The Daily: 18 August 2023

The Blueberry Moon was new on Wednesday. I did not see it. I can’t remember the last time I saw the moon. On Wednesday it was pouring again. We had 2.5 inches of rain, according to my gauge. For comparison, an average August, back when there were such things, saw 3.4 inches of rain in the entire month. I’ve lost track of how far beyond average we’ve gone already, and we’re only a bit over halfway into August.

I don’t want to complain. I have friends and family who can’t remember what rain smells like. Parts of the Southwest US are so hot, you can’t walk your dog at 2am without using protective paw-wear. Canada is still on fire. And the body count in Maui is still climbing, though I suppose that was caused by a windstorm, more or less, not specifically a lack of moisture. My mud-filled garage, soggy house and unripe tomatoes seem rather small beans by comparison.

Meanwhile, I took a plane to the Midwest. This is singular enough for those that know me. But it was such a quotidian disaster that it illustrates rather neatly the mess we’ve made of all things.

First, let us consider the expense. I was coming from Vermont and going to no greatly desirable location. Yet it still cost me nearly $800 to fly round trip. Do you know how few people on this planet can afford to spend that much money on one thing, never mind a discretionary expense? Given that over 10% of the world — around one billion people — lives on less than $1 a day and that the world’s average annual household income is a bit over $9700 — an average that includes billionaires, mind you — you can see that those who can afford to board a plane are in the extreme minority. And yet air travel contributes 2.5% of global carbon emissions by itself. So the tiny sliver of humans who can afford air travel are, by themselves, sending up 2.5% of all the carbon floating around in the atmosphere — which comes to around 920 million gigatons. (No, I can’t envision a number that big either… but it’s big…)

Seems a bit unfair… especially when you consider that most air travel is entirely voluntary. There are few situations that make air travel necessary. I would like to say that my backslide into flying was one of those situations, but really I could have gotten to the funeral in some other fashion if our culture was better organized. For that matter, I would not be living so far from my loved ones that I needed to fly to a funeral if our culture was better organized. But in any case, it was not absolutely necessary to fly even in this case. Had I taken my electric car and taken many more days off work (probably not an option if I wanted to go back to work, but humor me), I could have made the trip with much less expense in both carbon and cash. And this is a trip that was not exactly a choice. Most air travel is far less obligatory. That sliver of humanity that is frittering away gigatons of carbon is doing so largely for their own entertainment.

But whatever… jerks gonna fly, I guess… because they are too important not to.

Let’s look at what that expense buys, however. As I said, this was no coveted destination. If I’d been going someplace else, probably anyplace else, it would have cost more. So it costs about $800, about half again the annual income of a billion people on this planet, to go nowhere — and more than that to go somewhere. This is also, obviously, the coach option. Even going nowhere costs more if you insist on having sufficient legroom to avoid an embolism and a seating width that might accommodate at least an adolescent body. But I went nowhere in the tinned fish seats. (Mind you, tinned fish is generally dead…)

In other words, this expense bought many hours of considerable discomfort. My body does not like to fly, but no body likes to be mashed and lashed into an upright seating position for several hours. It hurts. It hurts the legs, the back, the abdomen, the neck. It makes for headaches which are magnified if you have motion sickness. Your feet fall asleep and your brain can’t. You are put in such close proximity to strangers that your body is taut for the entire trip. It is difficult to breathe deeply or to relax any part of your body. You are, in short, put in a high degree of stress for many hours — and that’s not counting any fear of being confined in a fragile and explosive metal tube that is tens of thousands of feet above ground. This was my $800 trip to nowhere. Other people do this for fun…

The flight out was bumpy and, given take-off and landing, I may have been riding with the C-students out of flight school. But this is actually better for me. I’m not afraid of flying, but I do have severe motion sickness. This is ameliorated somewhat by a jerky ride. (No, I don’t know why, but it’s true of ground and boat travel as well, so it’s just how my body interprets motion, I guess.) I was able to read, which makes the discomfort bearable. Being the middle of the day, I was even a bit hungry — though not for the plastic-wrapped sugary drinks and not-food ‘snacks’ that came complementary with my seat. In any case, I arrived at nowhere, gathered my belongings and went about my business.

This counts as the high point of the trip, the part that went more or less as advertised.

When the business was concluded, it was time to go back to the airport. And this is where the cracks in the system opened into chasms.

While I was on my trip, COVID cases began to rise. There were new red line graphs in the news, charting the upswing with an unsavory grin. People began to talk of masks again. On the way out, I was masked because my sister is very sick, and I didn’t want to bring anything else into her life, COVID or otherwise. But I was one of few people who put on face coverings, even in the very constricted setting of an airplane. On the way back, about a quarter of the travelers were masked; and many more of the people who work in air travel, whether in the sky or on the ground, kept their faces covered. So there’s that worry again… And do I need to point out that air travel, with the very fast mixing of populations that it enables, is primarily responsible for the rapid spread of all contagions… Without airplanes, there would be no COVID era.

Also while on my trip, Maui burnt down. At first, the media were understandably focused on the loss to humans. There was little talk of cause, though there were fingers pointed at the inadequacy of the alert system. (I can’t imagine how any alert system could work in that situation. Who would be responsible for keeping the sirens on?) When the conversation turned to origins, there was a loud bleat from the media, saying that climate had categorically nothing to do with this fire. This was eventually retracted — in the face of monumental and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Because, of course, climate caused the fire. There were human infrastructure failures — from the insufficient emergency alerts to the inability to shut down current when the power lines were downed — that magnified the human loss. But tinder dry conditions and a violent windstorm in Hawaii where weather is typically moderate and moist — boringly so, even — is due to the greatly increased energy in the atmosphere from human mediated climate warming. In a terrible irony, the tourists who had to run for their lives were some of the very people who threw those gigatons of air travel carbon into the atmosphere and, therefore, were a cause of this fire.

So was I…

My $800 plane ticket to nowhere and back bought me discomfort and quick transport to distant places. But it also bought the flooding in my garage, the intolerable heat all around the globe, perpetual Canadian fires and smoke, and at least one hundred dead and thousands completely unsheltered in Hawaii.

But in any case, I had to come home. There was no indication that this wouldn’t happen. I spent $400 on that part of the journey, after all.

As Son#1 and I were waiting to board our flight, we noticed that the plane at the gate, where our plane should be, was not leaving. And not leaving. And not leaving. And then he got a text saying that he’d been rebooked onto a flight-plan that wouldn’t deliver his person to Burlington until the next day — with an overnight in Chicago. Meanwhile many other people in the waiting area were frowning at phones and convening around the gate counter — at which two frazzled people were stationed. We joined a queue of a few dozen confused travelers, none of whom could afford extra overnight travel expenses and some of whom needed to be on the flight they’d bought in order to accomplish their travel goals. One guy had to be at a job-site in the morning and couldn’t wait on the airlines to make good on their promise to get him there.

Turns out, the plane sitting at our gate never left. The plane we were supposed to board also never arrived. Both were grounded by violent weather rolling through Chicago. If Son#1 had taken the rebooking, he would have been re-rebooked. There was no getting into or out of Chicago that night. However, when it was our turn with the frazzled gate attendants, we opted out of Chicago. By then, it was apparent that we were not getting home that night, so we booked a flight the next morning that went to Vermont via Washington DC. Then I called my family, begging someone to come get us.

On the trip back to my sister’s house, the edges of the Chicago storm system were turning the roads into rivers. We passed many accidents, one of which may have been fatal. (Or at least miraculously not.) But we made it through the storm and found veggie pizza and my sister’s golden retriever waiting for our arrival. We washed our clothes and went to sleep, in actual beds. I mention this because I doubt many of the rest of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of people in that airport who were supposed to fly through Chicago that night got to sleep in a free bed with a belly full of good food and a warm dog by their side. Most probably didn’t get to leave the airport.

And they had to eat airport food. Which is its own category of not-food waste. Over the whole trip, I had two airport meals. I did not buy the cheapest not-food, so what I ingested was probably at least somewhat useful for my body. Most options are not. But in those two meals I used about the same amount of waste — much of it plastic, toxic forever-trash — as I generate in two weeks on my own turf. Two rather profligate weeks at that — because, given any option, I don’t buy plastic. Everything at the airport is disposable. Given recycling’s abysmal record, I assume most of it is just trash dumped in the ocean. And all of it entails huge streams of introduced atmospheric carbon in its manufacturing and shipping. I think I doubled my annual carbon budget in those two meals. The other travelers got to have the expense, the indigestion, and the hefty carbon outlay for lunch, dinner, breakfast, and maybe another lunch, none of which was in their travel plans.

This is what an $800 ticket to nowhere buys these days.

So after a good, but short, night’s rest and an expensive cab-ride well before dawn, Son#1 and I were back at the airport to try leaving town again. But before we’d even boarded the plane, our travel time had been extended by two, three, four hours. We got to Washington DC a bit late. And then we stayed there. And stayed there. And stayed there. The same storm system that shut down Chicago the night before was ravaging New England, pretty much centered on Burlington International Airport.

Now, there were others headed to Burlington and many more who were affected by the Chicago shut-down. But all those together were only some of the people who were stuck in airports with us. I talked to a family who couldn’t get to Los Angeles because their flight went through Phoenix — and nothing was going through Phoenix for reasons I’ve yet to learn. The flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, that was supposed to leave from an adjoining gate was canceled. Also, for reasons… And there were many people lounging about the airports, all settled in for long-term travel suspension. Two kids were sleeping on the floor in one gate, apparently unconcerned about missing their flight — likely because they didn’t have a flight to miss despite $800 or more spent toward that end.

This is how air travel works these days. Passable weather along the entire flight path is nearly miraculous. And if that miracle occurs, then we have to contend with systemic disfunction in all the human infrastructure — from human incompetence to poorly paid labor, computer bugs to aging mechanical systems. Four of my co-workers have been on vacations in the last few months. Only one of them experienced the flights that they bought. None of them managed the trip with all their luggage. Nor did I.

My suitcase is old and large and decidedly not a carry-on. (It is purple, however, and therein lies its charm…) So it was gate-checked before I knew that Chicago was impassable. Late that night, it went to Chicago. Then to DC. Then to Burlington. It was delivered to my house in the middle of Wednesday’s rainstorm. It is still drying…

This is average. This is privileged average, even. If you are wealthy enough to choose to spend money on air travel, this is what that considerable expense will buy. Along with floods, fires, indigestion, toxic waste, discomfort, pain, destruction and death. This is as good as our system works now. It will never get better. This immutable disfunction is normal. This is what we are spending our wages, our lives, the planet’s life, upon. This does not seem a sensible bargain to me. It is not working…

Today, I was looking at properties that might be good for a garden and craft bookstore. I had found something that was probably up high enough to be safe from the new normal flooding. It was not ideal in any respect and needed a good deal of work (lots of ‘as is’ disclaimers), but I could almost see a bookstore generating enough revenue to pay the mortgage — as long as I didn’t take a paycheck for eight or ten years… Then one of my co-workers came out of her office and, by way of explaining her lack of work in mortgage processing, announced that the Fed has raised rates again… because our economy is tanking and this is all they can do about that…

So, I thought, that’s no loans for booksellers. Nor most aspiring property buyers, given the not-work happening in the mortgage department. I’m sure that will inspire new confidence in ‘the market’…

Is there any sane human who still believes that anything is still functioning properly?

And I realized that all this — from COVID and lost luggage and usurious lending rates to fire, flood, death and destruction — all this is part of that $800 plane ticket. We have bought and paid dearly for this polycrisis. And most of the spending was pure idiotic frivolity. Plane tickets to Maui. A week spent trying to forget another lost year. A day-trip to a conference on how to wrest a few more dollars out of the mess we’ve made in wresting dollars. A night away from home because we can’t find our home, our lives, there. Because we spend our lives on spending our lives… and that kind of recursion eventually eats itself into collapse. We bought these disasters. And what did we get out of the bargain?

Well, despite masks, Son#1 and I have the flu… I guess it’s better than COVID.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023