exit 670

“I am flying high over Tupelo, Mississippi, with America’s hottest band, and we are all about to die.”

That’s what I feel like right now – that quote from Almost Famous. This is less a plane than a tin can, assuring me both an aisle seat and a window seat because the vessel is only wide enough to sit three across – the entire plane. One could assuredly skip from the rear lavatory to the pilot’s cabin in less than thirty seconds, though moving so fast wouldn’t be recommended given the relatively silly width of the lone slender aisle that dissects the rows into such meager columns.

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There is certainly turbulence.

Oh, and there are random high pitched wails that last for four or five minutes. Always encouraging.

I sit in seat A11, one row in front of the mid-plane emergency exits, meaning I have an perfect view of the left wing as it shakes up and down. If there are any gremlins aiming to end our flight prematurely, I’m William Shatner. I remind you this is Halloween.

The sun comes out fifteen minutes into the flight. So far it’s been clouds and dreary rain; now I can barely see as the blinding rays crash through the window to my left. I do see a rainbow, but clouds remain, so the farms and fields of the Show Me State stay completely obscured.

The stewardess offers water, but no explanation for the multiple high pitched wails. Beer and wine are five bucks; hooray for my temperance. Soda or water is free, but I’ll be damned if there’s anywhere for me to put it. The tray table, still in its upright and locked position, offers little room for both a laptop and a small plastic cup of relief.

Oh. It pulls out. Cool.

I’m headed to Denver for management training, spending four days (plus this travel day) in classes at a local superstore. No time for play: school through the morning and afternoon, and by the time we’re out so is the sun, and I’m left with darkness and a minivan shared with three others. Coors Field can wait, I guess.

The roadgeek in me despises this trip, having driven my whole life, shunning the airlines en route to close distances such as Cincinnati, Detroit and Nashville. Google it: fifteen hours from St. Louis to Denver if one travels I-70, and I don’t think work would fit the gas bill – nor the hotel bill in Kansas that would probably ease the hardship of the journey.

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Airport parking is ridiculous – eighteen dollars a day at the official, endorsed, on-site, you’re not cool if you don’t park here parking garage – and this is after you navigate Lambert Airport traffic. So I shun the idea of taking the Defiant into Missouri, parking at a MetroLink lot and taking the train to the main terminal several hours before my flight.

Metro saves money, but not time. Creeping at a snail’s pace first through allegedly dangerous east side neighborhoods and then underneath the death of downtown St. Louis, it takes the better part of five quarter hours to reach the end of the line. Midday, in one’s car, traveling at your author’s usual speed, this journey would take about half the time. Still: eighteen dollars per day to park. Four dollars round trip sounds much better.

Mound City is certainly a commuter’s town, always expanding outward, looking for the next farm town in St. Charles or St. Clair County to envelope. This leaves little use for a light rail system developed in 1990, one which has yet to complete its second line and comes nowhere close to any of the metropolis’s shopping palaces, a death knell for transportation in St. Louis. Accordingly, Metro is seen as a way to get to the ballpark, or occasionally Lambert, or certainly to school if one is educated at UMSL or SWIC. Other than that, it is merely an oddity that avoids easy access to Forest Park, or your home for that matter.

So my trip is rather solitary, with only a few people riding between four or five stops, and no one imitating my ride to the end of the line. It’s an interesting trip, traveling through beautiful fall foliage lining the hidden passages of Belleville, where not so long ago this was all still so very rural, and then onto East St. Louis where crumbling brick buildings line streets left truncated for this white and red steel marvel. Next stop: 5th and Missouri, bus connections to urban decay.

I travel under downtown, with little room topside for rail lines amidst the one-way streets and department stores (well, those that remain.) Emerging at 250 Stadium Plaza, there are two Busch Stadiums – one which won’t be standing in a fortnight – and just past there at Savvis Center a perfectly placed album lies in the grass on the right side of the tracks. It’s Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” certainly an iconic image if one had to choose an album cover to display, and the disc itself sits halfway out of the sleeve as if placed there by a photographer arranging it for a promo shoot commissioned by Columbia Records.

No one on board the train claims it.

If the weather and my experiences today want to truly represent my feelings, they’re doing a bang-up job, and this is the perfect day to travel: dreary and damp, cool enough to be annoying but not cold enough to really complain about it. After spending the rather warm and very sunny weekend running around the beauty that is Southern Illinois and the Shawnee National Forest with the beauty that is Emily, I’m left alone today to drive through the rain and muck, dart with my luggage between the raindrops to catch my train, and as a final insult, made to walk down a rickety gangway to the Lambert Field tarmac, because my plane is so small that it won’t fit properly in the American Airlines gate it’s assigned to.

The plane rocks back and forth and I can finally see the Missouri countryside, brown fields mixed with spots of greenery and roads arranged in perfect squares, broken by a rather large lake resembling the footprint of a giant, three-toed tyrannosaurus rex. It may be Kansas by now: it’s like Google Earth, but without the cool labels, and with your screen shaking back and forth as if taken over by some evil mutant form of spyware.