Losing our baggage, but not our minds, at the airport
Lessons from three months of transit, with a surprise ending
As the end of my spring semester has drawn nearer and nearer, I’ve been looking forward to the joy of cracking open an epic new gaming adventure on my beloved Nintendo Switch. Jumping out of academia and into something completely different—in this case, the world of a well-made video game—has become a refreshing tradition for me. As I wrote about last year, I flung myself into Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom following the spring 2023 semester. After last fall’s semester came to a close, it was the (literally) spellbinding Hogwarts Legacy that got the nod, which gave this hopeless Millennial the chance to explore the world of Harry Potter properly for hours on end.
Spring 2024 was supposed to be no different. On the menu this May: Super Mario Bros. Wonder, last year’s side-scrolling adventure that’s an ode not just to the original Mario adventures of the 80s and 90s, but to delight itself: “Every frame oozes joy,” raved one reviewer. A new, relentlessly delightful Super Mario adventure would be nostalgic; colorful; and still a complex enough puzzle to keep me engaged. Nothing could be a better prescription for the hellscape of a year that seems to be unfolding before our eyes. I was ready to dive in.
Only, when I went to do the diving, the Switch was nowhere to be found. An evening of taking apart closets and putting them back together confirmed that it wasn’t anywhere in the house. It turns out that the maelstrom of travel I’ve been griping about in previous posts resulted in its misplacement.
It was truly a drag. I am aware that “ugh, where’s my Nintendo” gives off pretty serious “moody teenager” vibes; but in addition to the financial hit (can I wait until next year, when Nintendo is rumored to be updating the Switch’s hardware, to buy another one?), I really had become fond of my end-of-semester tradition of unwinding in the way that I like. Instead, I was being forced to unwind in some boring, healthy way like “reading a book” or “sitting quietly” or “spending time with my family.” Gross.
As far as where the Switch went, there was no shortage of possibilities. After a half hour on the phone with Nintendo, I managed to get my console’s serial number and confirmation that it hadn’t been “active” in awhile. I submitted a half dozen “lost item” reports to hotels I stayed at; the airlines I flew; and even my parents, who I saw briefly in Delaware back in March (they didn’t make me file an official report). After a “no dice” response from my folks, I resigned myself to the overwhelming likelihood that the thing was permanently “in transit”, lost in whatever black hole of airline bureaucracy a thing tumbles into when it’s discovered by a flight attendant; or maybe it was just the find of a lifetime for a 10-year-old kid as he deplaned with his parents, which honestly wouldn’t be the worst outcome in the world.
Upon returning from my best friend’s truly lovely wedding a couple of weeks ago, my “semester-in-transit” came to a fitting end; I won’t have to board another plane until late July. For my beloved Switch, the journey continued. But who knows? Sometimes things come back when you least expect them, and lost things become found. Like a human boomerang, I was sent around the country—for bachelor parties, conferences, meetings, and weddings—only to end up back where I started.
So what did I manage to bring back with me, if not my precious video games?
The more time I’ve spent in airports, the more I’ve come to accept (if not fully appreciate) them as a sort of microcosm of humanity. Swarms of people are rushing around, sprinting to a closing gate; there’s the quiet defeat in the eyes of someone (me) who’s settled for yet another days-old yogurt parfait from the Hudson store because the sandwich shop is located in a terminal too far away for them to still make their flight. Everyone is there for the same ostensible purpose: to be “in transit”, on their way to something. Despite all the talk of “final destinations”, the airport is nobody’s true destination. That is, I know of nobody who goes to the airport just to hang out. As a place we spend time in, it’s as a means, not an end.
The upshot is that most people — myself included, most of the time — view airports as a pain, a waste of time, an inconvenience to be endured. It’s a necessary evil, in which one escalator, one row of connected blue chairs, one departures/arrivals screen seems to blend mindlessly into the next.
Even so, with many hours to kill in airports over the past three months, I’ve tried to learn what I could from the airport-themed music and poetry I’ve had the pleasure of coming across1. It’s legitimately helped me deal with the seemingly unwinnable waiting game we’re forced to play at every airport we have the misfortune of visiting.
For instance, we’re all there to do this magical, miraculous thing of flying, tens of thousands of feet in the air, at unfathomable speeds. Even though we’ve been doing the passenger airliner thing regularly for nearly a century, it remains an obviously amazing feat of technological achievement.
But even as we partake in the majesty of human flight (and complain about it the entire way), we’re also confronted with the other, let’s-just-choose-not-to-talk-about-it side of the coin: that we could maybe all die at any second once we’re in the air.
Let’s get a hand from the popular poet Billy Collins to help us consider this:
Passengers2
by Billy Collins
At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats with the possible company of my death, this sprawling miscellany of people - carry-on bags and paperbacks - that could be gathered in a flash into a band of pilgrims on the last open road. Not that I think if our plane crumpled into a mountain we would all ascend together, holding hands like a ring of sky divers, into a sudden gasp of brightness, or that there would be some common spot for us to reunite to jubilize the moment, some spaceless, pillarless Greece where we could, at the count of three, toss our ashes into the sunny air. It's just that the way that man has his briefcase so carefully arranged, the way that girl is cooling her tea, and the flow of the comb that woman passes through her daughter's hair... and when you consider the altitude, the secret parts of the engines, and all the hard water and the deep canyons below... well, I just think it would be good if one of us maybe stood up and said a few words, or, so as not to involve the police, at least quietly wrote something down.
This is a classic Billy Collins poem in all senses of the word: it’s a fairly well-known “classic”, but it’s also very typical of Collins’s work in particular. It’s darkly comic and casual. It uses fantastical metaphors and similes that somehow work (“like a ring of sky divers”; “band of pilgrims on the last open road”; “some spaceless, pillarless Greece”). And, like any good Collins poem, it manages to live in a couple profound places at once: It’s an ode to the touching camaraderie of a set of airplane passengers, including an appreciation for the miracle of flight we’re all about to undertake together. But only a skilled poet like Collins (who served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate) could comfortably situate this sentiment smack in the middle of tragicomedy, one that honors the distinct possibility that we’re all about to die doing this, “gathered in a flash.”
I’m not all that afraid of flying. But you might be, and I get it. The airplane is a loud, confined space you share with strangers. Flying itself is a physics problem most people don’t really understand; we just accept it.3 We experience flying not just as an annoyance and waste of time, but also as a precarious and even dangerous situation. I’m guessing that shows and movies like “Lost” or “Cast Away” don’t help with this one bit. Nor, of course, do shocking videos of entire doors of Boeing airplanes snapping off mid-flight.
Even so, if this is a familiar feeling to you, then you should know that this danger — at least statistically speaking — is virtually nonexistent. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics has clocked only a few hundred air travel-related injuries in the past twenty years, orders of magnitude less than pretty much any other major form of transportation (let this serve as a reminder for my readers step in and show me this post if I ever consider getting a motorcycle as part of a mid-life crisis).
Meanwhile, plane accidents that result in fatalities are not just relatively rare: they’re near zero.
I’m fully aware that folks who (like my excellent wife) suffer airplane anxiety are unlikely to see that anxiety vanish upon reading these numbers. I get that this isn’t really a math problem that can be solved, however compelling the math may be. Nor do these stats mean that companies like Boeing haven’t been remarkably corrupt and negligent in their safety practices.
Even so, Collins’s poem gives us an opening to be irreverent about the precarious kind of purgatory airports seem to represent for us. Gate B7 obviously isn’t where you wanted to ultimately end up. You’d rather be at home (your life on earth) or wherever it is you’re trying to get to (whatever version of “heaven” you prefer).
But we might as well make the most of the weird time we have in the “waiting room” during the pre-board process. I wouldn’t recommend a public declaration of intention (“so as not to involve the police”), but some bemused people-watching can really help pass the time. Because in addition to their natural inconvenience, airports really do kind of have everything: tearful farewells and ecstatic hellos; delayed-flight frustration next to made-connection celebration; the full range of human emotions are on display, day in and day out, from about the widest variety of people you’re likely to all see in the same place. It’s a unique kind of situation, a confrontation with our humanity and its fragility, that Collins invites us to appreciate in his poem. It can be uncomfortable, but Collins helps us do it with a chuckle.
Another version of this lesson is articulated nicely in a lesser-known but favorite John Mayer song of mine (from before liking him stopped being cool) called “Wheel”:
And airports
See it all the time
Where someone's last goodbye
Blends in with someone's sigh
'Cause someone's coming home
In hand a single roseAnd that's the way this wheel keeps working now
I think you’d understandably roll your eyes if I started going on and on about how there’s great beauty in goings-on of an airport, and we need to appreciate it, and we should all just be grinning with gratitude and/or meditating in the middle of the chaos. Even the most zen among us would admit that they would never choose to be in an airport if it weren’t strictly necessary.
But I’ll stand by the idea that it’s a poetic kind of place where basically everything happens. All kinds of people, belongings, and journeys are doing the full menu of movements—departing, returning, or waiting—all in one strange, transitory space.
Making a temporary peace with the liminal space airports can provide did, I think, make it easier for me to accept the loss of a several-hundred-dollar piece of video gaming equipment. Seeing people come and go (including me), and come home again, helped reinforce just how cyclical everything is at the airport — a “wheel” that keeps working. I may have lost my Nintendo, but maybe I gained some helpful strategies for existing in a typically unloved place.
Internalizing these important lessons, however, did not prepare me for the shock of receiving this email from the Delta Airlines lost and found department, just 3 short hours after submitting my “lost item” claim:
I’ve maybe never been more floored by an email. I can’t really overstate how sure I was that I would never hear from any of the airlines I submitted “lost item” claims to ever again. Maybe this is because of my bottomless standards for corporate customer service; maybe it’s because of the general impossibility of the situation. I couldn’t even remember where or when I lost it; why on earth would I have expected Delta to know?
But they did. I apparently left my Switch in the seat-back pocket during the afternoon run of Delta 2873 (Austin to Salt Lake City) on February 4th. They hung onto it for two and a half months, tagged with the flight it was on and the serial number I managed to wrest from Nintendo customer service.
Cut to just one week and a minuscule $5 shipping charge later:
Turns out things do sometimes have a way of coming back to us. I know that not everybody’s belongings make their way home from airport purgatory, but I’m grateful that mine made the full turn of the wheel. And the weird magic of my Switch’s journey — including the (never thought I’d say this) phenomenal customer service from Delta — may have made my own semester of nonstop transit worth the story I get to tell about it.
Place Picks
In case the Amazing Tale of the Lost Switch wasn’t amazing enough, here are a few on-theme place picks that might sweeten the story a little bit more.
Shopping: Unclaimed Baggage, Scottsboro, AL
This is a first (and maybe a last) for me, but it’s a necessary one.
After I hastily clicked “yes, send me my video games please” on Delta’s email, they sent along the FedEx tracking info, which revealed that my Switch was being sent to me not from Salt Lake City, where it parted with me in February; nor even from Atlanta, where Delta is headquartered. The package was originating in Scottsboro, Alabama.
Why? It turns out one of Scottsboro’s major landmarks is a store called “Unclaimed Baggage” which is not so much a play on words as it is exactly what the name implies. Here’s their website’s explanation:
Airline passengers waiting for their bags upon arrival are almost certain to see them riding atop the bag carousel. That’s because airlines use sophisticated tracking technology to reunite over 99.5% of bags with their owners right away. If a bag is truly lost, airlines pay out a claim to the passenger. It’s only after an extensive three-month search that an unclaimed bag is deemed truly orphaned, a fate realized by less than 0.03% of all checked luggage! That’s where we come in.
Unclaimed Baggage apparently “has purchasing agreements for unclaimed items with all domestic airlines”, and operates its business to “maximize each item’s potential for a second life.” If the baggage is still unclaimed after three months, they either sell or donate it. Truly unusable airline passenger detritus is recycled sustainably, with all identifying passenger information removed.
Either my Switch ended up in Scottsboro as a complete coincidence (unlikely), or Delta was anticipating that this thing was a lost cause. Had I failed to get in touch with them for just a couple more weeks, it seems like this store would have been free to find a new home for it. Having never been to Unclaimed Baggage, I can’t say I recommend the store itself; but I just needed somebody else to know that this weird place exists.
Music: “Delta” by Mumford & Sons (Spotify/Apple Music)
I’m not usually one for loving odes to multinational profit-seeking corporations, but I’ll pour one out for Delta Airlines here for hanging onto my Switch for three months, responding to my Lost Item Report within hours, and returning it to me completely undamaged just days later. I’m confident Mumford & Sons weren’t paying the same homage with this song, the title track off of their 2018 album Delta. But they did make a great piece of gut-wrenching music. This album is my favorite of theirs, and has been a major soundtrack to the last few years of my life; it was in heavy rotation, for example, during the months I was getting to know my wonderful wife.
If Marcus Mumford’s voice weren’t so immediately identifiable, you might be surprised to learn who the artist was here. Few to no banjos or fast foot-stompers can be found on the Delta album; instead, we get more synth, more electric guitars and drums, and more delicious, slightly overwrought sappiness. This song is great, but the whole album is a heartfelt whole that I can’t recommend enough. Other standout songs: “Rose of Sharon” and “Woman.”
Video Game: “FAR: Lone Sails” by Okomotive
A returned gaming system requires a worthy game, and “FAR: Lone Sails” fits the bill. Excited though I am to try “Super Mario Bros: Wonder”, “FAR” is one I was already working on before my Switch went missing back in February. Fitting that it took so long to get back to me, since the game features a harrowing, epic journey across a barren post-apocalyptic landscape in a clunky land-bound ship. It’s a simple game, with a visually stark (but undeniably gorgeous) design and concept. I still haven’t finished the game, and will be quickly jumping into its sequel (FAR: Changing Tides) once I do; but I can’t resist a good metaphor, so it’s fitting that this fairly short game about an epic journey has taken me so long to complete.
I’ve already shouted out Nickel Creek’s “To The Airport” in a previous post.
From Picnic, Lightning (1997) by Billy Collins
At least here, we’re on the same page as Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter series, who proudly states that his dearest ambition in life is “to find out how aeroplanes stay up.”
I somehow knew how this would end, congratulations 😜
Those are two excellent toys in that A1 photo! I was happy but disappointed to be part of the search party but grateful how it turned out. Anyone who’s lost anything 🙋♂️would love to get emails like you did from Delta.