I've never seen an actual rocket launch. It certainly would have been exciting, to have been in Florida or California or such place to have seen one. Several members of my family have done so, and love rocket science, astronauts, the idea of space travel, and flight in general. To travel, or fly, from Fort Wayne, one must do something like make a journey from the Fort Wayne International Airport. I drive past the mega-stores popping up opportunistically next to the highway, around borrow-pit lakes formed near highway road overpasses, and through quaint, rural Indiana to the airport.
A couple of summers ago, a transplanted Lebanese man made the mistake of trying to bring a bottle of rosewater perfume with him after a flight overseas. He didn't make his connection at the Chicago/O'Hare airport to Fort Wayne; but his suitcase did.
The bag had quite a journey on its own; it had gone through O'Hare's notorious "chute," a mechanical device that sorts and transports suitcases in the airport. There's a stretch of the chute that whips bags along at some speeds reportedly approaching 70 mph. At some point in this overseas trip, the bottle in the bag broke or began to leak.
Somewhere along the way, the contents of his bag became contaminated with the leaking rosewater. To make matters worse, the bag sat unclaimed in Fort Wayne because of the way-laid passenger. Reportedly the bag went unnoticed for a couple of hours until someone smelled it. A couple of people went near it and then began to complain of feeling faint and nauseated.
The story blew up in the news media. Areas were blockaded off, traffic was stopped. It was 'post-terrorist-induced-fear syndrome' colliding with 'overpoweringly-smelly-perfume syndrome'.
People were actually being decontaminated. You know, hosed off by workers in full bio-terror suits and then sent to hospitals in trucks, and the airport shut down. All over a perfume essence, a strong, pungent rose water. Who knew? I guess all's well that ends well. Lessons learned.
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