Editor Takes the Long Way Home
The job calls for some travel, but usually not quite this much
San Diego, California is 2,913 miles from my home in New Milford, Connecticut. As an editor at Fine Homebuilding, I’m expected to travel to meet authors, take photographs and attend conventions. These duties have taken me to the West Coast many times, but I’ve never felt as far away from home as I did on the morning of September 11.
Although a continent separated me from the terrorist attacks, I felt the impact of the tragedy the moment I arrived at the job site. Having spent the previous two days photographing a remodeling project in a San Diego neighborhood located directly in the flight path of Lindbergh airport, I’d grown accustomed to covering my ears every five minutes as another departing jet roared overhead. On that morning, I was greeted by nothing but a chilling silence.
The author had no more interest in working than I did, but we pushed on. He drove nails and I snapped photos, while throughout the neighborhood, American flags seemed to sprout like dandelions after a spring rain.
I was able to hold it together as long as I had a job to do, but when we finished up on Thursday morning, and the skies were still silent, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to get home to my wife and my three-year-old son. The airline was saying I might be able to get a flight out on Saturday. Amtrak promised me a seat by the following Tuesday. I decided to drive. The lady at Budget Rent-a-Car expressed not the slightest hint of surprise when I asked her if I could drop the car off sometime next week in Connecticut. “No problem. Have a nice drive,” she said.
I also had people to visit along the way. My first stop was Tucson, Arizona. There, Lynn Underwood, a building inspector from the nearby town of Oro Valley (“Unified code makes life easier for builders and inspectors,” FH #142, pp. 48, 50) dropped everything to meet me for lunch and then offer me the two-hour tour of the beautiful, high desert country, complete with the most Saguaro cactuses I’d ever seen.
Later that evening, just after sunset, I was driving though the tiny desert town of Holbrook, Arizona, when I noticed a large group of people gathered in the town square. Not until after I was hundreds of yards down the road did I realize that what I’d seen was a candlelight vigil. The farther away I got, the more I wished I’d stopped to take part.
The next two days were uneventful. I spent only about half the time on interstates. Whenever I got off onto two-lane roads, especially when passing through small towns, the scene was the same: Countless variations of American flags and “God Bless America” messages made me feel as if I was driving an endless parade route.
While driving, I kept glancing up but never saw a plane in the sky, not even a vapor trail. Finally, on Saturday, September 15, an hour’s drive east of Denver, just as the sun was starting to set, I saw the first commercial airliner overhead and punched my fist in the air with pride.
When I arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Sunday night, I knew that I’d at least made it halfway home because Lincoln was right in the fold of my atlas. Two days earlier, I’d arranged to meet author Fernando Pagés (“Choosing and Installing a Ceiling Fan,” FH 142, pp. 98-103) on Monday morning to spend the day photographing an upcoming article of his (I had been scheduled to visit in October).
Knowing what my unplanned visit had done to his plans for the day, I would have been happy just to see him show up. When he arrived carrying a tote bag filled with Books-on-Tape, I was nearly speechless.
The weather that day was warm and sunny — as perfect as it ever gets in Nebraska I was told. I got the photos I needed with time to spare, took Fernando’s family out to dinner that night, and got a good night’s sleep (relieved that I wouldn’t have to think about flying for at least a month). Early the next morning, I headed for home.
A good book-on-tape can make the odometer spin like a roulette wheel. While I’d stayed informed jumping between National Public Radio stations along the way, I was glad to focus on lighter stuff for the rest of the trip. I laughed my way across Iowa, thanks to Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Two cassettes worth of Hemingway’s short stories got me as far as the motel in Toledo where I spent my last night on the road.
The following afternoon, A Walk In the Woods, Bill Bryson’s tale of hiking the Appalachian Trail, took me all the way across New York State and across the border into Connecticut. I pulled into my driveway in New Milford at 1:00 AM, September 20. It’s not a good idea to wake up a sleeping child at 1 a.m. to give him a big hug, but I couldn’t help it.
Tom O’Brien is an associate editor at Fine Homebuilding.
Photo: Andrew Engel
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