All that Metal in the Air

As a kid I never had a fear of flying. It was, by far, the coolest thing in the world. I craved the window seat and would press my face against the window and watch as the plane took off and landed. I thought it was so amazing how small things looked and how cars went from tiny dots to matchbox cars to model cars to regular sized as I watched. It was a miracle how it could be cloudy and rainy on the ground and then sunny and blue once you got above the clouds. It was like a bit magical thing.

Part of what made it all so wonderful was my general ignorance of pretty much everything. The exact concept of terrorism and plane crashes and death in general was something I knew existed but I didn’t really understand. It’s not that I understand death any better these days than I really do now, but I now understand how final it is. Trust me, that’s a big difference.

I flew quite a bit as a child. My family was big on traveling and that was a good thing. Considering my bladder issues, always taking the car was a bad thing. We never did a cross-country drive. We once drove up into Canada and then across to New York and then down to Washington DC and then back west to Chicago and that about killed us despite being a lot of fun. So, we never did the whole, pack-up-the-car-ant-let’s-drive-to-California thing. Which is fine with me because when I look at a map it sure does not look like such a trip would be much fun, but then, that’s just my opinion. There are deserts and mountains in the way and those do not look like any fun to get across. I would much rather fly over them and look down on them.

I say that even though these days I do not want to sit by the window seat. There was a long gap between the last time my family flew together for a vacation and when I had to make a few flights on my own. It started when I was living in St. Louis and looking to move back to Chicago and was having to fly back and forth for job interviews and other arrangements. I flew Southwest and back then you could get on their planes and then sit pretty much anywhere you wanted. I sat by the window, remembering how much I enjoyed that as a kid. It was surprising to me when I felt enormous anxiety once we got up in the air.

See, reality had sunk into me. My imagination had changed from that as a kid to one controlled by an adult. Having an imagination like mine can be a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because I have chosen to write and having a wild imagination helps with that. On the other hand it becomes a problem with negative things. So, that is why I cannot remain friends with anyone I have had a long term, loving, sexual relationship with. My imagination can imagine, in vivid detail, that person doing things with this new person in their lives that I would rather be doing with that person and that is just tortuous.

It also can imagine, in vivid, Technicolor, dolby-sound detail what it must feel like to plummet out of the sky from twenty or thirty thousand feet. So, when I looked out the window all of the childhood feelings of magic and wonder scurried right out of my head and the very adult-reality thought, “hey, we are up really, really high” shot into my head.

I suddenly could imagine what it would be like. Hear the sounds of tearing metal. I hate thrill rides and that feeling in your stomach when you fall from a great height. I thought, man, this would be one hell of a feeling as you fell thousands of feet. I tried to imagine what you would do with that time, the seconds or even a few minutes it would take to fall. How would you deal with the fact that you were still alive, aware of what was going on, but that you would very soon hit a very hard earth at a very high rate of speed?

It was then I decided aisle seats were now more of my thing. I could close my eyes and not look and it sort of felt like we were driving and not flying. Plus, over the years closed-in spaces have not become much of my thing and I often felt confined jammed in there next to the window.

Of course, other things have been added now and they fight more loudly than logic. I tell myself that O’Hare, in my entire life, has only had one huge fatal accident. However, it is still one of the deadliest on record in U.S. history, but still, just one. Think of how many hundreds, thousands, millions of people fly in and out of there safely. Same with New York and Atlanta and L.A. Thousands upon thousands of people are in the air right now, flying safely to their destinations. Yet, I still see terrorists in my head and flaming wreckage in my imagination. I know the odds are very stacked in my favor, but stillâÂ?¦

I am still not terrified of flying. I have done it and will do it again. I have dreams of traveling in Europe and they have yet to build that Atlantic Ocean-spanning bridge that would let me drive there. I am not a huge fan of boats so I have no desire to take a ship there. I am not paralyzed about flying. I am just saying I long for the days when I was caught up in the magic of the thing and blissfully ignorant about much of the world.

So, when I heard about the terrorist plot that was broken up this week, it struck home a little bit. One more thing to worry about now. One more thing to sit in the back of my brain and then pounce on my conscious mind like a fiend when I have securely strapped myself into a seat. Now they have explosives disguised as sports drinks. That just goes to show you that we will never, ever be totally safe. As soon as we have one way of beating them the other side will always be looking for another way to get around that.

I wish I could fall asleep on a plane. I have never been one to do that. My dad is convinced I slept through every single family car ride. This is not the case. I may have been lying in the back seat with my eyes closed, but rarely was I ever asleep. Again, I probably was hoping I would fall asleep, but sleeping in a moving vehicle has never been easy for me.

So, I always wish I could step on a plane and then zonk out and just wake up at my destination. It would make things so much easier, but I can’t do it. I have tried time and again. I close my eyes and then just sit there, awake and aware, but with my eyes closed. This does not accomplish the same thing.

Hey, maybe they should anesthetize the passenger and then just load us into planes that look more like cargo planes. Hard to blow up a plane when you are asleep. Plus, it would mean I would fall asleep in O’Hare and then just wake up in Heathrow. If the thing crashed, you wouldn’t even know because you would be asleep.

I like it, but I bet the airlines would never go for it. What would they do with all those bags of snacks and rock-hard inner rolles?