The Last Flight to Fargo

This last July, I made a quick trip to visit some friends in Boston. My final day there, after an idyllic morning reading a novel at my favorite chocolate shop and then visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, I headed to the airport to fly to North Dakota, where Keith’s entire family (eighteen people) were gathering for the weekend.

Friday night in the summer, the airport was a mob. I got one of those fun "boarding passes" where your seat is assigned at the gate. So, I went to the gate. Except it wasn’t the gate, even though the computer screen said it was. I waited in line for twenty minutes only to be told to go to customer service. No one was there. I glared at my phone, refreshing the flight information every thirty seconds. I emailed Keith. “Pray I make my flight. I don’t have a boarding pass, and there’s no gate for the flight.” “Yikes,” wrote Keith.

About half an hour later, another gate was assigned. I waited in that line for twenty minutes, only to be told that that wasn’t the gate either. “So where is it?” I exclaimed, exasperated. “We were supposed to be boarding ten minutes ago, and the flight is still marked ‘on time.’” The gate agent gave me a deer-in-the-headlights look, and picked up the phone. After several minutes on hold, he set the phone down. “Actually, this is the right gate,” he said, business-like manner returned. “I just didn’t know.” Huh. “What do you suppose our chances are of leaving on time?” muttered the man behind me in line. “I’d say zero,” I muttered back. The gate agent handed me the long-awaited boarding passes and I shuffled away to search for a place to sit down and wait.

I was assigned “zone 4” for boarding. Zone 4 seems to be my lot in life. It’s the last group to board the plane. The inexplicable thing is, I found my seat next to the window in the last row.

The departure time passed. I began to fan myself frantically. I had a short connection time, and Minneapolis is a big airport. We pushed back from the gate… and sat. “We’re just finishing up the refueling,” said the pilot. What were they doing all that time we were sitting at the gate? Twenty minutes later, we were stuck in rush hour traffic on the tarmac. Then bad weather changed the departure pattern from the airport, so again we waited. I started biting my nails. I was scheduled to be on the last flight to Fargo that night. If I didn’t make my connection, I would be the only one of the eighteen Olson family members to be absent from this once-in-two-plus-years family gathering, and Keith’s mom would not be able to say that everyone had been there… and it was all going to be my fault, because I had insisted on going to Boston.

My mind switched into frantic-problem-solving-mode. I could rent a car in Minneapolis and drive the rest of the way… for five hours in the middle of the night. No. Who was I kidding? Driving long distances in the daytime makes me drowsy. Someone could come pick me up? No… wouldn’t save any time, and someone else would end up missing the party too. I mumbled a half-hearted prayer, not really confident that God cared whether or not I made my connecting flight. After all, the tarmac was swarming with delayed planes. Why should I get special treatment?

Once we were airborne, I used the inflight wifi to email Keith. “I’m sure I'm going to miss my connection. What should I do?” “Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out,” came the response. I waited, still biting my nails. “Your connecting flight is delayed until 45 minutes after you arrive, and it leaves from gate F8. You should make it,” said the next email. 45 minutes… could still be pretty tight in the Minneapolis airport, when starting from the back row of the plane.

The nice people in the seats next to me let me get out first, and I filed down the aisle, out the door, to the jetway… what gate was this? I steeled myself for a sprint through the airport. F8, F8… I walked through the door into the terminal. Where was F8? I turned around. “Fargo,” said the reader-board above the door through which I had just walked. F8. This was gate F8.

The gate agent’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Welcome to Delta flight number 689 with service to Fargo, North Dakota. We’re experiencing a delay due to late arrival of the aircraft. There was a bit of weather on the east coast. We’ll begin boarding as soon as possible.” I laughed out loud in the middle of a crowd of grumpy North Dakotans.

“お待たせしました(Sorry for making you wait),” I whispered, confident that no one would understand my apology.