Rusty Saber: Far-flung correspondent files travelogue

There is something intriguing about a reporter filing a story. It sounds like something Humphrey Bogart would have done while wearing a trench coat. It sounds macho, like Bogey covering a revolution in some exotic-sounding place like Katmandu and filing the stories with an ill-tempered editor.

Well, I'm not Humphrey Bogart in Katmandu. I'm on vacation in Maui. I'm certainly not wearing a trench coat. If I were, I'd look pretty silly. The SBJ editor is never ill-tempered, except, of course, when a deadline is missed. It may not be what foreign correspondents do in the movies, but I will file the Rusty Saber for awhile not from Marrakech, Tunis or So Paulo, but from Maui via fax.

As any good correspondent would do, I kept a log while flying from Springfield to Dallas, and thence to the Hawaiian Islands.

The log reads like this:

The Springfield-Branson Regional Airport is an impressive place. Few cities our size have an airport of this quality. And I hate to complain. I appreciate the availability of these little puddle jumpers that fly from Springfield to Dallas and other hub cities. But, I mean, the plane we took to Dallas was a Saab.

A Saab is a car. It's a great car, but a car is one thing and an airliner is another. When I want the wheels to stay on the ground, I'll go by car. When I want to fly over the ground, I'd prefer an airplane.

Getting off a Saab airplane and getting aboard a big wide-body plane is a remarkable transition. Big airports like Dallas-Ft. Worth are people movers in the same way stockyards are cattle movers. (Well, not exactly in the same way. Our final destination was not the slaughterhouse.) Everyone herds themselves toward the right corral, where they wait to be herded aboard cattle cars, otherwise known as airliners.

I wonder if the folks who hire the people who operate public address systems in airports ever test applicants to see if they can speak and be understood? Waiting at DFW for two hours, listening to constant announcements, I never once understood a single word. It sounded like "skluaz phqurague squazxypt rfhatufvester," which loses something in the translation.

At last we were aboard the big plane. The Saab we took to Dallas would fit in an overhead storage compartment. For the life of me, I don't know why the airlines don't crack down on what they allow people to carry on an airplane. We can't begin taxiing until everyone is seated. But passengers can't take their seats until they find places to poke, cram, jam and mash what must be most of their worldly possessions. It's little wonder that so many flights are delayed. The passengers are stowing everything they own.

We were once on a flight with a teenager who brought a skateboard on the plane. After much ado, the flight attendants finally found a place for it. If the passengers would have been given a vote, I'd have cast mine for throwing the kid and the skateboard off the plane. I think it would have been a unanimous vote.

Eight hours on an airplane creates a whole new definition of cramped.

Instead of inventing the Internet, as Vice President Al Gore claims to have done, I wish he had invented airplanes with enough legroom to accommodate human beings.

When legs were passed out, I was late getting in line and the only ones left were short ones. However, as short as they are, there's no place to put them. How do tall people manage to fold themselves into these cramped quarters?

With half of the trip still ahead, I gave serious thought to organizing a group to overthrow those pansies in first class. There they are, living in the lap of luxury (jacknifed into my seat as I was, I didn't have a lap at all), with plush leather seats, plenty of legroom and real food. I'll bet I could fan the flames of revolt and drive the first-class passengers out of their affluent digs. If the food served in the tourist section were to be served in a prison, a riot would break out and the warden held hostage until he met the demands for better food.

But as we land in Maui, all the bad food and cramped quarters are forgotten. We arrived safely. I have now filed my first story. Stand by ...

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury College and a Springfield public relations consultant.)