As I write this, Peg, the cats and I are supposed to be climbing out of ELM in N8201G, bound for Perry via the airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. Instead, I'm sitting here in pajamas because the cobalt blue skies the weather liars promised yesterday failed to appear at dawn.
Outside, it looks like this:
The record snow for this time of year, around 18 inches a couple days ago, is not really the issue.
Those soft gray skies? That's another matter altogether. As an old fighter pilot with an instrument rating, I don't feel much hesitation about flying around in clouds or shooting an instrument approach at our destination. P hates it, however, flying around in a milk bowl, and I don't much like droning around in the soup for protracted periods of time because we don't have a functional autopilot and staying wings level takes a certain measure of concentration. It's no big deal in small doses, but for an old guy a couple hours of instrument flying can be exhausting.
The problem this morning, however, is hiding up there in those clouds from the surface to around 12,000 feet. When I called the friendly briefer at the nearest flight service station (one of the coolest things our tax dollars provide--personal, custom weather briefings by an actual human who can answer questions and even display a little humor at times) and told him we wanted to fly from Elmira to Greensboro in a Cessna at 8,000 feet, he just said "I don't think that's a very good idea today." He went on to relate that everyone on the East Coast was reporting moderate icing from the surface to 12,000 feet, with a PIREP from an Airbus 320 leaving Philadelphia that was pretty much caked with rime ice on climbout. Those guys have the tools to deal with that. We, on the other hand, would just get gradually encrusted in the Cardinal until we looked like the inside of your freezer when it's time for a defrost. Then we'd fall out of the sky. Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow.
I'm just happy to have made it home last night. As I was doing my best Dale Earnhardt imitation on Back Beach Road yesterday afternoon, scrambling to make my flight after a partners' meeting that ran long, I pulled up the Delta app on my phone to see that once I got to Atlanta the nice folks at Delta had changed my itinerary to include a 15 hour layover, presumably because of the blizzard up here earlier in the week.
At that point, all the stuff I said in earlier posts about making the best of it and accepting things as they are briefly effaced as the old me re-emerged and I started dog-cussing every car clogging the passing lanes, as well as my apparent fate sleeping at the Hartsfield Marriott instead of next to P.
I also noticed the boarding pass on my phone didn't denote my TSA Pre status, and by-God I wasn't taking off my shoes at the checkpoint. While in this irrational state of agitation, I walked up to the ticket counter in a snorting flurry of indignation and told the nice young lady I needed a paper boarding pass with "TSA Pre" on the front.
"It looks like Delta made a change to my trip that has me stuck in Atlanta."
"A change? I don't see it here, sir."
"My phone app says I'm spending the night in Atlanta. I guess the blizzard messed everything up."
"No sir. You're going to ELM tonight. All of your flights are on-time."
I lightened up a little at that point, and the voice in my head chastised me for letting this bump in the road get under my skin. So what if I'd had to stay in Atlanta overnight?
I made it to the gate with time to spare, returned a couple phone calls, then was off to Atlanta.
When I arrived and opened the overhead bin, my coat and scarf were gone. Jumping to conclusions and turning back into my inner jerk, I blurted out, "That guy ahead of me just walked off with my coat!" I proceeded to repeat this bit of deductive detective work to the gate agent, then passed it along to P in a text as I was running to my gate for Detroit. As my behind hit the seat in the 757 and I breathed a sigh of relief at having made it just before they closed the door, I noticed a voicemail from the 404 area code. The gate agent's message told me the crew had found my coat, which apparently shifted fore or aft during takeoff or landing into the next compartment. They'd get it to me in the next day or so.
Relieved and feeling humbly stupid at this point (as opposed to the arrogant stupidity one encounters in, say, politics), I settled into my seat and let Paul Fussell make me feel even more dense as I tried to parse through his chapter on adversarial contrast in World War I poetry in The Great War and Modern Memory. I used to understand this stuff, but my brain is turning to mush in my old age. I ordered a second glass of wine from the flight attendant, and tried not to make the connection.
Detroit created an environment that fostered good behavior, because all the bars in the airport are closed due to the pandemic. I made the gate in plenty of time, but then had another text-based temper tantrum with P when we were stuck on the ramp for over a half-hour waiting to be deiced.
Forty minutes after our scheduled arrival we descended through the icy soup and landed at ELM, which was still blanketed in snow. P had a Jameson's waiting for me in the cupholder when I crawled into the rental car. She'd had her own crisis that morning, dropping the car keys into a huge snowdrift and then spending two hours digging around for them until they finally appeared down the street, having been pushed there by one of the snow plows that seem to come by every forty seconds or so.
We sat up and talked until one, which suggests that in the back of my mind I already knew we weren't going anywhere this morning. I'll get a little work done today, drive P around to take pictures of the Winter Wonderland, and maybe buy a couple steaks from the new butcher shop in town for supper tonight.
It was probably best that we not take all of that bad karma up in the air this morning. Maybe a higher power was looking out for us by making it impossible to fly.
Tomorrow the weather liars are promising fair skies and tailing winds all the way to the farm. Inshallah, as the Saudis used to say.
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