The week before Thanksgiving 1991, I piled my meager belongings — mostly clothes and a few electronic items, like an alarm clock — into a big blue bag intended to hold golf clubs. My parents drove me to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and, nearly a decade before 9/11 took such simple things away from us, sat with me in the boarding area while I awaited a flight to Seattle.
I don’t remember what we said. It doesn’t really matter. My emotions were all over the place. I was sad to be leaving the place I had called home for 18 years. (Odd to think that I’ve now lived elsewhere for as long as I ever lived in North Richland Hills.) I was thrilled to be heading off to my first real post-collegiate job, as sports editor of a small paper in Alaska.
In Seattle, I was joined by my grandmother, who had flight privileges on Alaska Airlines because my grandfather, by then 11 years dead, had been an executive with the company. She was coming north to help me get settled, and she ended up doing so much more than that, buying me a car. (It was an ’84 Escort wagon, if I recall correctly. Brown. Oh, yeah.) For three days, she stayed with me in a world gone white and cold. And then she went home to Washington.
That was on a Sunday. Four days before Thanksgiving. I’ve never felt such crushing loneliness.
So why am I thinking of this at 5:34 a.m., 18 years later, while I sit in the dark of my house, with those I love most sleeping a room away?
Strangely enough, it’s because I’m thinking of a friend I’ve never met who’s a world away from his loved ones on this day of giving thanks. Of the many ways in which life has changed since I sat alone on Thanksgiving in a studio apartment in Kenai, Alaska, perhaps none is more notable than the technology that binds us even as we seem more adrift than ever from one another in time and physical distance. I can read Charles Apple’s blog and see the things he sees in South Africa, know what he’s had for dinner, experience his frustration and his jubilation as he does hands-on work with a newspaper there. I can flip over to Facebook and read my friends’ most intimate thoughts about what they’re thankful for, all because they’re compelled to say it and the Web site can move it from their fingertips to my eyes in an instant.
Let me tell you, it’s pretty damned glorious.
Nineteen ninety-one was undoubtedly a simpler time. If I view it through the hazy lens of nostalgia, I sometimes yearn for those days, when I was younger and my world seemed more pregnant with possibility. That can be dangerous, I think. Eighteen years ago, I had to swallow my loneliness; even a phone call home, in the days before unlimited cell phone minutes and flat-rate long distance, had to be short and bittersweet.
Today, I can think about Charles Apple and write down my half-baked thoughts and beam them out to anybody who cares to read them. Charles is going home Monday, and I can only imagine how happy his wife and daughter will be to see him after his two months away. It seems to me that will be a day of thanksgiving, regardless of what the calendar says.
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November 26, 2009 at 7:58 am
Charles Apple
🙂
November 26, 2009 at 6:24 pm
jimthomsen1
I remember 1991 at this time clearly. I was living and working in Yakima, in south-central Washington, and was planning to be home — Bainbridge Island, just west of Seattle — for Christmas, when a monster snowstorm hit, socking in the mountain passes that lay between my new home and my old one. Chains were required on Snoqualmie Pass, which would take at least three hours to get to. My car in those days was a waspy-sounding VW Rabbit, and I just didn’t think such a tiny, light vehicle stood much of a chance in drifts deepening well beyond the one-foot level. So I called my parents and told them I just wasn’t going to be able to make it home for Thanksgiving dinner.
Well, my dad just wasn’t having any of that. In fact, he said, he’d drive over himself right that minute and come and get me. The thought filled me with dread and terror. My dad was in his early seventies then, drove with trifocals and his Ford Escort station wagon, I felt, would be equally in jeopardy against mountain pass conditions. So, in a panic, I said: “No! NO! Dad! I’ll come. I’ll find a way. I’ll make it. I promise.”
So, I hauled out the chains, borrowed a couple of 50-pound bags of concrete mix from my neighbor for vehicle ballast, and set out in near-whiteout conditions. What was normally a 45-minute drive to Ellensburg took two hours, and I was wrung out with sweat from one 3,000-foot turn when the guy ahead of me started fishtailing and I had to swerve toward the oncoming lane to avoid him. I went into my own skid, and managed to straighten out just seconds before an oncoming eighteen-wheeler would have rolled over me.
I stopped for coffee in Ellensburg, splashed myself with cold water in a Burger King restroom, and contemplated the next 110 miles with the resigned dread of a condemned man making the last walk of his life to the execution chamber.
I put on the chains at a rest stop outside Cle Elum as the foothills began their deceptive climb into the Cascades. The snow thickened. The drifts deepened. The sky darkened. My tires only occasionally touched the road, and any goosing of the gas pedal above 30 made the rear of my Rabbit want to rabbit away off the road and past the shoulder. But going any slower meant that I risked getting stuck. Such constant tension in my wrists and ankles and at the base of my neck gave me the worst headache of my life. And I was all alone, and felt suddenly and shatteringly sorry for myself in a way I’ve never felt before or since.
The darkness was complete atop Snoqualmie Pass, and the road was invisible in my half-blocked headlights. All I could see were a soggy blur of red taillights somewhere up ahead. At this point, I’d been driving for nearly five hours, and was nearly in tears. I just wanted to stop, and rest. I had fantasies of getting a hotel room, eating a hot dinner in a downstairs restaurant, and sleeping for about fourteen hours.
But I pushed on. And, just when I was about to pull off at the next exit, abandon my car and trudge through the snow dunes to the nearest civilization, a miracle fell on my windshield. A drop of rain, followed by another, and another as I began my descent down the pass into King County. Within two miles, the drops intensified into a steady drizzle. Within five miles, the road became bare and wet in patches. And by the time the exit signs to North Bend slipped past, the fishtailing had become a thing of the past.
In another 45 minutes, I was approaching the Seattle ferry terminal in a gray wedding veil of rain, and just made the 4:30 p.m. boat to Bainbridge. I had sweated all the way through my clothes, and the veins in my head throbbed and beat like timpani drums. But I had made it. I went upstairs to the ferry coffee shop, bought some coffee, knocked back a couple of aspiring, and smiled.
My family was waiting for me, dry, warm and safe, especially my brave but foolish dad. We would be together on Thanksgiving Day.
November 26, 2009 at 6:29 pm
craiglancaster
Jim, buddy, don’t you have a blog?
Just kidding. Great story, man.