheelchair at the airports) is so vast that, even though the charges for all those features have already been paid, we’re at the mercy of a great, impersonal tube (as Bea describes it) that sucks you in and eventually spits you out the other end (you hope), so you might as well relax.
Relaxing, however, is at the moment a little difficult. No one would ever guess that inside my peaceful-looking home, its eaves dripping with snow melted by the fast-strengthening afternoon sun, dithers a would-be modern-day Ulysses, consumed by the need to, as it were, get his ducks into a row before his Friday-noon departure.
The person who pops eternally into his mind, though, as he prepares, is not Ulysses, but Dwight D. Eisenhower, the director of probably the greatest military operation in history, the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Imagine the complexity: personnel, transportation, equipment, rations, ammunition, fuel, communications, medical supplies, weather, to name just a few of his concerns. But he had staff officers and they had officers to take care of the preparations. I’ve got one old guy who, though he has less capacity to handle complexity, has ever more of it to deal with.
I never had to pack a pill organizer when I was young. Now I do, and I have yet to get mine straight. I’m forever opening Thursday morning, for example, and finding an unidentified evening’s doses. The last time I spent several days in Massachusetts, I was nursing a quite serious leg infection. I cheerfully opened the organizer and discovered I’d done everything perfectly, except for the antibiotic, which I’d left behind. My comment at that moment is, as the 19th-century English explorers used to say, better imagined than described.
There are contingency plans for almost anything that can go wrong. Weather? We sit tight, wherever we are. Screwed-up reservations? We can find room somewhere. The cell phone has been an incredibly handy tool to have, as long as you’ve made sure to keep it charged. Lost luggage? I stow in my carry-on everything I’ll need for a couple of days of existence: toothbrush in a maximum three-ounce tube, pills, clean smalls, and charging cords for phone, hearing aids, and wrist watch. When Bea and I cohabit, the wires at night look like a thicket of sea snakes.
I check the likely weather where I’m going. After that, packing my duds is a piece of cake. I start with my feet: shoes (I wear ’em) and then work upward on my body, ending with a jacket and a cap that’ll stash in a jacket pocket. The pen knife that I carry everywhere, even though I no longer use a quill pen, has to go into my checked bag, otherwise it’ll get confiscated, along with the electronic luggage locator and any whiskey or maple syrup. I pack a bathing suit for the hotel pool.
I wear jeans for flying (remember wearing a jacket and tie?) because they have a cell phone pocket on one leg, and a long-sleeved shirt with two breast pockets, preferably with flaps. I don’t need a passport, but I’m used to carrying it, and security doesn’t peer at it the way they do my driver’s license (also necessary). Two car keys, one in my pocket, the other in my Dopp kit. I’m forgetting something here; no doubt about that. But it’ll come to me probably somewhere over Chicago. I’ll do a face-palm, and when I get a quizzical look from my seatmate, say something like, “Damn! I forgot my fritzit.” “No problem,” she’ll say. “I’ve brought two.”
This, my friends, is why I try never to travel alone.
