DisCon III
Started: 2021-12-20 11:05:00
Submitted: 2021-12-22 23:21:22
Visibility: World-readable
In which the intrepid narrator leaves his time zone and travels across the country in a widebody jet to attend the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, DisCon III
I've attended Worldcon in person three times (Helsinki in 2017, San Jose in 2018, and Dublin in 2019), then a global pandemic happened and Worldcon in New Zealand didn't happen as scheduled. As I looked at my calendar for 2021 I allowed myself to hope that 2021 might be better than 2020 and that I might be able to travel for fun and attend Worldcon in person again. Then 2021 happened and the plan did not survive contact with the enemy: Worldcon postponed itself from summer to December, when we hoped that vaccines might be more widely deployed, especially for children ages 5 to 11. (It didn't help that one of the hotels that the convention was scheduled to be held at went bankrupt during the pandemic and closed, throwing a cloud of uncertainty around the convention.) It turned out that August, when Worldcon was originally scheduled, was the peak of the Delta wave; as the wave ebbed in the fall it seemed like there was hope for a Worldcon in December after all.
Then, suddenly, the day after Thanksgiving, the Omicron variant appeared out of nowhere and everyone started worrying again about how much they should be worrying about COVID-19. I had already gotten my booster shot, and I felt reasonably comfortable with Worldcon's hard-line mask-and-vaccine stance. Now that I'm nearly two years into an unprecedented global pandemic, after more than six months of being fully-vaccinated even though that doesn't seem to have meant as much as I hoped it might, I'm finally beginning to feel pandemic fatigue. (This is the plot point that happens near the end of the second act of the zombie movie where one character decides they can't take the stress of living in a zombie apocalypse and takes a walk outside unprotected or forgets to latch the window.) I'm not going to give up on masking and distancing where practical but (absent new information that Omicron is more dangerous to people like me and my family; early data is hard to interpret but seems to suggest that Omicron is rather mild in vaccinated and boosted people) I'm not going to cancel my plans. I bought an attending membership and bought plane tickets to fly to Washington, DC in the middle of December.
(I respect people who are making different trade-offs about their own risk factors; I'll continue to do what I can to avoid being a danger to others as I cautiously return to the outside world.)
I no longer live in a place where I can nip on the train and arrive at the airport inside half an hour, or a place where I can reasonably summon a Lyft to take me to the airport at a moment's notice. (At least, I assume it's hard to get a Lyft across the mountain from Santa Cruz, I've never actually tried.) I ended up scheduling a car service to drive me across Highway 17 and up to SFO, since I'll be flying straight to Pasco after Worldcon to visit my parents for Christmas in Walla Walla.
When I booked my flight, departing SFO at 08:25 on the morning of Wednesday, 15th December, it seemed like a reasonable time, but once I did the math (an hour's drive from Santa Cruz, and I'll need to get to the airport early because who knows what's going to happen to the airport during the Christmas travel season in the Second Plague Year), I requested the car pick me up at 05:30 — and that meant I had to get up even earlier. (It seemed like a good idea at the time. The alternative was getting into DC late in the evening.)
At 05:30 I saw a car waiting in my neighbor's driveway (because we share the same driveway, and it's hard enough to figure out which house is which in the daylight) and confirmed that it was, in fact, the car waiting to take me across the mountain. The drive across the mountain was quiet in the pre-dawn chill. Overnight a bit of rain had fallen and the road was damp.
At the departure curb at SFO I saw what looked like a young woman getting out of her car wearing a Pikachu costume (or possibly Pikachu pajamas) helping a young man get his bags out of the trunk of the car.
Aside from everyone wearing masks at the airport, and being constantly reminded by PA announcements to keep wearing masks, the airport experience was substantially similar to the Before Times. My own concession to the ongoing pandemic was to double-mask: I wore a disposable surgical-style mask under the reusable cloth masks Kiesa made during the first months of the pandemic. This was the first time I'd worn a double mask; it seemed prudent given the ongoing uncertainty around the Omicron variant. It also proved convenient to have two masks: while eating on the plane I could take off my outer cloth mask (which ties tightly around the back of my head, making it difficult to pull it off quickly or put it back to eat and drink) and use just the disposable mask under it.
I selected a direct flight from SFO to IAD operated on a 787-8. This was the first time I boarded a wide-body jet since the Before Times. As I settled into my seat I noticed a rainbow above the plane sitting next to me on the tarmac and noted that this was real, but also a metaphor.
My flight to Washington-Dulles was long and uneventful. Clouds obscured the Rocky Mountains as we flew over Colorado, then cleared enough that I could see North Platte, Nebraska, and returned just west of Lincoln. The cloud cover remained the rest of the way east, preventing me from seeing anything other than formless white below me. When at last we began our descent into Washington-Dulles and we broke through the clouds I saw that there were more clouds below. We broke through several additional layers of cloud before I could finally see the ground on our lazy approach to the airport. As we descended I could see office parks laid out clearly below me, including some building that looked very much like data centers (clustered around the old Mae East interconnect here in Northern Virginia) and I wondered whether their site risk assessments included the risk of being under the approach path.
My plane touched down a little after 16:00 EST. We disembarked at concourse D, where the obvious way to get to the terminal was take one of the weird Mobile Lounge people-movers. There were several boarding gates, each with queues formed in front of them, and it wasn't obvious which one I should wait at. Presently one of them opened and people tried to exit (pushing their way through the crowd of passengers waiting to take their place to take the mobile lounge back to the terminal) and people from every queue crowded to the front to board the mobile lounge and eventually the scrum poured into the mobile lounge and then we tried to fill the available space to let everyone on board and it was obvious that no one was going to maintain any sort of physical separation on the crowded lounge.
Presently we departed, drove around the tarmac, past a bunch of wide-body jets painted in the liveries of airlines around the world, and docked at the main terminal. I waited for my bag to arrive at baggage claim (which took a while, and once the bags from my flight did actually start spinning around the baggage carousel I couldn't remember precisely what my black roller suitcase really looked like; though I figured it out eventually), and then stood in line for coffee (which also took a while) and finally made my way to the Silver Line Express Bus. The Washington Metro has been thinking about building a rail connection to Dulles for about as long as I can remember and now it's finally built but they plan to open it sometime early next year. In its place there's a shuttle bus that goes straight to the last open station on the Silver Line. I paid $5 for a ticket and boarded the bus and we merged onto the access highway, past the complete but not-yet-open rail right-of-way, to the station.
I bought a stored-value transit card and rode the Silver Line inbound to my hotel in downtown Washington DC, practically around the corner from the White House.
By the time I got to my hotel it was 19:00 and it was too late to make it to the Worldcon convention hotel before registration closed at 19:30. (Wednesday was officially the first day of the convention but the programming was relatively light, except for the opening ceremonies, which were getting underway when my plane touched down at Dulles.) I turned my attention instead to supper: I tried not to do the time conversion to tell me that it was still late afternoon back home in California and instead reminded myself that my only lunch had been a bag of crackers on the plane. I walked to City Tap House in Penn Quarter for supper, stopping along the way to admire a large Christmas tree in [fill in the blank].
After supper I walked by the White House. I walked past the vehicle barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue then jogged into Lafayette Square at the barrier closing the avenue even to pedestrian traffic. This was the site of the infamous "Donald Trump Crosses the Park" incident in the summer of 2020 when riot police cleared the square with tear gas so the then-president could get a photo op at St. John's Church on the other side of the park.
I found my best vantage point of the north face of the White House under a street light providing some illumination and took a selfie to prove that I really was in DC (and, incidentally, that one can still sort of see the White House despite multiple layers of fencing).
I walked around the west side of the White House and turned onto the Ellipse, separated from the South Lawn by another series of fences that made it almost impossible to see the brightly-illuminated White House inside. Here I found the National Christmas Tree, a tastefully-decorated Christmas tree on the lawn surrounded by smaller trees representing every state, territory, and several other groups. (There was one tree for schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and another for DoD overseas schools.) Each tree was decorated with ornaments designed by students at one particular school in the state, territory, or other group. California was represented by an ornament for each county; I spotted, off to the side on the tree, a kid's hand-drawn representation of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The trees were mostly organized in alphabetical order, so Colorado's tree was next.
I walked back to my hotel and got ready for the next day, hoping that I could begin to adjust to my new time zone so I could get up in time to start out at Worldcon the next day.
