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farts on planes
Thursday, February 23 2017
location: Cabin C, Mayatulum Resort, coastal Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico
This morning in the balcony seating off the dining hall, Gretchen and I hoarded bread, black beans, and salsa, and Gretchen prepared four black bean sandwiches for our travels. Though there's something inherently depressing about bean glurp between two pieces of bread, we didn't expected good vegan options until the Philadelphia airport. Meanwhile, that frontend loader was still carrying buckets full of seaweed to the seaweed mountain. The sea was maintaining the calm that had arrived yesterday and the wind was gentle (making dining on the balcony pleasantly doable).
One of the Mayatulum guests was a hot young mom who had brought two little girls, one of whom looked to be about five or six and resembled the girls on the cover of the Led Zeppelin album Houses of the Holy. Indeed, she rather resembled a very young Robert Plant. She and her little sister (a toddler with such deeply red hair that it looked unnatural) were playing in the sand below our balcony. By now Gretchen and I had taken to referring to the older girl as "Led Zeppelin." A few minutes later, their mother had them get naked and pose in the surf while she took photographs. Things couldn't've been more Led Zeppelin. I remarked to Grtechen that such photos used to be a lot harder to take back when you had to drop them off for development at the People's Drug, where Nosy Nancy Norris was sure to see them and spread gossip in the PTA.
Up in a nearby coconut palm, I saw a small lovely bird with bright orange and black markings (possibly an orange oriole) hopping around doing something, though what it was was not clear what. I pointed it out to Gretchen, and then she noticed the coconuts, and how in the same tree one could see groupings of nuts in all stages of development, from tiny grape-sized nuts all the way up to mature ones in shiny yellow husks.
After Gretchen gave a last goodbye to the beach, we packed up our things, checked out of Mayatulum, and waited for our shuttle. It was actually already there, but now we had to wait for the other Mayatulum guest who would be riding with us. She was running kind of late; perhaps that's just how it is when you do yoga and you're in Mexico satisfying an Eat, Pray, Love itch.
But then finally we were on our way, heading north up Route 307 towards Cancún. The resorts slowed peeled past, each trying to look fancier and less potentially-decrepit (or dangerous) than the next. I'd mixed myself a final orange-juice-and-mezcal cocktail for the road, though I wasn't really feeling 100% enough to enjoy it. Evidently the versions of that same cocktail I'd drunk last night had eaten into today's sense of well-being. I felt this especially in my guts, which just couldn't seem to get comfortable. It's possible my problems were from something Gretchen and I had eaten and not from the mezcal at all, since she was also feeling badly, mostly in her guts as well. I eventually did start drinking my beverage in the hopes my problems were a hangover that it could solve. But it only made me feel worse. But the buzz was somehow worth it, so I kept drinking.
We got stuck in very slow construction-related traffic just south of the Cancún airport. It seemed to take a half hour to move the couple miles that the traffic was backed up for. Eventually we arrived at the place where the road necked down from three lanes into one, and from there on it was clear sailing. We didn't go through any sort of customs process upon entering the airport. There was a conventional airport security line where the staff made Gretchen dump some containers of leftover Charly's Tacos soup and black bean glurp but allowed her to keep those black bean sandwiches she'd made this morning. A woman near me chuckled and said "no guacamole or hummus either!" Tip to terrorists (though not Radical Islamic ones!): get your gel-based explosives onto airplanes by spreading it in thick layers between pieces of bread. After security, we were dumped into duty free, and then there was the gate. Mexico really couldn't give two shits about people leaving.
American Airlines had tried to trick Gretchen into buying an upgrade by saying the only seats available were two terrible ones far apart from each other. It turns out that American reserved a bunch of seats that can only be allocated at the airport, and when we checked in today, we were given the best seats one can hope for as a couple flying in a big two-aisle jet: a pair of seats between an aisle and a window (as we had on the way to Cancún).
Just there in my seat with my laptop on the tray table, I was able to do some offline debugging of the code I'd been working on. The flight was shaping up to be a pleasant one. But then an acrid salty smell filled the air. Someone had relaxed a sphincter and released a foul cloud of flatulence. I instinctively looked over and Gretchen (though it didn't smell anything she's ever authored) and she immediately denied it and put her nose in her shirt. Though it's well known that he who denies it supplies it, Gretchen is honest about such things. We soon decided the culprit was the gentleman in front of me. The farts recurred every ten minutes or so, until eventually the guy in front of me got up and went to the bathroom. He was gone a long time, and we hoped our troubles were over. But then after he returned, so did the farts. At some point I noticed the woman sitting next to the suspected culprit was also putting her nose in her shirt. Since she was either his girlfriend or wife, it now seemed unlikely he was the one responsible. I began to suspect the South Asian guy across the aisle, though the identity of the offender remains a mystery to this day.
After landing in Philadelphia, we entered the terminal and ran as quickly as we could to beat all the other people on out plane to immigration. We were so successful that in this that when we arrived at immigration, there were actually more immigration officers than there were people being processed. Despite our arrival from Mexico in the age of Donald J. Trump, we made it through both immigration and customs in record time. Evidently the United States doesn't trust Mexican airport security, because we had to go through it again before we were allowed into the rest of the airport.
After catching the shuttle to Terminal F, I immediately ordered myself a burrito at Chipotle. We still had those black bean sandwiches (though I think Gretchen actually ate part of hers), but the idea of eating one made me feel a little queasy. By this point, Gretchen's stomach was so upset that all she could do was order some plain white rice with a little soy sauce from a preparer of Asian food. She hadn't eaten anything since Cancún and she knew she had to eat something. As I wolfed down my burrito, Gretchen tried to interest me in the latest anti-Trump rant from Maxine Waters, but the reception on her cellphone meant we never actually got to see it.
The plane to Philadelphia was another two-engine prop. For whatever reason, Gretchen and I were seated separately. She was up in the front with a big fat white woman and I was back in the middle of the plane with amid members of an African American family. Seated next to the window beside me was a skinny black kid of about thirteen who obsessively brushed his short hair throughout the flight. After we landed, I heard him telling his dad in the seat in front of him that the brushing had helped calm his nerves when the plane had been doing scary things. He obviously hadn't been on many plane flights in his short life, because that had been a relatively smooth ride (at least by the standards of a plane that size). After our plane had come to a stop and waited for the door to open, the air filled with the unmistakable smell of flatulence, though of a somewhat different quality than the kind I'd smelled on the flight from Cancún. I thought perhaps the fart came from the woman across the aisle, whose butt happened to be very close to my face at the time. But then I saw the mother of the kid next to me putting her nose in her shirt, and she was two seats in front of me. The mother caught my eye and I started laughing and shaking my head and shrugging my shoulders to say it wasn't me. The mother then started blaming her kids, and then, hilariously, raised her voice to address the back of the plane to say she wanted to apologize for the smell, that it had to be one of her kids.
Stewart Airport is lightly-staffed in the evening, and someone had neglected to unlock the door allowing people from the tarmac to enter the gate. Fortunately, the weather was unseasonably warm and I was perfectly comfortable wearing a teeshirt and the flip flops I'd bought in Tulum.
When Gretchen and I got to our car, we were horrified to find that it wasn't responding to the key fob. On a modern Prius, there isn't even a key, or so we initially thought. We were thinking that if battery in the key fob had died, we weren't going to be able to get into our car. But then Gretchen remembered that the key fob actually does contain a stripped-down little nub of a key for occasions like this. This allowed us to get into the car. But the fob refused to start the car. At this point I realized the problem wasn't with the fob, it was with the car. Its battery had died. And by battery, I mean the stupid 12 volt one it needs for some reason in addition to the 100 volt batteries it uses to do the hybrid thing (and which almost certainly had a good charge maddeningly inaccessible within them). Upon learning that all we needed was a jump start, Gretchen quickly accosted another couple in the parking lot nearby (which was lucky; Stewart's parking lots are as depopulated as the rest of the airport). They were meat & potatoes couple if ever there was, each of them a human bowling pin, and they had an enormous pickup truck. "This is a first!" the man said as he saw that the car to be jumped was a Prius. It took a little maneuvering of the truck to get within the range of our jumper cables. But when our car came alive, it stayed alive. And of course it would; it had all that power in those big batteries that for some reason require a dinky 12 volt battery in order to express themselves.
The dogs barked initially when we came through the door but then threw a wiggle party in celebration of our arrival. Our house sitter would be spending the night in our bed, so I cleared the bits of wood and pipe off the bed in the master guestroom and we slept there.
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