How hard is it really?

   I wake with the rising sun, make my coffee, wash the pot, shave and pack my razor.  The cab arrives and finally I am off to meet my family.  In Japan.

   First Logan to Dulles, then the long haul from Dulles to Narita.  We reach altitude than then settle in for the run north and west, threading around the Buffalo and Toronto, and then pushing up, up, up, across the western shore of Hudson Bay, the great Canadian northwest, Alaska and the Bering Strait, and finally, finally descending to Narita. 

   When people ask if you have any plans for the summer, and you sheepishly say that you are vacationing with your family in Japan, you want to sprinkle in some notion that this won’t be entirely greater than your friend’s week of sand and fried clams on the Cape.  And so you make sure to say how long a trip it is to get there and back.  And how much the change in time will disrupt your sleep. 

   But how hard is it, really?  Especially if, like me, you have just read Nathaniel Philbrick’s Into the Heart of the Sea, which recounts the true story of the Nantucket whaling ship Essex – rammed and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale in the very middle of the South Pacific, the crew consigned to the open sea in three whaleboats, an ordeal that only a handful of them survive, and barely, and only after eating several of their dead companions’ flesh and sucking the marrow from their bones. 

   As compared with 93 days in an open boat, and nothing to eat after the few biscuits but your neighbor, I am prepared for 13 hours on a plane with the lovely stewardesses of All Nippon Airways, my choice of in-flight movies, and two full meals and snacks.   The stir-fried scallops with mushrooms, asparagus and oyster sauce was a bit heavy on the pepper, and the French chardonnay could have been chilled just a bit more.  But happily I need contemplate my neighbor’s forearms only as they pertain to the armrest.