Wacky Watermelon #1

“Shit.”

“This…is a problem.”

Eight hours before that we had been getting on our nonstop flight to Chicago’s O’Hare airport from London. The flight was delayed two hours, and about halfway across the Atlantic I realized that we only had a three hour layover scheduled in Chicago. I thought maybe I had my times confused or the effects of the night before were still messing with my head. But I had the feeling that I was right. Unfortunately, I was.

“We’re never going to make our flight.”

“Quick. Check out the next flight out of Chicago to Salt Lake. Maybe we can make that one if we end up missing our 8:00 flight.”

…

“Um, there is no other flight.”

“Shit.”

We had just stepped off the flight from London to Chicago. To our best knowledge, we had about 50 minutes to get our luggage, go through U.S. customs, recheck out luggage, go through U.S. security, and make it across the airport to our terminal for our 8:00 p.m. flight. We knew we were in trouble and the hangover from the night before certainly didn’t help. It had been our last night in Dublin and we stupidly took the locals’ advice for what to do that night before our 6:00 a.m. departure back to the states. Go out to a pub. Sounded like a good idea at the time. It was a good idea at the time. It was even a good idea while we were on the Dublin bus headed for the airport (possibly because the alcohol levels in our bloodstream were still favorable). The part where it started to become a not-so-good idea was about halfway across the Atlantic. At least, that’s when it became a bad idea for me. But we both knew the second we stepped into the international terminal in Chicago that we had both fully realized, and paid for, our stupidity the night before.

The second we found each other by the gate, we bolted away from it towards the luggage carousel. We waited 20 minutes for it. My friend looked at me with the normal panicked look that crosses his face whenever things aren’t going to plan, and rather than attempt to calm him down with my normally calculated approach to high stress situations I simply said “we’re in trouble.”

With that public acknowledgement of the obstacles we were facing, we then started running towards the customs counter. I thought to myself “30 minutes…we can make it.” That was until we got to the big room for U.S. customs and found literally hundreds of people in line in front of us. There it was. Defeat. There was no way we were going to get our gate in 30 minutes with the gargantuan line in front of us. I turned on my cell phone to tell my family that we were staying in Chicago when my friend literally tackles me in the line to grab the phone and shut it off.

“What the hell are you doing?!?”

“Shhhhh, those guards are looking over here and you can’t have cell phones on in here!”

“What?”

“That sign over there says you can’t have cell phones on! Now those guards are looking over here and that’s all we need is another delay.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure your football tackle in the middle of this line did absolutely nothing to catch their attention.”

Looking back on the whole thing I’ve found that putting two independent and headstrong people suffering hangovers into a high stress situation that involved a lot of waiting when they’d rather be running can produce a lot of smartass remarks. But thankfully the guards really didn’t care. In the midst of what seemed like an impossible situation, we finally got some hope when a couple more desks opened up and we ran as quickly as we could to get to them. We made it through customs with relative ease, and we had made it to the bag check within five minutes. We checked our bags and were very close to our destination.

When we got through security I looked at my watch and we had 18 minutes left before our gate closed. We ran as fast as we could through the international terminal until we made it to the railcar we had to ride to get to our terminal. We had been doing so well, and we had very little time before our gate closed. I looked at my watch again and we had about 15 minutes left. I began to relax thinking that we were pretty much there. That was until the railcar waited for 10 minutes before taking off. The “oh shit” look was again on our faces as we got off the railcar and started running through the terminal trying to find our gate.

As we raced through the terminal my friend managed to catch a glimpse at a flight status screen and he yelled that our flight gate’s status said “final call” on the board. We ran even harder. As we ran past all kinds of people, desperately trying to avoid collision after collision, we heard the announcement that said the flight gate to our Salt Lake flight had closed and was now departing.

“Damn!”

We stopped running and just looked at each other. We had been beaten. After looking at each other for a few moments we simply shrugged our shoulders and started walking. We had made it to the floor where our gate was and we decided we might as well figure out when the next flight in the morning would leave. Then, we heard it:

“Correction for flight UA 9658. Last call for United Airlines flight 9658 to Salt Lake City. Last call.”

We stopped walking, turned, looked at each other…

“RUN!”

We ran as fast as we could down the hallway towards our gate. Everything was going fine until both of us, after dodging near collisions with the people around us, were set on an inevitable crash course into two security guards that were walking in front of us. Both of us attempted to dodge this collision and ended up clipping the outside shoulders of both guards. Neither of us broke stride during this, and I looked back to see the two guards get slammed into each other as we ran past them.

My friend said, “maybe we should stop!”

“Are you out of your mind? Just run!”

We made it to our gate right when the attendant was moving to close the door. Breathless we threw our tickets at the counter saying “wait, that’s our flight!” She looked quite amused at our obviously panic-stricken disheveled appearance and calmly ran our tickets and let us on board. We stepped onto a full plane of passengers while we were literally gasping for air (I estimate we sprinted about a mile) and the half of the plane literally exploded in laughter. Apparently we were just the funniest thing they had ever seen. Sitting down the flight attendants literally came over to us with bottles of water and we drank them within two minutes. After resting for about five minutes we simply looked at each other and gave each other a high-five.

************

Looking back on it, I have no idea why we felt so victorious making it onto that flight, or why it was so critical that we did make it. It wasn’t like it was the last flight to ever leave Chicago for the rest of our lives. If we hadn’t made it, the worst that would have happened was a night of inconvenience in being put up in a hotel room and shuttled back to the airport the next morning. But from the minute we stepped off the London flight, we were both determined to make it home that night. There was no room for questions about how likely, or how smart, it was for us to try. We just knew that we were going to make it, and the ridiculous amount of effort we exerted in order to do so only goes to show how stubborn the two of us can be if we want to. But more importantly, I think of it as a great memory of what can happen when two likeminded friends set out to do something regardless of the difficulty in doing so, and they go do it. I didn’t question him, he didn’t question me. It’s the best type of friendship.