Lessons from a Bad Trip

Please indulge my tale of woe, because I really do have a point.

I just got back from a bad trip. I traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina to present Youth Development for Haven House Services. Don’t get me wrong -- that’s not the bad part. In fact, my trip to Haven House was wonderful, and I’ll be telling you more about that part of the trip tomorrow. The bad part was the return odyssey home.

It began with a delayed flight out of Raleigh that got me to Charlotte, North Carolina at about 6:30 in the evening. I had a really tight connection to catch a direct flight back to Portland that would get me in at about 10:00 PM on Saturday, so I was listening very closely when the flight attendant was making gate announcements. My first clue should have been when she announced my flight number, paused, and then went on to the next flight without saying anything. My second clue should have been when I asked the flight attendant for gate information; she said she’d get back to me and then never returned or talked to me again.

It was the third clue that finally got me worried. That was when I got off the plane and looked at the departure board to see no flights to Portland listed. I went up to the nearest gate and asked them to check my flight. Only then was I told that my flight was cancelled and I’d have to go to the ‘Special Services’ desk.

I arrived at the Special Services desk to stand in a long line waiting to see only two Special Services agents. I was in that line for (I’m not kidding, I timed it), 2 hours and 55 minutes before I got to spend the next 25 minutes dealing with the agent and trying to find a way home. When I left the desk I had a $10.00 food voucher (with only a few minutes left before the restaurants started closing; and just try to find food in the Charlotte airport for under 10 bucks!), a flight to Los Angeles leaving at 7:40 AM on Sunday, and another flight out of LA to Portland leaving at 6:45 PM Sunday evening. Not only was it going to be a long trip home, but it looked like I was going to be spending the night at the Charlotte airport.

I went to the gate I’d be using in the morning, found a rack of 4 chairs that didn’t have arms, and bedded myself down for the evening. I was just drifting off to sleep when a security guard wheeled up on a Segway to tell me that the airport concourses close overnight and I’d have to leave. That meant I had to spend the night out past security where there was little more than a hard, cold, and dirty floor to lay down on. I decided to stay up all night.

The story has a little bit of good news. When I got to LA I was able to get on standby for an earlier flight, and I made it back to Portland dirty, tired, and a bit cranky, but only 17 hours later than planned. Of course, there were many irritations in that 17 hours, such as having to repeatedly go through security after I had purchased $3.00 bottles of water, which I would then have to discard (I think I did this about 3 times) -- and, if I wanted to, I could lament the unpleasantness of my journey in far greater detail. But, as I said earlier, this story has a point.

For all the unpleasantness, there were also some good things that happened brought about by something we humans seem to do when we share experiences. We bond, and in bonding we make the hard times a little less hard for each other. I was not the only one whose travel plans were screwed up, and as I interacted with all the other people who were having a hard time I established some really enjoyable -- if temporary -- relationships.

My first acquaintances were the two teachers from Newberg, Oregon, who I later ended up having dinner with as we got to the restaurant just before it closed. We then met a young man trying to get to a party in Detroit. We’d hold his place in line as we sent him out seeking information in other parts of the airport. A woman trying to get to Nashville with her two little children commiserated with us as she struggled to keep her children from going bonkers, and we were later joined by a young woman from Longview whose husband was trying to get help at another service desk. She was in constant phone contact with him and we’d exchange what we were learning about the situation with what he was finding out. She was also dealing with her concerned mother who kept making crazy flight arrangements over the internet to the tune of 13oo bucks and up. We even discussed the possibility of renting a van and doing a road trip back to Portland, as a rumor was circulating that we wouldn't be getting a flight out until Monday or later.

Overnight in the airport I spent some time with the ex-marine who had just been discharged and was trying to get home; the lady from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who tried to rescue a lost kitten wandering around the airport; and the Hispanic gentleman, also headed to Portland, who apparently had the same bladder as I do, as we kept running into each other on the way to or from the restroom. As it turned out, he and I both made it on the standby flight to Portland out of LA the next morning. We were giving each other high-five’s in two languages as they let us onto the aircraft at the last minute.

My final temporary friend was the women I sat next to on the last leg of my journey. She was scared to fly and clutched her stuffed animal the entire trip. Helping to reassure her that we’d be safe may have been the universe’s reason for delaying me to that flight.

None of us knew each other. It’s likely we’ll never meet again and, if we spent more time together, it’s unclear whether we’d have anything in common or even like each other. But for the short period of time that we were thrown together in a bad situation, we were friends and formed a tight support system -- in some cases without ever even knowing each other’s name.

And here’s the point. Do we not see this exact same behavior with youth on the streets? Do we not see them forming tight bonds with people they’ve only just met and know little about? And do we not tend to pathologize that behavior, treating it as another ‘issue’ that the young person needs to deal with? Yet the fact is that this behavior, the tendency to quickly bond and form relationships with strangers who are in similar circumstances, is just like so many other behaviors that we tend to pathologize in street youth. It is a normal, rational, and predictable human response. Put yourself in their situation and you will do the same thing. The proof can be seen in my trip home.

I’m not saying that youth we meet on the streets don’t have issues to work through. We all do. What I’m saying is that they are probably far healthier than we tend to give them credit for, and that many of the behaviors we see as ‘problems’ are really quite normal human responses. We’d be far more helpful to them if we didn’t pathologize the behaviors we’d exhibit if we were in their shoes.