TKM

As I write this, le domestique and I are Hawaii-bound for a twin 40^th-birthday celebration, mine having passed with much blog fanfare in November and hers yet forthcoming in March. She observed just moments ago that this is our first ever flight from Los Angeles without the psych! westbound takeoff–U-turn combo. Departing LAX, planes always take off over the Pacific, after which eastbound flights turn around and head on their merry overland way. This time we brashly continued our westward trajectory, prompting me to observe that this is also our first flight entirely over water and therefore entirely without emergency landing opportunities, which was kind of a weird place for me to go, because I’ve never worried about flying. I blame it on Lost, which films in the country of Hawaii. (Le domestique is trying to fool me into believing that Hawaii is actually part of the United States; she’s funny like that.)

While waiting at the airport for a red eye—the espresso/coffee beverage, not the icky itinerary—I saw a flight attendant lose her grip on her cappuccino only to catch it between her stomach and the wall of the coffee counter without spilling a drop. “Nice save!” I said, to which she merrily replied “Thanks!”

“That seems like a good omen for your flight today,” I added—unwisely, it turned out. She looked at me like I had just licked the foam from her drink, and it was only then that I realized that’s kind of an asshole thing to say to a flight attendant, reminding her that on the slim chance that her flight goes very, very badly, she could soon die screaming. And while unforeseen dangers lurk in every life and career, no one has ever suggested as I’ve left for work that my day might yield life-threatening complications—beyond perhaps a confluence of articles so incompetently written that I pulpify my brain with repeated blows to the skull from my desk dictionary, which, while only slightly less likely than a plane crash, is more self-determinable.

The idea of horrible things that can happen on planes seeped into my brain when we arrived at the airport, simply because LAX was the least busy I’ve seen it since pre-9/11 days. We walked right up to the self-serve kiosk and checked ourselves in, then le domestique noticed that the plane was only about half-full, so we delightedly switched our seats to an empty middle row of three, leaving a vacancy between us so that we can stretch out a bit and, as the need arises, flail our arms about wildly without striking one another. Our luck continued as we delivered our checked baggage directly to a waiting TSA guy and waltzed through security. For several years after 9/11 I was pulled aside at airport security for an in-depth search of my bags and person EVERY TIME I FLEW, lending little credence to officers’ claims that I had been randomly selected. Perhaps I share my name with a person of interest to the United States government—like maybe that bog turtle expert is a fugitive shoe bomber—or it could just be that TSA training highlights the probability of gender-vague troublemakers. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad to have escaped the long arm of the TSA law, because I really dislike having stern people paw around in my undiepants and such.

As a copy editor by trade, I would ordinarily spell out the full name of any organization or government bureau on first reference, with subsequent references given in acronym form, but I’ve forgotten for the moment what TSA stands for, and at 30,000 feet I’m temporarily denied help from the Internet. I’ve heard that some foreign air carriers already provide free in-flight Wi-Fi as a tonic to bored travelers, and while I wish my own country’s airlines would embrace the concept, I understand that those same foreign carriers are allowing in-flight mobile phone use as well, and if it’s a package deal, I’m against it. I guard my sanity too jealously to be forced to listen to Mr. No Inside Voice narrate his journey to his Bluetooth or, worse, drone endlessly to a business associate about how their Cincinnati office is totally on board with the idea to move forward on the plan to introduce their strategic objectives at the next planning meeting of the oversight committee for Strategic Idea Summit 2008: How to Introduce Your Plans for Maximum Forward Movement With Minimum Oversight.

I became absolutely convinced that we had passed through a time-warp portal and entered the Golden Age of Air Travel when a flight attendant handed me a hot breakfast of eggs scrambled with sour cream and chives, potatoes, ham, fruit, and a muffin. Other than your complimentary beverages, not a single four-hour flight I’ve taken in the last decade has resulted in anything but some weird processed “havarti” cheese ’n’ crackers, a cookie, and, when lucky, a smile, so I can only surmise that this five-hour-and-nine-minute estimated flight time is critical to the awarding of victuals.

Le domestique just observed that no amount of mahalos on a form obfuscates the fact that the country of Hawaii makes its visitors fill out a survey disclosing just what it is exactly that we’re up to in their environs and also whether we’ve brought along any live seafood or virus cultures. And our 50-something mainlander flight attendant did not engage in the spirit of aloha when I asked her whether, as domestic partners, we could submit a single “family” declaration form. “Excuse me?” she said.

“We’re domestic partners,” I repeated, indicating le domestique. “Can we fill out a single form?”

“If you’re a family, you only have to fill out one form,” she said, halfway gone before she finished speaking. Her tone excluded the sunny interpretation that she was surprised I would even have to ask such a question since, as we all know, love makes a family.

At any rate, I let le domestique’s form speak for the both of us. But if I had filled out my own form, I would have categorically denied any intended mischief pertaining to crustacean or virus smuggling, and I would have disclosed to Hawaiian officials that I have come to their country for the lava…

 …and the coffee!

“Wouldn’t it be neat if you could go coffee-tasting like you can go wine-tasting!” I enthused to le domestique a week or so ago, after I realized that the Big Island, on which we’ll be spending the lion’s share of our trip, is where the Kona coffee lives! Hey, wouldn’t it be even neater if there were a way you could find out whether such a thing is possible in just 0.31 seconds, which is how long, sans typing, a Google search for “kona coffee tasting” took to return 1,740 results! Six hundred coffee farms have convened along one 25-mile stretch of scenic country roads for my tasting convenience. Whee!

We had actually booked on the Big Island for that other alluring hot liquid. Living as we do in Southern California, we’ve got all the white sandy beaches anyone could ever want or need, but there’s simply nowhere we can go when we want to watch liquid fire devour everything in its path. To me, lava seemed worth the five-hour plane trip almost by itself. I have always been a fan of its lamps. And look-see here how close the country of Hawaii lets tourists get to its fiery blobness:

It’s heartening to know that my intimacy with lava* will be limited only by my own personal stupidity level, and frankly, I think our country could take a lesson from the Hawaiians. Word to the United States, if you don’t allow someone to get eaten by a bear every now and again, all the pot banging in the world will simply fall on deaf ears.

An online friend of mine who lives on Oahu says one can spend her whole week’s vacation at Volcanoes National Park and still not see everything worth seeing there. I would contend that one can spend those same seven days plantation-hopping in Kona and still not taste all the coffee worth tasting. Now, le domestique and I have wine-tasted our way up and down the Californy coast, and even still, what I don’t know about wine could fill a book—while other tasters use their little golf pencils to scribble notes like “ashy” and “aggressive tannins,” I keep mental notes of “like” and “did not like”—but about this coffee beverage I am much more discerning. My therapist encourages me to curb caffeine intake—and she has a point; with the neurotransmitters in my gearbox already capable of making my brain rev like a stock car on race day, taking on excess sugar or caffeine is just tempting fate—so when I told her of my planned coffee tour she wondered aloud whether, like wineries, the Kona tasting rooms might better be equipped with spitting tureens. 

When wine-tasting one is bound to encounter a tour group or three wherein a dozen or so people are carted from winery to winery by limo or van such that they can eschew the spitting and get completely blotto with impunity. Coffee-tasting obviously harbors dangers of a different sort, so tour maps carry a travelers’ advisory suggesting that it is perhaps wise to participate not only in the tasting opportunities but in any tours offered of the plantation, its harvesting and roasting facilities, and any historical exhibits, thus putting a little distance between one’s cups of caffeine. That all seems reasonable to me; half a dozen plantations on I may be in a frame of mind to bring in a harvest or two. Concurrently, le domestique may be in a frame of mind to force-feed me the anti-anxiety meds I didn’t need for the plane trip over. 

*It turns out my intimacy with lava is also limited by its current trajectory, which is veering inconveniently away from the national park’s edges and really inconveniently toward a couple of straggler houses† in a subdivision previously decimated by lava flow. The only way for touristas like us to see it would be by helicopter. I suppose I could have found this out via a simple Web search weeks ago, but that would have spoiled the searing disappointment I felt on finding this out instead my first morning here.

†As homeowners in California, where earthquake coverage is excluded from standard insurance policies and sold as a separate product, we were naturally curious as to whether those poor stragglers were covered for volcanic ire. We learned from a friendly tour operator whose tour we weren’t on but who nevertheless stopped to show us pictures of his own recent lava encounters—because that’s the way Hawaiians roll—that there are three designated lava zones for insurance purposes: He owns a home in zone 2, where he pays approximately double the rate of someone in zone 3, where the danger is most remote; then there’s lava zone 1, in which the doomed subdivision lies, where insurance cannot be had for love or money.

I am posting this on day three of our trip, because that’s how long it took us to stumble across Wi-Fi on the island. Granted, we weren’t trying all that hard, and it’s gratifying to see that there are fewer Starbucks outside the airport than there are inside the airport (three, just in the terminal we came through); on the other hand, we’re in a Starbucks now and are grateful for the Wi-Fi-portunity, so, Mahalo, Starbucks! We are here following a five-hour coffee-tasting marathon (and even I recognize my limits, so I’m currently sipping a green tea lemonade). The tasting experience? There were no spitting tureens. It was awesome. More later! 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under the gays, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.