Rosary Turbulence

9 May, 2023 | Seattle, US

The flight home was around ten hours, with the silver lining that I would recover the day I sacrificed to the God(s) of Timezones1 back in March.

After a rapid and direct train to the airport and a pretty straightforward run through security, I found that the sophisticated boarding strategy employed by the airline I chose was “just form one fucking enormous line”.

The flight crew made their best attempt at putting the cabin on a sleep schedule suitable for easing into Pacific Standard Time, but they were thwarted by some fairly heavy turbulence. Normally I could weather this as a heavy sleeper, but it was combined with my seat neighbor - who I am going to call George - working a rosary and praying with an enthusiasm that increased directly in proportion to how much we were being jostled around.

I’m generally not a social person on flights, but the Seattle politeness I grew up with precludes me from not engaging if someone else tries to be, which George did. And not just to me, but basically everyone nearby, in no less than four languages.

While his English was modest, I learned a lot about George in a short period of time. He and his family were from Taiwan, but had lived in the US for many years before returning. His son remained, was now a doctor on the east coast, and George was headed to Port Orchard for a family reunion of sorts. Some of this was communicated orally, but many of the details were revealed in a note - written in Chinese and English - which basically asked for help getting there.

Rick Steves has a rule and it is a good one - never check a bag if it can be helped at all. Pack less if you have to and just do laundry/buy stuff at the destination. I follow this rule whenever I can, but it wasn’t an option for this flight, and so it was I found myself standing around (along with 90% of the other passengers) waiting more than an hour for our luggage to appear.

A genuinely good and cool thing about most humans is that even a very limited shared experience can spontaneously generate a brief community. George eagerly took the opportunity to say hello to passengers that he had conversed with before (largely in Chinese or Korean) and we helped the less able folks nearby get the larger/heavier luggage off the carousel.

It was at this point George directly asked for my help and, remember all the times during my travels where people helped me out, I swore an oath to see that he got through the airport and on the right shuttle. He went so far as to call his son and put him on the phone with me, I think to ensure the request had been communicated accurately. George’s son was thankful and temporarily flummoxed (“who is this guy?”).

Compared to the bags, customs was a breeze. George had a green card from living here some time ago; which was good, as I am hardly an appropriate (or, frankly, competent) advocate for navigating the brutal, inhuman nightmare that is our immigration system.2

Just walking out of the terminal, a person in scrubs asked us to take a nasal swab. Turns out, despite the CDC effectively giving up on COVID a few days earlier, some state level efforts in Washington still exist. The swabs were anonymous - one could easily tell as they put them all in the same container and asked for zero identifiable information - with the goal of tracking new/incoming variants.

After chatting with the medical professionals, primarily expressing joy at the knowledge that not everyone is trying to pretend COVID isn’t a thing, I got swabbed. An eager George also got swabbed, possibly not understanding it was voluntary, but it could also be a result of the greater default social trust that the Taiwanese appear to have about medical matters - something that served that island nation pretty well during the pandemic.

The medical professionals that administered the swab were happy to tell me where the shuttle to Port Orchard was. In a rare bit of convenience,  atypical at Seatac Airport, the shuttle stop was right next to where we exited the terminal. I left George there and gave him my number, in case he needed more help or got stuck or lost.

This aberrant experience of convenience did not repeat on my attempts to get home. I walked to the light rail, past the second largest parking structure in the world, tapped on, and made it to the platform to discover the wait for the next train would be 28 minutes.

At this point, it’s unclear if our regional transit authority - Sound Transit - really likes transit at all, or desires to built it. Recently, they approved another sprawling parking garage, a project that amounts to an $8000 per driver, per year parking subsidy. And they are now trying to start all over again, after six years of planning, on the line from Westlake to Ballard. Voters approved this expansion in 2016 and, so far, no one has so much as lifted a shovel about it.3 Another set of environmental impact statements, another six year wait. Meanwhile, in the background, all of this is happening amid an absolutely skyrocketing pedestrian fatality rate:

It would have taken two hours to take the light rail home. It ended up being about 25 minutes by cab. In my defense, I really wanted to get back: