Post-Apocrypha

On Friday, I left work and headed directly to LaGuardia, so I could get home for pseudo-Christmas (Saturday) and get drunk for pseudo-Christmas Eve. Fortunately, my flight was delayed only 20 minutes, up to the point where the plane circled above O'Hare for an hour, and we made an unplanned stopover in Dayton to refuel. Despite an extended stay on the tarmac, we were not able to leave the plane. After some apparent difficulties (Pilot: "as you can see out the left, the fuel truck is right over there, [not refuelling us for some reason, those shitheads] -- it was pretty clear from his tone), we set out again for O'Hare, a mere four hours late. The reason: unseasonably warm weather. No, really, melting snow, light rain, and a fortuitous dewpoint had rendered Chicago and impenetrable gray mass.

I slept through the last leg of the trip, and when I awoke found we were maneuvering aimlessly across the taxiways of O'Hare. At least, I presumed it was O'Hare -- There were no landmarks to speak of. There was still snow on the ground, frozen in windblown drift and emitting streams of vapor, which mixed into the ambient fog. The ony visible objects were bright but hazy blue lights, and meaningless letters and numerals, which emerged inconsistently from the ground. We steered right and left among the roadways tangled roadways, with no sound but the steady thrum of the idling jets. The landscape, as far as could be determined, was achingly flat and endless, bordered in the far distance by glaring orange and yellow fuzzes of light. As this went on, I began to believe we had entered not an airport but a stange, endless, ensorcelled country, doomed to wander an eternity among snow and wind and fog, seeing just far enough to feel the vastness of the terrain.