Bloodlines
By Kevin Ryan
A collective groan followed the announcement that Flight 1292 to Minneapolis was delayed again. There was limited patience among the passengers around the hot, crowded Frontier gates that Thursday night, a distinct contrast from the jovial group over on the other side of Terminal A where, just an hour earlier, I said goodbye to Briahn before she boarded a plane to Norway to meet up with a couple of friends.
I wasn’t all that bothered by the delay. While not as adventurous as a trip to Norway, I was looking forward to my visit to Minnesota. There’s a certain ease to going there.
I have lived in Colorado for 27 years, but Minnesota is still home. Aside from my immediate family and a few close friends, I don’t tell anyone else I’m coming anymore. It’s just easier that way, more relaxing to limit the number of people I have the potential to disappoint. In a way, it allows me to be a stranger in a place that I’m intimately familiar with.
I had planned this trip to Minnesota a month ago, to see family and celebrate my brother Mike’s birthday. I changed my flight to fly out a day earlier after learning that my uncle John had died.
John was 91 and died just a few days short of his 92nd birthday. He was my dad’s second oldest brother, and with a 14 year age gap, John was nearly a generation older. By the time my dad turned four, John had already graduated from high school and joined the Army.
Growing up, John was mysterious to me. Occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of him, always with a tight crew cut and a stern look, sitting in the stands at one of my hockey games, or watching from high on the bleachers, behind the backstop at my baseball games. But he’d usually leave before the game ended.
In the summer, he’d sometimes motor past our house on Ruth Street riding his stripped down Gold Wing. He’d rarely stop, but if my brothers and I were out front playing, he’d shout “Hey” as he rode past.
Waiting to board the plane from the tarmac, I caught a glimpse of the Rocky Mountains behind a film of haze glowing in the late day sun. As I took a sip from my water bottle, I had the thought that maybe this water came from up there. I squinted to make out the traces of snow that still clung to the tallest peaks. I felt guilty thinking how the water I poured out before going through security likely came from there too.
I found my seat, 36F, and stashed my bag in the overhead compartment. A woman with wild, curly dark hair was sitting in the middle seat, 36E, her head resting against the seat in front of her. I waited in the aisle for her to notice me and when she didn’t I said, “Excuse me.” She still didn’t respond, so I tapped her shoulder. She jerked her head back and squinted up at me, trying to make out who I was. I pointed to the window seat. She looked over and then back at me smiling, maybe a little embarrassed, maybe a little stoned.
As I took my seat I noticed that there was tape lining the frame of the window and it appeared the sun shade had been removed. I wondered where else they used tape on this plane.
I use tape to fix a lot of things. My truck’s headlights are held in with Tyvec tape because I don’t want to spend a hundred-plus dollars at the dealership for the thin plastic mount, and none of the junkyards I’ve searched have trucks with a mount that isn’t already broken. Tape does the trick, but my truck tops out at about 65mph. It also doesn’t fly.
But this tape job, around the window frame, appeared to be recent, and thorough. Recalling news from a couple years ago, of an ill-fitted door blowing out on an Alaska Airlines flight, I wondered if a good tape job may have prevented that whole situation.
At family gatherings, John would sidle up to you, often a little too close for comfort. He’d look you in the eyes with this intense gaze and quiz you about family – or airplanes. It was disarming, but also made you feel important – like you were the one person he trusted with this nugget of truth.
He would ask something like, “You know the largest airplane?”
You’d probably respond with, “a 747.”
And even though you were wrong, he wouldn’t tell you. He’d say, “You know that’s what a lot of people think.” And then you would feel comfortable because you understood he was sharing something about himself with you.
If he ever smiled, I never saw it. He never spoke about it so much but you could feel this bond with him, if for nothing other than the fact that you were family.
John had been a firefighter in St. Paul for years before my dad joined the department. There’s this story I have stuck in my head that John, recognizing my dad’s indifference to his own future while his buddies were being drafted for the Vietnam War, was instrumental to my dad becoming a firefighter.
John would have known that a public service job could earn his brother a draft deferment. So to make sure my dad followed through with the physical fitness test, the first step to becoming a firefighter at the time, John drove my dad there on a brisk fall morning in 1968.
I don’t know where that story came from. Did my dad tell me the story? Did John? Did I make it up? Maybe it stems from some existential daydream in which I consider the outcomes had my dad been drafted.
It’s hard to believe it was something I made up. In my head the story’s details are so vivid: John and my dad pulling up to an obstacle course set up on the front driveway of some fire station. It was the deer hunting season opener so the old Ford and Chevy pickups lining the street with loaded gun racks hanging in the back windows seem to be a reliable image. The truck’s owners, well fed young men dressed in flannels, jeans and hunting boots, breath heavily and wipe their brows as they drag dummies around, climb ladders and crawl through tubes to complete their tests, all before getting back in their trucks to drive up north to their deer camps.
I immediately recognized my cousin Greg, John’s youngest son, when my brother Dan and I walked through the front doors of St. Pascal’s that Friday morning for the funeral. He carried the same swagger that made him so cool as an upperclassman to me and my friends when we were freshmen in high school.
He stood talking to one of his dad’s old pals, left hand in the front pants pocket of his black suit. His right shoulder was slung low, with his hand hanging a little awkward, absent of a cigarette dangling between his thumb and pointer finger, I imagined.
Despite his boyish haircut and the slimming cut of his suit, I could see Greg seemed to have lived a few hard years. He was never much of a rule follower and compensated for his slight build with a lot of personality.
He began telling Dan and me a story about his dad. Just like his dad, Greg always makes you feel like the story is just for you. But Greg tells stories with a lightness and humor.
Unlike his dad, who seemed to glide around a room with intention, Greg never stops moving. He wrapped his story, laughed and said “Can you believe that?” And then he bounced to greet another family member.
Over tacos and margaritas, a couple days after the funeral, I asked my dad about my concocted version of how he ended up becoming a fire fighter. He confirmed that the test was on the deer hunting season opener and that a lot of the guys he tested against were big, wearing flannels, and had arrived in gun-racked pickups. But he denied that John had dropped him off at the test. He said the only encouragement his older brother ever offered was bringing home a fire department job application for him.
I didn’t tell my dad, but I prefer my version of the story. It just didn’t seem enough for John to have simply tossed an application on the table in front of my dad. That was too simple, too normal. It wasn’t significant. This was an event that may have determined my dad’s existence. My own, even.
The plane accelerated, pushing me into my seat, rattling over every crack in the runway and lumbering side to side with the clumsiness of the #15 Bus crashing over potholes on its route down Colfax. I tensed up, my body’s final act of resistance, as if it didn’t agree with the decision my brain had made to leave the ground.
Then the nose tipped up, leaning me back like a giant, flying La-Z-Boy. Climbing, a soothing rumble massaged my low back and my eyes became heavy. My body surrendered. This would be the most comfortable 10 minutes of the entire flight.
When the captain announced that we had reached our cruising altitude of 32,000 feet, I put my earbuds in and started scrolling, searching for the podcast I had saved about the band The Replacements. I thought about reading the book I’d brought. I always bring a book, but rarely read when I fly. I’m also not much of a talker.
I could sense the woman in 36E was now awake and looking out the window. She may have been saying something to me, but I figured if I could ignore her for a couple minutes she’d eventually see that I was wearing headphones.
The podcast I was listening to turned out to be a disappointment so I turned it off, reclined my seat and looked out the window. I wondered for a second, running my finger over the bottom edge of the tape, how cold it was outside.
I had left the headphones' noise-cancelling feature on and the roar of the engines was minimized to a gentle, almost imperceptible, white-noise. It created this odd feeling, as though we were gliding along silently. It was vaguely familiar, like that of a flying scene in an IMAX movie.
Amber light outlined the tops of the pillowy clouds and a thin, dark red line hung on the edge of the horizon. I felt a slight nudge from the woman sitting in 36E. She pointed out the window with one hand and held the other over her mouth. I tried not to look annoyed as I pulled the headphones out of my ears. She lowered her hand from her mouth.
“Oh, it’s incredible,” she gasped.
I looked again, expecting to see some unnatural phenomenon. “Has she never seen a sunset?” I wondered, before turning back to her.
“Look at that red line on the horizon,” she said, pointing again.
I nodded.
“It’s…” she started before drifting off. “It’s like… It’s like a…”
She was moved by what she was seeing. I didn’t quite understand why, but I lowered my guard a bit. I found myself rooting for her. I wanted her to say something. I wanted it to be significant.
“It’s like a… bloodline.”
I stared out the window trying to understand what she meant. And then the colors collapsed into a gradient blue that darkened as the sky reached away from the horizon.
My brothers and dad rebuilt the deck off the back of my youngest brother Dan’s house a couple of summers ago. I couldn’t get the time off work so I didn’t make it back to help. Grape vines are now crawling up and around the cable railings, filling in the gaps where they had been cut back. Sitting at the table on the deck, I was looking out into the long, narrow yard where Dan had recently cut the grass in a diagonal pattern, similar to the way our dad did it at our old house on Ruth Street.
It was Mike, my middle brother’s birthday and while me, my two brothers and some friends sat around the table on that deck sharing food, drinks, and stories, my parents were alone in the yard playing a round of cornhole.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying but my dad was swinging his arm, probably sharing some tips on the mechanics of throwing a bean bag. My mom didn’t look impressed, but then she tipped her head back with laughter when my dad flubbed his toss. He shook his head and a self-deprecating smile curled up from the corner of his mouth.
As the two of them walked together, my mom with her hand on my dad’s shoulder, to retrieve their bags I thought about that story of how my dad became a fire fighter.
My uncle John saw something in his younger brother. He sensed my dad’s courage, but also his tenderness and compassion. He saw in him a desire to help people. John didn’t need to drive my dad to the test because he knew that giving him the application would be enough.
She talked about how she spent the last five months in Mexico and how she was excited to return home to Minneapolis. “My little urban jungle,” she called it. When I told her Briahn was visiting Norway she shared that she visited her husband’s family there a few years back.
She continued to talk as we walked through the terminal. I wanted to ask her what she had meant back on the plane but she seemed distracted and a little confused, stopping to read the signs directing us to baggage claim. I found it odd, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she’s never flown into this terminal before.
Once we reached Baggage Claim C, we waved and bid each other an unceremonious farewell. I peeled off and exited through the sliding glass doors into the heavy Minnesota air. It looks like a bloodline kept running through my head. I even said it out loud a few times, sing-song style.
I spotted my brother Dan’s maroon Honda CRV stopped one lane out from the curb.I walked over, tossed my bag onto the backseat, then hopped in the front. Dan smiled as he looked over and said, “Hey brother.”
Kevin Ryan is a writer and photographer based in Denver, Colorado. When not writing, he enjoys fishing, writing songs no one will ever hear, and traveling mostly near, but sometimes far. Explore more of Kevin’s work on his website.
