The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 2

Only in the last couple of years have I begun to accept that God intended us to fly in the air despite the fact that we are not born with variable pitch propellers attached to our noses. Because of this reactionary point of view I find myself assuming a peculiar mindset when traveling by air. I think it is equal parts fear, humor and anticipation against a background of deeply ingrained annoyance, all hopefully hidden behind a façade of being an experienced traveler.

I do not fly well. It's not just the forced immobility inside a flying petri dish with 90 of my closest friends, traveling six miles above the earth at barely sub-sonic speeds in air cold enough to cryogenically preserve Ted Williams head. It's not even the prospect of surviving for 6 hours on a small bag of dime sized pretzels from the Cretaceous era and a sawed off plastic cup of diet Coke. It's all the rest of the dumb stuff that goes with the experience. We don't even have to be in the air for me to get pissed off.

It starts with the boarding experience. Everyone gathers around at the gate, poised in their starting blocks for the mad dash to the boarding ramp. Up front, of course, are the people in Boarding Group 5, oblivious it would appear to the order imposed by their boarding pass or maybe hoping the gate lady will for some reason decide to go counter to God's laws of numbers by starting with their group. Behind them are the lame, the halt and the blind along with those "boarding with small children." I saw one family on this trip with 3 children small enough to need help; they should have just given them the plane for crying out loud.

Now, I assume that all this regimentation of the boarding process is intended to speed things up. What happens is quite the opposite. Once on the plane we find a line of people looking first at their boarding passes and then at every bloody row number, struggling with the concept that the numbers are in sequence and not random. If you are standing at row five and your row is seventeen, move the hell on. You are perfectly safe not looking at the numbers again for at least a few rows. You’ll get a hint when you're in the area; it's called row sixteen.

There is also a mysterious process that goes on during boarding. The person in the window seat always, always gets there after the aisle and middle seats are occupied. If anyone knows why this happens please let me know.

Finally on the subject of boarding, to the folks at Southwest Airlines, God invented seat rows for a reason! Lose the colored cards and use the numbers. An airplane with a center aisle the width of Lance Armstrong’s bicycle seat is not the place to use "general admission" seating.

Airlines have rules about carry on luggage that supposedly limits us to one personal style item and a small bag which will fit in the overhead. They even have a little box thing at the boarding gate as a kind of a template for carry-on bags, the airline equivalent of the "you must be this tall" bar at an amusement park. The bar at the "Tilt-N-Hurl" ride seems to work because you almost never get puked on by a toddler there. The baggage box is a totally different story; it's there for no apparent reason other than perhaps intimidation.

Look at the bags people drag down that aisle. I've seen smaller apartments and the bigger the bag the smaller the person dragging it. Instead of that luggage box at the gate, they should have a person who makes sure that the passengers can bench press at least twice the weight of the bag. That would put a stop to 75 pound girls dragging bags so heavy they come equipped with dual axle wheels and then waiting helplessly for some chivalrous soul to hoist all their earthly possessions into the already overstuffed overhead.

By the way, when you land the flight attendant always warns you to be careful when opening the overhead compartment doors because "stored items can shift during the flight." Yeah, right! By the time every one is aboard any plane I have ever ridden, those compartments are so full, sand couldn't shift up there. They will also remind you that anything not stored above must fit underneath the seat in front of you. Dust was the only thing that would have fit under the seat in front of me.

With all that bad air travel attitude, you might think I would be somewhat of a rebel once on board the plane. Quite to the contrary, I become peculiarly submissive; I grovel in fact. The flight attendants are the "alpha wolves" and I am but a freshly whelped cub. My theory on this compliant attitude is that somewhere up there, behind the clouds there are airplane spirits and I do not want to annoy them. If I am a good airplane citizen somehow that magically insures my particular plane will have an equal number of take-offs and landings and I think we'll all agree that is a good thing.

I wouldn't think of leaving my seatback in anything other than its full upright position when landing and taking off. It's unclear to me why that's required but if the flight attendant says do it then consider it done. Likewise with my table, it's fully in the up position and locked just the way they tell me. Seat belts? Forget about me because I have that puppy cinched down so tight my knees turn blue and I can drink two veinte coffees from Starbucks and still cross the continent without needing to use the bathroom. Moreover, that seat belt stays cinched down not just until the plane comes to a stop at the gate but until the ground crew has washed out the holding tanks and all the empty toasted almond bags have been dug out of the nooks and crannies underneath the seats. Then and only then will I arise from the seat, drag my belongings (ever so carefully of course) from the overhead compartments and tiptoe into the terminal, chanting my post-flight mantra, "Hah, cheated death again!!!"

By now you are asking yourself what this has to do with "The Little Frog and Duck Boy." Not too much I suppose except it gives you a little context for what, I, a flight-o-phobe was willing to endure for the sake of this most special reunion.