30 November 2003

The President and I had a busy travel week.

I was not with him, per se, though I was just as anonymous hurtling northwest in my truck as he had been on Air Force One headed for Baghdad on a surprise holiday visit to the troops. The fact that Senator Clinton and Jack Reid were there had nothing to do with the timing, of course, and I will actually believe it. This is just the bold-man-of-action thing that Dubya likes to do. And I know the troops appreciated it. There was querulous mutterings from some actual Iraqis about how visitors do not come and go like thieves in the night, and I am sure they just wanted to provide some real Islamic hospitality.

Like the Spanish intelligence guys got last night in Baghdad. The resistance has murdered Brits, Italians and Spanish now. These are the times that will stress the relationship between the Coalition of the Willing. And relationships were much on my mind this particular morning.

I was completing my jaunt to visit my troops in the State of Michigan. I had breakfast with one son, narrowly missed another as he exited Lansing, eastbound, and got a couple days with my folks in the little town by the Bay. Dad is eighty this year, and Mom is two years behind him. I need to spend as much time as I can spare up there. It is hard, though, with the 14 hour drive between me and the Northland. But on this morning I was trying the Dawn Patrol out of the new regional terminal at Pelston. It is dressed up to look like a gigantic log cabin and the parking is free.

They are trying to increase traffic there and they might be onto something.

I was on a real jet, not one of those scary Brazilian turbo-props. I was in the back of a Boeing model I had never heard of. I had risen at 0400 to be through security in time, but that is the only way to get out of the North, either early or late. The pilot came up on the cabin intercom and told us there was only about 37 minutes to the shiny new terminal in Detroit, so I decided this was really a slick way to travel if I could make the connection.

Mom and Dad drove me to the airport. We left the house around 0515. We walked around the terminal for a while, marveling at the knotty-pine paneling and the folksy wooden couches and armchairs in the lobby. We had an emotional farewell; Mom had showed me the obits in the paper and many of the departed were younger than they were. So there is always that in the background. Nothing morbid, mind you, just a simple observation. I passed through security in the little toy departure area- they only have the two gates, after all, and I waved goodbye with sadness in my heart.

They startled the crap out of me in there. I was repackaging my briefcase after Security, munching part of a sandwich, and I felt the wall behind me quiver. It was smoky glass and the vibrating kept up until I realized it was not the wind blowing against it (it is strong and blustery in the inky cold pre-dawn) but my Father about a foot away, gently rapping on the glass from the other side.

This is too easy, considering how hard it was to get here. Or rather, how long it took to get here.

Dawn rimmed the circle of the earth in bright fiery crimson. Looking down I see the lights of a middling large city in the darkness. I think we are over Lansing, or Saginaw, perhaps, gliding down toward Ann Arbor and the airport.

The pilot said we are 60 miles out, winds abating, landing to the south. I think that means a straight-in approach, always a good thing if you are traveling on a regional air carrier, considering the number of hours accumulated on the fight deck. The little tube of the jet was dark with only a couple exceptions. I had my light on, second to the last seat in the plane. A petite woman in the seat in front of me did her best to drive her seatback into my knees. This may have been a jet, but the seats were still stingy.

I glanced at the OpEd section of the New York Times. William Krystol, the conservative columnist the Gray Lady prints for balance, included the results of his private contest for a name for the war in Iraq. There were thousands, mostly predicable, and most lame. He printed the five finalists, promising each a 250-dinar note left over from his last trip to Iraq.

He produced them with a flourish. Brad Corsello of New York sent in my favorite: "Dubya Dubya III. From Fall River, Massachusetts came Richard Sander's suggestion of "Rolling Blunder"; California's John Fell contributed "Desert Slog," and a fellow named Will Hutchinson of Vermont put his tongue in his cheek and suggested "Mess in Potamia."

But the winner, according to Mr. Krystol, was Willard Oriol's "Blood, Baath and Beyond." Willard is from New York. Which would have been out the port window on the rim of the world, dark turning to light.

We flared onto the runway at Detroit right on time. The flight had not been long enough for beverage service. It was my first time in the new terminal. It is an astonishing bit of construction. The tunnel between the "C" and "A" terminals is a futuristic bit of New Age construction with the sound of chimes and strange flaoting colors projected onto shiny textured surfaces. I have been through the generations with aviation in Detroit. I remember flying into the old Willow Run Bomber plant in a DC-3. The plant that built thousands of Boeing B-17's and B-24's and it served as Metro Airport for years after the War.

In the 1950s the Airport Authority opened the new Detroit Metro to the east, closer to the city. I recall vividly the day Dad took us to the observation deck there to watch the very first Boeing 707 begin regular jet service to the Motor City.

It is interesting to fly over the state of your birth. To the left of the flight path is part of the past still living. Mom and Dad had a guy breeze into their lives from the internet. He was a member of the Slavin Clan, who live in a place called Bad Axe Michigan, which is on the "thumb" as you look at the State. We are not that far away from them, blood-wise, since our connection was a great-great grandmother who married into our Irish clan and moved south to Stuebenville, Ohio, where my great-great grandfather James joined the 72nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry and where he is buried.

That is also where the Griffen clan joined our line, all Irish, bringing Mike's service in the 10th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry to the Thanksgiving table, Union and Confederate dining together. Michael's sister married James, who begat James who begat Mike who begat my Mom with Hazel, my grandmother. That is where the pure Irish strain was diluted with Hazel's German heritage and the Catholic Wars in the family began. I met with Great Aunt Barabara the summer before she passed away, and she was the last 100% Irish. Her eyes were as blue as the sea.

She talked about my Grandfather in the present tense, as if he had just stepped out to the corner for a beer. MIke had been in his grave sixty years.

Dad waxed eloquent on the period after he died as we walked along the old railroad right-of-way by the bay on Turkey Day. He talked about the houses they had in New Jersey and Long Island, and where his older brother Jim kept his Model A when he was working in the City and didn't need it that often. He talked fondly of the Chevy Coup with the rumble seat he and Mom had, and he talked about how proud of my Mom he was. He told me about Mom's adventures in graduating from Bethany College in 28 months and being president of her sorority while she was doing it. She went full time to school, around the year, since there was a Navy V-12 cadet program at the college and there was a war on. She worked for the Admissions Director in her "spare time" and when he left the school to join the war effort, he asked her to come work for him in New York City. My Grandmother told her to go, and leave the Ohio River Valley behind.

If she had tried to graduate in the regular time, the war would have been over and they wouldn't have needed women since the boys were all coming home from overseas and needed the work.

And that, in turn, would have made quite a difference, since she wouldn't have been working at the Texas Corporation in the Chrysler Building to meet the demobilized and dashing Naval Aviator, who, by the way, was asked to stay on in the Navy. To which he said "No" and left Pensacola to attend the Pratt Institute of Design where his buddy Ray, who went to Bethany, said there was this hot babe who worked on the 68th floor of the Chrysler Building.....

When Dad announced he was going to marry the pretty girl from Ohio with the Irish name, my Aunt got up and walked out of the room, assuming from the name that she was a Catholic, and it was the Catholics in Grandfather J.B. 's shop at Bell Labs who in lockstep forced my Lutheran grandfather into retirement when he got back from overseas assignment putting the phone system into Bermuda.

The irony, of course, was that Grandma Hazel, a striking beauty, had permitted only Mom's older sister Laura Rose to be raised in the Catholic Church, and Mom was raised a Presbyterian. Which weren't the only religious wars. I mentioned to Dad that his mother wasn't too hot on the Jews, but that was the nature of the times, I suppose. Still, I said it was startling to hear your ancient Matriarch talk about "Those People" down the block who had no holiday decorations on their house....

That house in suburban Detroit was not far off our line of flight as we boarded and lifted off right on time. We pitched up steeply into the thin blue sky and the drifting puffy clouds and the bright sunshine. We headed east across the industrial belt south of Detroit proper toward Canada. My sons were behind me and my folks over my right shoulder, the curve of the earth blending into the gray haze. Below the warehouses and oil tank farms gave way to Ford's Rouge River Manufacturing complex and I could see the glittering silver ribbon of the Detroit River in the distance.

Climbing out of the tower control area, we corrected course from due east to east-southeast, passing over a professional- sized baseball field surrounded by old factories. Once it must have been a hot Industrial League venue, and maybe it is still for some hungry blue-collar kids. But I see them as Poles and Hungarians. And that would make things a long time ago, when they lived and worked and played here.

Then over the tip of Zug Island, flat featureless fill, and the dredged shipping canal that makes the river navigable, and passing astern is Grosse Isle, the big island in the River. You can still see the outlines of the old Naval Air Station where Dad flew those gigantic blue single-seat fighter bombers called the "Skyraider" in the Naval Reserve.

Grosse Isle slides under the wing and we are over the farms of southern Ontario. The dirt is brown and warm under the thin bright light, fertile looking even from the perspective of seat 11F.

Then we are feet wet, headed across the lake and the clouds crowd together and the earth is lost to my sight.

There is an ocean of used Kleenex balls below that is unbroken until the snow on the ground in central Pennsylvania is revealed through a tear inthe fabric of the clouds. Then the pilot informed us we were within the 30-minute range of the capital and no one was permitted to rise from their seats.

The clouds began to break up and I could see a great river, perhaps the Shenandoah, and then the Virginia horse country and the Beltway and the pilot begins a series of steep banks to line up with a landing to the north on the active runway at Ronald Reagan National . The woman in the seat next to me did not like the maneuvering. She told me she had a couple drinks before she got on the plane to steady her nerves. The flaps went down and the wheels came down with a clunk and a whine and the woman gripped the arms of her seat. I reassured her that those were normal sounds, and in fact, good sounds, since we could not land without them.

I looked at the window at the Bluefields waste water treatment plant, and the Naval Research labs and Bolling Air Force Base and then the threshold of the runway was beneath us and the pilot flared and the wheels chirped onto the pavement.

I looked at my watch. We were on the ground shortly before ten in the morning.

That is a lot different than a 14 -hour drive. I wondered exactly what I might do the rest of the day.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra