If you fly through Dallas

(you might never make it home)

Last August I traveled to Tucson, Arizona to attend my cousin’s wedding. My mom has lived in Tucson for 17 years, and I have never once visited her (or stepped foot in the state) in August. I have noticed that when she calls me in other months — especially months like January and February — she finds casual ways to drop the weather into our conversation, just in case I need to be reminded that while I am suffering through a bitter winter she’s a little outraged every time she has to put on a sweatshirt. But in August, fewer phone calls and never a peep about the weather. It’s not something most Arizonians want to talk about, that one month of the year when the desert turns into a broken rainforest and every inhale feels more like a prolonged and decorated form of suffocation than a life-sustaining breath. I thought it was a delightfully strange choice of time and place for a wedding, and I’m sure my cousin was teased mercilessly for this, but I appreciated the excuse to experience this dark side of desert life and to dance all night with glistening skin from sweat and overhead mist, lingering through the final two songs as the sky opened up with oversized raindrops.

I have a lot of cousins, and I almost never miss a wedding. The last few have been extra fun because I leave the kids at home and join the entourage of aunts and uncles as a solo traveler, as the cameo niece. The entourage is usually built of two to four couples, plus my aunt Carolyn who (more often than not) leaves her husband at home. This time Carolyn and I, without having planned it this way, ended up with the same flight itinerary back to Pennsylvania. We had no idea this was ultimately going to mean we had two extra days to spend together. I’m not going to go into all the details here, but I’ll give you some basics of what happened:

• show up at Tucson airport, check in for flight, check bags

• flight is significantly delayed (actual departure time unknown), we are going to miss our connecting flight in Dallas; we decide to stay in Tucson an extra night because we have a comfortable place to sleep that’s not an airport floor; rebook for 24 hours later; stop at CVS on the way back to my aunt and uncle’s house to get toothbrushes and cheap-ass pajamas; put on the cheap-ass pajamas as soon as we get back to the house; wash the clothes we’re wearing so we can wear them again the next day

• show up at Tucson airport next day, check in for flight, bags already in Dallas (or somewhere); flight is delayed but eventually takes off

• flight goes on and on, circling around but not landing; Dallas won’t let us in, everything is grounded; we’re going to run out of fuel if we don’t land somewhere; plane rerouted to Oklahoma City

• on the ground in Oklahoma City we see at least 20 other planes sitting on the runway around us; it’s obvious no one is going anywhere any time soon; I realize we could end up sitting here for hours; I start to freak out a little

The thing is, I have no trouble flying, no fear of being in the air or inside a contained vessel as long as I know when I’m getting out. Take away that little piece — the end time — and it’s my worst nightmare.

• we are given one minute to decide whether to get off the plane right here, right now, in Oklahoma City, and take our chances on the rest of our itinerary or wait indefinitely (on the plane) for the flight to resume its course to Dallas where we will have missed our connection (again). for me, this is a no-brainer; Carolyn is supportive; Oklahoma City, here we come!

• we get off the plane, walk through an employees-only back chamber of the airport, sign a waiver we probably should have read first, and are unceremoniously dumped into the terminal; Carolyn gets on the phone with the airline and we have to choose one of several farcical options for our continued journey home; we choose to rent a car and drive 3.5 hours to Bentonville, Arkansas to catch a flight the next day

• rental car line is at least an hour long; when we finally get a car and hit the road we are starving; I find us the closest decent-looking place to eat, which turns out to be an iconic steakhouse with good wine and possibly the best steak I’ve ever had in my life; Carolyn and I congratulate ourselves on winning the day (despite losing it pretty hard); we drive to the halfway mark — Tulsa — and stay in a hotel for the night; we watch bad TV, hand wash our underwear in the bathtub, laugh at everything, and work out a plan for the morning; this isn’t so bad

• the Bentonville airport (AKA the Walmart airport) is basically in a pasture; we laugh and laugh when we almost miss the entrance after winding around through farmland for half the drive there; it’s a nice airport, built for Walmart execs; we have a nice lunch, and we both order cocktails; we believe we are going home today

• around the time the flight is supposed to board, we hear announcement that there are not enough crew members available to staff the plane, that they are waiting for one flight attendant to arrive from — you guessed it — Dallas; Carolyn and I have not enough faith in that airport left between us to see this as anything other than catastrophic; this is Carolyn’s moment to freak out; I tell her if we can’t get on this flight, I am renting another car and driving us home

• it takes another hour but we finally get on the flight; drama-free connection in Charlotte; we are particularly shocked to find our luggage waiting for us in Harrisburg

A few weeks later I receive a text from Carolyn: “I just have to tell you, I LOVE my CVS pjs”

My reply: “Lol. I wore mine last night.”

Several times throughout this saga, Carolyn said to me, “Jessica, you’re going to have to write a song about this.” We agreed that it would have to be a country song — one of those sad-funny “poor me” songs with twang and beer and a man or maybe a dog waiting for me at home. She even suggested a title: “Dallas, the Devil’s Hole.” I liked the idea, but never did anything with it.

Then, a little over a week ago, Carolyn called me from Texas. "Jessica, you really have to write that song,” she said. “I’m stranded again, and it’s all because of the Dallas airport. I can’t get out of Texas for two more days.” I laughed and we chatted for a while, and I told her I’d see what I could do.

I love when someone gives me a writing assignment. If it lands with me at the right time, when I’m in the right mental space to roll with it, the prompt takes me to a noticeably different place than I would have gone to on my own. Some of my best songs have been written this way — “Looking for Spiders,” “When I Was the Weather,” and “Let’s Get a Tree", to name a few. I’ve done it often enough to know that where the song begins (with the prompt) and where it ultimately lands (the song I actually write) tend to be wildly divergent. In other words, what you’re about to listen to is not a funny song about a travel fiasco; it’s a pretty deep, dark reflection on the nature of life, how it has this way of wrecking our plans and demanding from us a sometimes devastating level of adaptability and grace.

Please enjoy this very raw solo demo of my new song, “If You Fly Through Dallas”