Go west young man

At the end of the summer of 1985, I went to Japan for the first time. We got on a 747, the biggest airplane I had ever been on, with 300 other people and took off from LAX in California. I had grown up there, and never thought of it as "The West". California, southern California, was so far ahead of everyone else, and The West was Yesterday. I had joined the navy to "see the world", and saw dozens of states in the US, but didn’t see much of the world. Flying to Japan was the farthest away I had ever been. I was married to a Japanese woman. I had met her in California, when she stopped on her way to the east coast to visit a friend of hers who had been my friend in the boarding school we had gone to.

We had gotten married 2 and a half years later, when I was still in the Navy, but less than a year after we married, I was out of the service and on my way to Japan. My wife had graduated that June with an Arts Degree and we set out on an eight week drive across the US in our new Toyota pickup truck. We had gone east to west and to many places in the west before we drove back to LA and put our truck in storage on jack stands. We had seen as much of "the real America" as we could before we went to Japan. We had already made made a cross-country drive together in December of 84, a straight trip to LA from Providence for Christmas at my family’s place. She had flown back from that trip while I drove the truck back alone, and that spring, I drove the car I had before we got married, a Mazda RX-2, back again across the country, in a long 4400 mile loop to stop in Oregon to visit a Navy friend. I was glad my wife wasn’t with me on the Mazda trip; the car did not run right most of the way, and it wasn’t until I had gotten 2/3rds of the way across the country that I thought I had it tamed and running better.

In 1985, I drove across the US 3 times.  After her graduation, we took our Honeymoon Trip in our new truck, the vehicle without any problems of any kind. We drove all around and where we wanted to and arranged storage for the truck and finally got on the flight we had looked forward to for many months. On the drive across the US. my wife had been teaching me Japanese; I could name every farm animal we saw in English and Japanese. I learned how to say "at Yale today I saw a squirrel". I knew the words for things in the kitchen and the things we ate, and was, I felt, fairly ready for "Japan".

We got on the plane and found our seats and listened to the pre-flight safety lecture – I always pay attention to that sort of thing – and we settled in for the long, ten hour flight. Drinks were free on trans-Pacific lights, and I ordered a Jack Daniels and settled in for the flight with the fat Steven King book I had bought in the airport. I put down the book though and took my wife’s hand and smiled at her goofily, looking forward to seeing her country like we had just seen mine.

Less than an hour into the flight, the plane banked heavily to the right and the pilot came on the intercom and said, " Folks, our plane has a small problem and won’t make it to Japan. There’s nothing to worry about, but we will be landing in Seattle, where another plane is going to be waiting for you to continue on to Japan. Please relax and enjoy the ride to Seattle, and I’m sorry my crew won’t be taking you".

My wife and I, and everyone else on board, I think, shared a worried look, and tightened our seat belts. The plane seemed ok to us, and our worries passed, but going to Seattle was going to disrupt our plans in Japan; my wife had to get to a phone. However, when we landed in Seattle we were herded from one 747 to another one almost next to it on the runway, and there was no time for anyone to make any calls. There was some grumbling about that and a lot about how ‘the airline" had "screwed up again", and the stewardesses looked harried and were not calm; we had the same cabin crew as the other jet.

Our new jet trundled out to the runway and the pilot came on, a different guy but with the same sort of voice. "Welcome aboard our plane folks, and I’m sorry for the unscheduled change of plans, but you’ll be glad to know that we’ll make up some time and we’ll only be a few hours later than you would have been. Thanks for flying with us, and if there’s anything you need, just ask the cabin crew for help". The 747 cruised down the taxi-way and sat at the foot of the runway… and then turned around and went back to the terminal, the pilot saying, "Umm, folks, it turns out that we will be too late to land at Narita airport, that it closes before we’ll get there. The airline has arranged for another plane tomorrow morning, and will provide accommodations tonight. I’m sorry for the delay."

My wife and I looked at each other and sighed. Life was still an adventure.

***

The plane went back to the terminal and the usual pandemonium ensued as three hundred people sought to get off the plane that they had just gotten on 25 minutes ago. The airport buses were overwhelmed with passengers going to the airport hotel. I took one look at the chaos and said, "let’s walk", and shouldered my carry-on bag and started towards the hotel. It was farther than it looked, and only a few buses came after we got there. "We should have waited" hung in the air.

The room was a lot nicer than most of the motels we had stayed at across the country; certainly it cost more than we had ever paid for a motel. We had a chit for room-service and ordered some food, waiting while my wife called Japan to tell her parents of our change of plans. Our flight from LA had been set to land in Osaka, close to their city, but now the flight we were on was going to Narita, near Tokyo and hundreds of miles from where we wanted to go. The airline had arranged tickets for us on a domestic flight from Tokyo to Osaka, but we were still more than a day late and plans had to be changed.

Fortunately, the hotel provided toothbrushes and razors, but I learned from that experience to always pack a change of socks at least in my carry-on bag; I was feeling less than fresh the next day as we lined up and got on a plane to Japan for the third time in two days.

I had grown up in southern California, almost as far west as I could get in and had been looking all over the US to find "the real West".  That turned out to be east of California. but I kept going west from California and flew as far West as I could get.

To Japan.

*****