Peasant Woman

After a relaxing (and unplugged) week in Kauai, Kimo, Mali Zub and I were at the Lihue airport Sunday night when we learned our flight back was canceled due to technical difficulties.

Well, as you might guess, that didn't exactly please a lot of people. All the passengers, most of whom were cranky from waiting, tired from the late hour (11:30 p.m.) and sand-covered (because they'd been kicked out of their hotel long ago), began to short-circuit. Meanwhile, one lone airline representative battled her way through the increasingly irate crowd to announce that shuttles would soon be arriving to take us to a hotel, and, by the way, here's the number to call so that you can rebook your flight and hopefully get out tomorrow.

Mayhem. People began rushing the representative while she shouted for us to settle down, Please let the families with children through first! I picked up Mali Zubs and got to my feet while people pushed from behind, jockeying for space.

"Hurry!" a young woman to my left yelled at her husband. "Get up there, get to the front of the damn line!"

Similar rally cries surrounded us while Kimo, Mali Zub and I struggled to pack up all the baby toys that had been keeping Zubs at bay for the past hour. A young woman rushed past us with a baby stroller, her two-year-old daughter startled into a high-pitched sob from all the action.

"Families with children first!" the rep yelled, over and over. Somehow, it didn't really seem to make any difference: we were surrounded by singles and couples demanding, Goddammit, to be the first ones served.

I was so shocked by the anger and vicissitude around me that I just stood and watched while Kimo waited our families-with-children-turn. People who minutes before had been quietly reading or napping or staring off into space were now yelling, red-faced, at anyone they could find.

"She said families with children first," boomed a voice behind me.

"This is my child," a woman said.

"What! He must be at least 24!"

And on and on it went. One boisterous young woman and her husband (who were duking it out with the airlines via matching iPod phones) continued complaining at the top of their voices until the ticketing agent couldn't take it anymore and finally gave in. Never mind that the elderly passengers, who were next in line for the shuttle, continued to wait patiently while the youngest children screamed and cried out of exhaustion and fear.

And all the while, I couldn't help but think how horrible it was to see so many adults acting this way. Never mind that we were in Kauai--gorgeous, relaxing Kauai of all places--where food and lodging were just a shuttle ride away. The way people were acting, you'd have thought we were stuck in the desert or some Survivor-type island where there wasn't enough food or water to go around. Instead, we'd been given an extra day of vacation, put up in a gorgeous $380-a-night hotel, and given a $40/day food reimbursement.

In the middle of all this craziness, two separate families asked if we needed any help, since we were traveling with a baby. The kindness of those two gestures have stayed with me these past few days, past another red-eye and into the jet-lagged haze of adjusting to post-vacation life. Still, it's frightening to realize how quickly our society could break down if something were really wrong. All the social norms as we know it, out the window.