April 5, 2007

Commuting for Love — Winning Essay

By Bob Mayberry and Denise Stephenson

We didn’t call it commuting, not that year. We knew what commuting was: the first year when she was a master’s student in Berkeley and he a freeway flyer in LA. Or the years we drove between his job in Vegas and her doctoral program in Albuquerque — every month, like clockwork. Or these last years taking the three-hour train between academic jobs in Oceanside and Ventura, California.

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The whole relationship’s been one commute after another. Commuter lovers, we like to say. How do you manage? friends ask. How do you keep the relationship alive? It requires commutement, we say, and then we laugh. You gotta be able to laugh.

But 3,200 miles! That’s not commuting, that’s real distance, real travel, and real crazy.

He had a job on an island in Southeast Alaska, where it rained so persistently that folks hopped a jet for a sunshine break in Seattle, portal to the great northwest, where Alaskans headed to get out of the rain! His flight took four hours and included stops on two dangerously tiny airstrips: Ketchikan, where the airstrip hid on a fog-bound island; and Juneau, where successive 180 degree turns left you dizzy and painfully aware how close the steep mountainsides were to your wingtips. When they fly, Alaskans drink a lot.

She had a job in Michigan, six hours to Seattle. Rather than have one of them spend all day in airplanes, they split the travel time. Considerate, democratic even, but problematic as hell. Doubled the chances of a rendezvous weekend ruined by weather or equipment failure or delays.

We like to think we made those flights every month during school, but it wasn’t that often. Academic jobs have a habit of getting in the way. Committee work, tenure review deadlines, research and course preparations. And the sheer ennui that would set in every time we’d begin to plan another rendezvous. God, I’m tired. Can’t you just fly here? Is it really worth the money? We’ll see each other at Christmas. Such doubts are the shifting sands relationships falter on.

So you pack up your old kit bag and book the next flight out. Damn the cost, full throttle ahead. What value do you place on love?

You have it planned to the minute. Planes in Grand Rapids and Sitka taxi onto the tarmac for takeoff; you both look forward to peanuts with your drinks — rum and coke or wine — imagining two nights together in a hotel in Seattle.

He lands in Juneau, watches half the plane empty, refill. Taxi to the end of the runway. Stop ... and wait. No hell bleaker than stalled on a taxiway. Then the dreaded announcement: grounded by fog. Fog? This is Alaska, it’s always foggy. Just get the damn plane in the air; we’ll break through the fog a couple hundred feet above ground and the sky will be blue, the sun shining, and Seattle only 3 hours away. But the FAA doesn’t make decisions based on weather conditions in the wild blue yonder. So he is grounded in Juneau while she munches peanuts and drinks domestic wine in blissful ignorance all the way to Seattle.

Imagine her confusion at his not greeting her arrival. The uncomfortable waiting, wandering the airport hungry but not wanting to spoil the reunion dinner, looking for his gate location. This was before the ubiquity of cell phones, airport arrival screens the only source of information. Then the disappointment upon discovering his flight hasn’t left Juneau. The quiet shuttle ride to the hotel, once imagined as a romantic rendezvous, now painfully lonely in its strangeness. The hours in an empty hotel room waiting to hear his voice, to know he’s okay, to learn when he’ll be getting out of Juneau.

On the phone that night we bemoaned our miserable fates, then slept alone in strange beds, in unfamiliar hotels, miles from our respective homes and still hours away from each other. The next day, when his plane finally landed and she greeted him with open arms and they hugged away the distance between them, they laughed.

“Hey, we’ve still got 45 hours.”

“$2,500 for 45 hours, that’s like 50 bucks an hour!”

“Hookers would be cheaper.”

“We gotta stop meeting like this.”

“You want to end this relationship?” he asks, confident she doesn’t.

“No, I want to see more of you, less of airplanes.”

“Damn Alaska weather.”

“If only you could get a job on my campus.”

“Like that’s gonna happen. Why don’t you get a job near me?”

“You know why.”

“Yeah.”

They look at each other, then utter in unison: “Academic careers.”

In synch again, they smile in recognition of how often this conversation must be repeated, in how many cities, for how many couples.

You gotta be able to laugh.

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