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The power of 10 years
Kootenay Crust
By Ian Cobb
Carrie and I are about to embark on our first real vacation since we started e-KNOW and it is my first escape longer than seven or eight days in duration in more than a decade.
Man. Things change in a decade, especially if you are a parent. The wee little bastages grow up.
That has me eagerly but a bit nervously anticipating a reunion with my only ‘blood’ child in San Francisco in a few weeks. Now a resident of Toledo, Ohio, it’s been three years since we last saw one another. That seemed like a long time to me but then I realized it’s been 10 years since we both experienced the blunt ugliness and shrill sting of ‘the war on terror’ when she was denied access to a flight to Canada because I placed a hyphen in her name on the ticket when there was no hyphen in her name according to her ID.
My child was 12; she was anticipating spending the summer with her dad in the Rockies. Despite protestations by her mother, Homeland Security deemed her a threat against America and expressly forbade her from boarding a flight to Minneapolis so she could link to Calgary where I, having spent the night crouched next to a small fire in Kananaskis (cell phoneless still at the time), awaited her arrival.
Adding to the whap aspect of the event was the fact that my nation-threatening child was bumped from a flight to Calgary about six years earlier because George W fucking Bush decided to invade Des Moines, where she grew up. Long story short, his popping into the capital of Iowa caused me to be pacing back and forth at the arrivals part of Calgary International Airport, wondering where the shrieking hell my kid was.
It is a numbing, freezing feeling watching a plane-load of souls empty through the arrivals door – waiting for your child to appear – the door opens and closes repeatedly but no sign of the kid. And then there was the realization she wasn’t coming through the door… and the freaking out began.
Unattended minors cannot fly out of connecting airports if said connecting flight is the last of the day to leave for that destination.
Because then President Bush made a surprise landing at Des Moines in Air Force One, it bumped my kid’s flight and she had to wait until the next day to fly out. That was a ‘learning’ experience.
Six years later, it happens again, also because of nimrod US government B.S. This time in the form of a jar-headed, hyper-officious Homeland Security kine who barred my daughter access to a flight because of an errant hyphen.
As there was a time when we humans were not constantly connected to the hive via devices that have enslaved the easily distracted and needy timid and getting messages could take several hours, once again I went through the trauma of a missing child scenario.
Back then I spread Columbia Valley tourism magazines all over the northwestern US and Western Canada. I had several boxes in my truck and decided to leave one at the information desk in Calgary Airport. I was on my way to shout at poor unsuspecting souls at the airlines desk about how they had lost my child and plopped a box of brochures on the closed info centre desk on my past. Normally a fast walker and enraged to the Nth, I steamed off through the airport. A ‘witness’ claims I threw the box on the desk and sprinted away, which resulted in half of the airport being closed as the Calgary Bomb Squad dealt with a ‘suspicious package.’ Their wee robot sawed open the cardboard box and glossy covered magazines slid out onto the floor.
I didn’t see any of this; I was already speeding back to the Columbia Valley, formulating a plan to immediately get in another vehicle and start driving to Iowa.
When I returned to work to inform my boss I was going for a rampage across the Great Plains to free my child from the yoke of American government insanity, I learned about how I inadvertently caused a terrorism scenario to unfold while I was angrily reacting to my child being refused access to a flight because of the stinging bolt of paranoia that is still eating at America’s heart. Try and make a story like that up and critics will shit all over you for being too outlandish.
Still, there was some poetry to it all and some balancing of the universe.
A great deal has changed in my life since then – a clearer and better road travailed. And fittingly, we are about to embark on a great road trip and bring that decade loop to a close.
There is great power in 10 year’s time.
If your life is off or wonky right now, don’t worry – time’s power and a fair wind heeded will lead you to better places.
