Snowed Out

All I had to do was leave five minutes earlier. Or even two minutes. Hell, if I had jogged just a bit faster as I weaved back and forth between the crowds at Logan, I probably would have made it.

That would have been the end of the story. You could have stopped reading right here.

But I didn’t leave five minutes earlier, or even two. I left twenty minutes late, partly because I had some pills to pick up for a friend in his room (not as sketchy as it sounds, honestly), and partly because, well, I’m kind of an idiot.

I left school on Dec. 19, the last day before winter vacation, excited to get back to my hometown of Denver for a much-needed vacation (read: writing papers). My flight was scheduled to leave at 6 p.m., so I took the T not long after 4 p.m. (I now get why people take cabs all the time, despite the fact that it’s twenty times as expensive.) As I arrived at the Silver Line shuttle stop just in time to see the crowded car drive away, I glanced at my watch, beginning to worry.

4:40…4:45…4:50…

I was in trouble, but I was optimistic when I got to the airport with a good forty minutes to go before takeoff. I even saw a fellow Coloradoan, a friend of mine whose flight was supposed to leave before mine.

“Good,” I thought. “If she’s still here, then I’ll be fine for my flight.”

That would have been great, except for the fact that she had missed hers. We exchanged a few brief words before I got in the check-in line. After checking my luggage and receiving my boarding pass, I got to security. It was getting closer and closer to the moment of truth.

5:35…5:40…5:45…

Finally, as the final boarding calls for our flight were announced over the airport loudspeaker, some friendly travelers let me and another man on my flight jump to the front of the line. We made it through security. We were going to make our flight. 5:47...5:48…5:49…

I jogged with my newly-made friend to the gate, feeding off his optimism the entire way.

“We’re gonna make it bro,” he said jubilantly. “Our bags are on the plane, we have our boarding passes.They can’t leave without us.”

My, how wrong he was. Because not only did the plane leave without us—though we arrived at the gate in time to see a guy board literally two seconds before we got to the plane’s walkway—the door was slammed in my face. I even had my hand on the handle, but the female attendant was too strong (don’t laugh), and forcibly closed the huge metal door in front of me. Needless to say, I was livid.

The story could end here, too. I could have gotten a ticket for another flight, gotten home, and written letters to the unnamed airline. Nope. Despite the fact that some sympathetic ticket agents informed me that there were zero flights to the Mile High City within the next three days, they figured out a way to get me home to Denver the next day. How, exactly?

By flying me to San Francisco and then to Denver.

Now, I was never the most astute geographer, but I was pretty sure California comes after Denver when traveling west from Boston. But what choice did I have? I headed back to school, attempting to kill time before my trek back to the airport the next morning to catch the 6:25 a.m. flight to the Bay.

Before my return to the airport the next morning, I encountered: 1) A stranded freshman who had missed her own San Francisco flight, and accompanied me back and forth to campus; 2) The same sad and dejected Colorado friend who had missed her flight (and had a harrowing journey of her own); and 3) An eerily deserted Dunster dining hall, in which I proceeded to prance around with another friend who had stayed at school for an extra day.

I thought those would be the most exciting parts of my attempts to get home, but I was so, so wrong. After the cab ride back to the airport (which I grudgingly paid for), my flight landed in San Francisco six-and-a-half hours later. I was happy—until I turned on my phone.

“The Denver airport is closed because of all the snow,” the message from my mom said. “You’re not going to get out of there for a while.”

Four nights later—five days after I started—I finally got home on the night of Dec. 24. I celebrated Christmas with my family, and an absolutely wonderful friend in Berkeley hosted me for those four nights. Sure, I spent hours upon hours upon hours in airports, waited an entire day for a standby flight that never materialized, saw grown men break down and cry, and people be treated like animals by airport staffers. But a few things came out of the experience. I realized that my friends are there for me, I’ll never fly on a certain unnamed airline again, and that people finally have a reason to believe in their stereotypes of a snow-covered Denver.

And if you want to get me really, really mad, just slam a door in my face.

—Malcom A. Glenn is a junior History concentrator in Leverett House. He enjoys long walks in the Bay Area and seeing the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge.