Waiting in the terminal

Pin It What a horrible word—terminal. Doesn’t terminal actually mean a disease with no cure which will inevitably cause death? Something fatal?

This is what I was thinking as I watched the planes taxing to and from the airstrip. I was hoping that this trip I was taking would not turn out to be the terminal type.

Admittedly, this was the longest flight I’d ever taken before—I was doing it—I was flying to New York for the first time in my life; the Big Apple; the home of the Statue of Liberty; the location of about a dozen movies I love.

Still, visions of plane crashes from shows like LOST flashed through my head as the plane taxied to the runway. I glanced out the window at the lines painted on the airstrip, like chalk outlines around accident bodies, red and white were the reminders to pilots of where to go. Captain Bob’s voice pulled me out of my morbid thoughts as he reminded us that our flight would take about four hours.

We reached the runway and waited. Moments later, the sudden pull of the engines threw us back in our seats and the pavement shot away beneath us. The land pulled away as we became airborne. As I looked out the window and watched the scene below me, I decided that it was indeed a long fall back to earth.

Over the Great Salt Lake we soared, with its pallid blue-gray waters reflecting back the morning light me. As we moved beyond the realms of the Salt Lake Valley, mountains rose like the paper-mache topographical maps I’d made in elementary school as a kid.

It was a few hours later that we flew over Lake Michigan. I anxiously looked out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of this massive body of water below me, however, the foggy cloud cover made this impossible, it was like trying to see through a steamed window. Dejectedly, I slumped in my seat…to be over The Great Lakes and not be able to see them…

Curses.

It was then that I decided to do the next best thing, I snagged my iPod and found Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and listened to it in order to pay homage to that great body of water; all the while, the wind currents buffeted our plane back and forth.

Still farther and farther that plane moved me from my home, from the places which I found familiar and comfortable; I was now headed to destinations which remained yet uncharted and unexplored.

It wasn’t long before the big, blue ocean stretched out to meld with the distant skyline in a haze of heaven and water. It was then that I finally saw the city down below me, where lives were being lived…millions of them; millions of people that I didn’t know but that could probably be friends with me and that I could probably like and be friends with in return.

Bring on the adventure…