When does 6 hours equal 14?

How does a 6-hour plane flight become a 14-hour story? It’s all in the timing.

I was enrolled in a workshop that was run by what at the time was called NAPPS (The National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling). It was a weeklong conference on “Using Community and Family Stories in Teaching”.  Renowned storytellers, Syd Lieberman and Barre Tolken, were teaching the class. The course was held at the site of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

This workshop was to begin on a Monday from 5:30 p.m. until 9:30p.m. the first day and then run the rest of the week ending on Friday from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Since the workshop wasn’t going to begin until 5:30, I decided to take a flight from New York at 9:30 a.m.  The flight itself was to have a transfer in Pittsburgh and then arrive at Tri-Cities Airport in Tennessee at about 3:30 where I would be picked up by someone from the workshop and brought into Jonesborough.  Everything was planned out well. I should have arrived in Jonesborough well before the workshop started.

Everything would have been fine, had things been on schedule, however the first flight from New York was delayed.  That’s when the problems began. There was about a 45 minute window between when my flight landed in Pittsburgh and when the next flight left for Tennessee. By the time I got to Pittsburgh I had less than 15 minutes to make the connection and the connecting flight was on the other side of the airport. Needless to say, it left before I got there.

The attendant behind the desk was very helpful in realizing that my missing the connection was not my fault and looked through her papers and said that there was a flight leaving soon for Cincinnati that I could get on that could connect me with a commuter flight to Tri-Cities.  My first task before boarding the flight was to place a call to Jonesborough and let them know that I was going to be delayed.

I never realized that squeezing me into a flight to Cincinnati was going to be taken literally. There were three seats on one side of each aisle and my boarding pass had me sitting in one of the middle seats.  Much to my chagrin, assigned to the seats both left and right of me were two of the biggest truck drivers I had ever seen. These two guys were so round that holding my breath was the only way I could fit between them.  For the entire flight I was not addressed at all by these two men, who obviously knew each other and talked incessantly throughout the entire flight to each other. Luckily the flight was about one and quarter hours long.

The most interesting thing that I discovered on landing in the Cincinnati, Ohio airport, is that the airport is actually in Kentucky.

After about an hour layover I boarded my connecting flight (a Delta Commuter prop jet) to Tri-Cities. We stayed on the plane without taking off for about another hour, when the pilot came on the speakers and stated that there was a warning light in the cockpit that wouldn’t go off, so we were to be deplaned.  Again we were left waiting for this to be resolved when we got another announcement that our flight had been cancelled due to technical difficulties.  The only problem with this cancellation was that there were no other flights to Tri-Cities from Cincinnati.  Back to the ticket counter I went.

Again they were very helpful and put me on an American Airlines flight to Atlanta where there would be a connecting flight to Tri-Cities. I asked if my luggage was to follow along with me and was assured that was to be the case.

Again I called Jonesborough and let them know, that not only was I going to be later than expected, that I was going to miss that day’s session and in fact might not get in until 11:00.

The flight to Atlanta went off without a hitch. While in the Atlanta airport I had to take one of their underground transport systems (subways) to get to my connecting flight.  The subway was crowded, standing room only.  It made numerous stops within the airport. Prior to each stop a robotic voice came on over the loudspeaker announcing what stop we were approaching. Think of the voice as a poorly, computer generated attempt at what a robot should sound like.  I asked a person near me, why they couldn’t have created a voice that had a southern accent, after all we were in Atlanta, Georgia. I was told that it originally had been designed with a southern voice, but no one payed any attention to it.

I made the connecting flight, though it was delayed a little, and arrived at Tri-Cities after 11:00.  The airport and all of the counters closed at 11:00.

When we got to Tri-Cities and looked for our luggage we discovered that all the luggage from those of us that had been re-routed from Cincinnati was not on our plane. Keep in mind at this time of night there were no attendants to help us.  As we were getting ready to leave, in a very frustrated state, I suggested that we look behind the Delta counter on a hunch. Lo and behold, our luggage was there.  It appears they fixed the plane in Cincinnati and it arrived before we did.

I didn’t get to start taking my course until Tuesday morning with the initial topic of discussion being my trip to Jonesborough. Timing is everything!