It has been forty-eight hours since my journey began, and I am on one of the most miserable flights I have ever experienced. My legs are cramped and my knees ache from the over twelve hours of sitting stuck in the middle seat with barely enough room to stretch. My head is pounding from the lack of sleep, with only about three hours of intermittent rest since I began the journey 6,652 miles ago. My neck is stiff, despite the neck pillow. My nose is stuffy, my throat is sore, and I have a persistent cough that makes everyone lean just a little farther away from me and whisper “He got the rona…” (don’t worry, I am wearing my KN-95 mask). Suffice it to say, travel is not always a super comfortable experience, and this last leg of the journey is extremely taxing. But why has it taken me so long to get halfway around the world in the modern era?
Because I’m an idiot. And because the O’Hare International Airport must have a personal vendetta against me. Let’s start back at the beginning.
After ripping the emotional band-aid off and saying my final farewell to my father, I was dropped like a dog at the West Virginia International Yeager Airport. As with most small city airports, this one boosts a whooping two concourses and seven gates. It’s small. But an advantage to such a small airport is that it is super quick to get through baggage and the TSA check. In less than thirty minutes, I was lying back and playing Animal Crossing at my gate terminal. Attempt that feat at the LAX.
The plane from Charleston to Chicago was uneventful, apart from the occasional shockwave of anxiety spiraling down from my elbows to the tips of my fingers like an electrical gyro wheel. Those planes aren’t very large and there isn’t a whole lot of room to maneuver or snacks to enjoy, but at a flight time of just over an hour and a half, you don’t need much but a good stretch once the trip is done. I landed in the O’Hare at around 6:30pm and the concourses were frantic with people rushing to connect to flights, all of God’s children engaged in the time-honored tradition of packing themselves like sardines into little metal tubes of jet fuel and recycled air to be flung to all the corners of the earth. I, however, was in no hurry. I was staying the night in the terminal.
Now, at the age of thirty-two, you would think that I would have saved enough money to get myself a nice hotel or motel and prepare myself properly for the journey ahead. But you’d be wrong. I’m stubborn as a mule and a “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” when it comes to spending money on anything besides travel and food. Comfortable sleep? Forget about it. I can sleep on a bench at my gate or lay out in the floor. Shower? Who needs it. I can give myself a quick sink bath.
So, with nothing to do but kill time, I wandered the beautiful O’Hare terminals and grabbed a bite to eat at Tortas Frontera, a location known for the “best airport food around the country” (Eubanks). While the guacamole was fresh and the food was good, I think calling it the best airport food in the country seems a bit of a stretch. Still, if you need a meal in the O’Hare, I recommend it over the other options I saw on display, especially for the price. But with a full belly, everyone back home updated on my location, and my gate located, I tried to settle in for the night and get some sleep at the gate.
Enter what should have been an expected aspect of the terminal at night: cleaning. While trying to get some sleep, the airport custodian who was busy in my wing, spent the entirety of two hours sweeping my little area, around me, near me, and stopping quite frequently to chat with her coworkers. And you know what, more power to her. My mistake. She’s got a job to somewhat do and I should have stayed the night in the hotel or chose a different spot to sleep. Regardless, shuteye was basically an impossibility, even with headphones, so I grabbed a couple of coffees and energy drinks and decided I would just wait to sleep on my plane to LAX. And so, I sat and killed time writing, reading, and rocking back and forth in exhausted delirium, waiting for my 6:00am boarding time. And finally, only ten minutes were left, and the counter was getting ready to board.
And then I got an email that read as follows:
“Good morning,
I am reaching out to you to inform you that we have your luggage here at O’Hare Airport. Terminal 1 Lower-level cage 2 by door 1G. Please come to pick up with a valid ID the bag [sic] will stay here for 3 days then will be sent to Houston.”
Welcome absolute blind panic.
I ran to the baggage terminal and realized that if I left through that security checkpoint to get my bag, I couldn’t get back in without going through TSA. I would most certainly miss my flight if that were the case. Security told me to go back to the gate and ask about possibly getting my bag sent to the plane. Of course, as big of a mess as the Chicago O’Hare is, that was not a possibility. If I was connecting to Narita, I would need to go get my bag myself or I was going to Japan with no clothes. Dejected, defeated, and so very tired (only about forty-five minutes of sleep by this point), I got my bag out of the cages and went up to see if the United agents couldn’t find me another route to my destination.
I still don’t know if this snafu happened due to my own negligence or due to my United representative in Charleston not informing me of the need to transfer bags myself from the baggage claim on my next flight. All I know is that if I had just splurged on a hotel room that evening, I would have avoided the absolute miserable state I would find myself in for the next twenty-four hours. Thankfully, what little bit of good karma I had acquired over the past week balanced out, as there was a delay in Denver for a flight to Narita. I would be able to book a flight from Chicago to Denver two hours later and transfer to Narita from there. Whether this was due to the fire that had started on the American Airlines plane earlier that day (Muntean et al.) or some other cosmic force butterfly effect nonsense, I am not certain. But it meant I was still getting to Japan in time for my orientation. Not sure if I should be happy with that fact or not.
Sick to my stomach from the absolute adrenaline dump, hot from moving through O’Hare’s TSA checkpoint in my heavy as hell winter coat in an unseasonably warm concourse, and tired from little to no sleep, I tried to stomach some McDonald’s hashbrown and orange juice and begged to the Almighty above that I was going to be passed out soon.
Nope. I was stuck in the very middle row, which is definitely the worst seat in the house. And in case you didn’t know, planes run at about 90 decibels during the cruise in terms of noise. For a comparison, a jackhammer runs at about 100 decibels. A power mower is about 96 decibels (“Noise Sources and Their Effects”). Long story short: an airplane is loud. And I am already something of a light sleeper, so I was “toast” (as the kids would say). I got maybe thirty minutes of fitful sleep on that flight. So much for the recovery I was hoping for.
When we finally landed in Denver, I was at my wits end. The four-hour layover was spent trying to sleep on a bench at my gate (maybe got an hour) and then wandering the terminal in a red-eyed haze, barely tasting my Quiznos sandwich as I stared at the familiar range of the Rocky Mountains. I even managed to lose my neck pillow in the toilet. On that final note, a very nice Japanese man happened to sit next to me with my neck pillow at the gate and when I mentioned that it looked like mine, he said “Oh oh! In the toilet. Yes. You lost this.” And gave it back with a firm handshake. Good dude.
By the time my plane to Japan boarded, I was running on maybe an hour or two of sleep and had spent the rest of that thirty-six hours awake. My cough had gotten worse, and I had run out of Benadryl, so I wasn’t feeling too comfortable in my mask and middle seat. Still, I was finally off. One final twelve-hour journey and I would be in my new country.
Leaving the airport at Denver was a surreal experience. It was like my past and present were all kind of mixing in a sleep deprived fever dream, and when the wheels finally left the ground, I realized I was out. America was no longer my home for the time being. I was completely on my own.
The flight crawled by. The longest journey I’ve spent on a plane up until this point was the eight or so hours from Toronto to London, but this was a different beast. I could feel the seat digging into my tailbone by the end of it and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to stretch and move more in my life. Again, with a middle seat, I was a bit limited in movement on both sides and couldn’t even really look out the window to distract myself. Instead, I spent most of the flight trying desperately to sleep and only succeeding for about an hour or so at the end. I did end up watching Groundhog Day on the little in-flight TV (god if that was the 24 hour loop I was stuck in…) and dreamed of a warm bed in a cold room, a hot shower, and the quiet dark of a dreamless void.
And then, just when I thought I couldn’t stand another single second strapped into this modern iron maiden, the plane broke through the clouds and suddenly we had touched down. Freed from my constraints, I was hit immediately with the realization that I had done it. I was in Japan. And now, the real challenge would begin. Navigating a foreign country with only my incontrovertibly frazzled wits to guide me.
And now, to end this leg of the journey with a little etymology:
Terminal. The noun, not the adjective. I need to make this distinction because some moments of this journey felt terminal. This word came from the Latin terminus which meant “end or boundary” and later morphed to terminalis. In about the mid-fifteenth century, popped up in middle English as “terminal” with the same meaning as in Latin. In about 1870, the word started to be known as “the end point of a railway line” and was “later extended to airlines by 1921” (“Terminal”). And this is the terminal point of this point. Ba-dum-tssss.
Works Cited
Muntean, Pete, et al. “Passengers evacuate onto wing of American Airlines plane after engine catches fire at Denver airport.” CNN, 14 March 2025, https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/13/us/american-airlines-fire-denver-airport. Accessed 19 March 2025.
“Noise Sources and Their Effects.” Purdue University, https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/Training/PPETrain/dblevels.htm. Accessed 19 March 2025.
“Terminal.” Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/terminal. Accessed 19 March 2025.
One response to “#6 O’Hell No”
Cody,
You made it!!! Thanks for sharing your journey. In 1970 I traveled to Hong Kong on the third flight of Singapore Airlines. It wasn’t full; I was offered crushed pineapple juice and a warm washcloth any time I even stirred. Then learned my baggage had not made it in the same plane. Singapore Air gave me the equivalent of $250 to purchase what I needed. Seven days later just an hour before leaving the hotel in Singapore my Samsonite suitcase was delivered. It had been taped, signed, labeled from SFO twice, from Manila once, and from Kula Lumpur once!!! And by then I had everything I needed and this darned suitcase was nothing but a real nuisance for the rest of my 5 week trip that included Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. I’m so glad that you arrived with your luggage and I hope you made your orientation meeting in good shape.