these foolish things

The phone rang at 10:30 last night -- Christmas night -- and Dennis answered. He sucked in his breath and said, "You'd better talk to Anne." It was a woman from the airport, almost in tears, telling us that our morning flight had been canceled. She said that the morning flight had been delayed or canceled three days in a row, and that she pretty much hadn't left the airport in five days.

She spent many minutes trying to reroute us, explaining how they had tried to get a bus to take everyone to the Green Bay airport in the morning but that the bus driver had bailed. She looked to see if any flights were available out of Green Bay. No. Marquette? No. Rhinelander? Yes! And it is a flight out at a human hour, 10:45am, which is Central Time, too, so 11:45am our time (psychologically), meaning that we didn't have to leave for the drive until almost 8am, to give us three hours of safe time to get there. Plus... because this is now the third flight we've been promised, we got sweetly upgraded to first class for both of the longer flights coming and going. Well, okay. When I got off the phone, I sent a thank you note to Melinda, the woman who had helped us. Now if only she could ensure our bus-to-ferry connection once we get there.

The drive down this morning was beautiful. Picture every Christmas card or child's book you've ever held that had a "Winter Wonderland" scene in it, and that was us. The roads were clear, there were bits and pieces of light snow falling here and there around Painesdale and Watersmeet, but all the trees were thickly dusted and the long views of the Ontonagon River Valley were gentled with the edgings of white and the low grey sky. Eventually as dawn came on the crows appeared, doing lookout from the white pines or digging in the banks on the roadsides.

I hope Dennis didn't mind that I needed to sing, the mix CDs keeping me going. (Thank heavens for Cole Porter.)

Now we sit in the Rhinelander airport, an hour to go, a blue-tiled waterfall-fountain making us doze against the other background noise of the TSA folk checking people's luggage. I think of Allan Heaps and Karla Kitalong, with whom I drove back from a Computers & Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri many years ago now. Allan wanted to save money by not staying another night in a hotel, so we -- he -- drove all night, fueled by bridge mix he bought just north of the Wisconsin/Illinois border. By the time we got to Rhinelander it was close to 4am. Allan and Karla were in the front seat, shouting "Rhinelander" over and over in different accents, making each other crack up. They settled finally on a sort of Germanic accent, thick and authoritative in spite of their giggles. This morning I started the chant of it as soon as we saw the first road sign. Dennis didn't remember the story, and certainly didn't remember the emotional resonance and comfort of such chanting in the dark.

But we are here and, if we are lucky, we will be sitting by the fire at Shaw in about 14 hours. (And being grateful that all this didn't happen while we were trying to get to the MLA.)