My rental car was stuck in a snowdrift.
It was the middle of the afternoon on January 15th, 1989, and I had skidded on a patch of ice on SR-195 on my way to Spokane, Washington. I had covered a basketball game at the University of Idaho the night before and was on my way to the airport to fly home, first to Seattle and then to Reno.
I had plenty of time to get there until the snowdrift got in my way. I called for road service, and by the time they came and pulled me out, plenty of time had dwindled down to nearly no time at all.
By the time I was back on the road, I was 21 miles from the airport and my flight was scheduled to leave in 23 minutes.
When you figure security checkpoints and TSA screening, I was screwed.
But wait … it was 1989.
The TSA didn’t even exist.
Yes, boys and girls, American airports didn’t used to be hellscapes.
People didn’t have to go through inspections before boarding airplanes. In fact, once was the time passengers could even carry handguns onto planes. If you watch the 1954 John Wayne movie “The High and the Mighty,” one passenger actually fires a pistol in the main cabin on a flight from Honolulu to San Francisco.
As recently as the late 1990s, I remember being able to stand at the gate at Burbank Airport and watch my wife get off a plane from Denver and walk directly to me.
The way things are now, since Osama bin Laden and his buddy COVID-19, flying has become an extremely unpleasant experience. You’ve got to get to the airport hours before your flight, stand in lines that seem interminable, go through security checkpoints leaving you with no privacy, and because one guy tried and failed to blow up a plane with a bomb in his shoe (he failed), you even have to remove your shoes.
Twenty-one miles, 23 minutes?
Yeah, maybe in your dreams.
But in 1979, I got to the airport three minutes before my flight was scheduled to leave, tossed the keys to the rental car people and ran to the gate. I made it right as they were starting to close the door to the plane.
They let me in, and as soon as I sat down and strapped in, the plane started taxiing to the runway.
On time.
There are certainly ways in which our lives have been changed for the better in the last 33 years, most of them technological. But don’t ever kid yourself that things haven’t become more difficult and less pleasant in other ways.
It was incredibly stressful for me to avoid missing that flight, but there was a feeling of great satisfaction — almost elation — to succeed at it.
Tough to find feelings like that anymore.