I am a no-fly zone!

Every time I look in the mirror and see that there’s still no propeller on my nose and only two landing gear, my belief that God did not intend us to fly is re-enforced.  Although I can’t recall when I decided riding in airplanes was a gratuitous flirtation with a fiery demise, I can recall at least one image from my first trip by air. When I was in elementary school I flew from Roanoke, Virginia to Allentown,Pennsylvania to visit my aunt. The aircraft was a two engine propeller job of some sort and I actually climbed a rolling set of steps to board it. With two main landing gear, no nose wheel and the little training wheel at the back it sat at a definite nose up angle which I suppose ought to be looked at as a positive thing.

My negative outlook on air travel may have started in college. Our Air Force ROTC unit took a weekend trip to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton,Ohio. The trip was on a DC-1 or some such primitive plane. Shortly before we landed in Ohio, a crew member walked back to my seat and asked me to look out the window and tell him whether or not the landing gear was down. I’m pretty sure that was when it began.

Last year I went out to California to visit a friend I had not seen in 20 years. It was, I think, a measure of the value I placed on this friendship that I paid so much money to experience a 6 hour sphincter seizure.

On a cloudy morning in June, at an absolutely heathen hour, I somehow found my way to the long term parking lot at BWI Airport After standing in the rain for about twenty minutes a shuttle bus came by and carried me off to what I considered to be the gates of Hell itself.  Check in was deceptively easy but I think that was just the airplane gods trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I’m an air travel wimp but a wimp with attitude. Only in the last couple of years have I begun to accept that God, while not intending for us to fly really doesn’t mind if we do.  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 360 minutes of forced immobility inside a germ laden 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 left over 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 to the order and discipline imposed by their boarding passes. 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 small children; 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 either speed things up or at least define the pecking order that will prevail once we are airborne and our miserable destiny is in the hands of Carol, Tiffany, Gina and Captain Somebody. If speeding up the boarding is the intent, what happens is quite the opposite. Once on the plane I find a line of people looking first at their boarding passes and then up at every bloody row number while struggling with the concept that rows are numbered in rational sequence, not at random. If you are at row five and your assigned 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 gets to their seat 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 row 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 limit 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. 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  passengers can bench press at least twice the weight of their bag. That would put a stop to anorexic waifs dragging bags so heavy they come equipped with dual rear axles and radial tires and then wait 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 everyone 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 such 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 mewling, 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’m a good airplane citizen, my good manners will somehow magically insure that 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.

Furthermore 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. I can drink two venti coffees from Starbucks and still cross the continent without needing to use the bathroom. Without the seat belt of course, Mother Nature would have her way and the phrase “holding  pattern” would take on a whole new meaning. I really hate it when my coffee finishes its trip before I do.

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 lurch up the passenger way  into the terminal, chanting my post-flight mantra, "Aaaah, cheated death again!!!"

The flight itself was comfortable but the view from my window seat was pretty tedious. Two hours in the air had put us over one of those really flat states; the ones this Easterner can never seem to keep sorted out….Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas…somewhere with corn, cows and presumably combines. It was a delightfully clear day and I could see all the way to the ground where presumably my plunge would stop if I opened the wrong door when trying to go to the can.

After a while even my wide-eyed wonderment began to fade. They showed a movie but I passed on America West's kind offer of a headset for the paltry sum of $5 so I could hear the sound on a movie I had already seen. They wanted to sell me something they called a 'SkyBox' as well, a little cardboard treasure chest intended to fend off starvation. This time I saved $2.00 and so between the head set and the 'SkyBox', the unspent $7.00 offset the cost of the “Sandwich From Hell” which I had bought in the terminal to bring with me. Aren't I clever…that's a rhetorical question, OK?

I had to change planes in Phoenix where America West would hand me off to something called Mesa West for the one hour final leg to Long Beach Municipal Airport.  According to the schedule I would have about 90 minutes between planes to get a drink and enjoy the sandwich I had bought in Washington. I was wrong on so many levels.

Traffic at the Phoenix airport seemed gridlocked as we waited to cross a runway until what seemed like several dozen planes landed. Not waiting would have resulted in our being the lead story on the eleven o'clock news (10:00 PM Pacific Time) and that didn't seem like a particularly good thing especially since I knew I wouldn't get to see it. So, I was content to wait…and wait…and wait…  Finally, a break in the flow and we 'darted' across the main drag onto a taxiway where we again came to a stop that consumed another 15 minutes of my sandwich time. Since this delay was due to no available gates, I couldn’t help but zone on this as the airport equivalent of a mall parking lot at Christmas…parking buzzards, cruising the lanes of the parking lot, watching for signs of an imminent opening, going into hover mode when one appears.

Once inside the terminal I had only about 20 minutes until my flight began boarding. That left just enough time to grab a fifty cent drink for which I was charged three times that. By the time I got to the gate the flight was already boarding and I had just enough time to discover that I would have been better off checking my sandwich through so maybe the airline would have had the opportunity to lose it for me.

Other than the 30 yard stroll through the pizza oven they called a passenger walkway to the commuter plane and the fact that the seats on the commuter plane were padded with a single layer of 'Charmin' the next to last leg of my trip was uneventful. We landed at Long Beach more or less on time and the luggage appeared on the carousel so quickly nobody even had a chance to gripe about how long it was taking. In fact, the Long Beach airport terminal was small enough that I could peek around the edge of the outdoor carousel and see the luggage actually coming off the plane.  I almost expected to see  a very very small man in a white suit  crying out, "De plane, de plane!"

A short luggage lug across the street to the Enterprise Car Rental office where my reservation was actually in their computer at the correct price and I was on my way. The final leg would be my introduction to driving in California, an hour and a half of trying to survive on a series of roads, all of which were referred to as "The" as in "The 15" and "The 415" and so on.

A note here about California highways and driving: apparently since Erik Estrada hung up his mirrored sunglasses and knee-high CHIPS boots anything goes out there speed-wise. At one point as my foster car was rocked in the backwash of yet another barely sub-orbital SUV I thought I must have been crawling along at way below the speed limit. I looked down at my speedometer to find I was doing 85 mile per hour. I haven't driven that fast since I reached voting age. Although I was the three legged coyote in my traffic wolf pack, at least there weren’t all that many people telling me I was Number One so I must not have been doing that badly. It is nevertheless highly intimidating to be a freshly whelped highway cub in a pack of 3000 pound automotive alpha wolves.  Each of the cars that passed me must have had a steering wheel and a driver with at least one finger on that wheel but there was something subtly different about the way they moved down the highway, a sort of ballistic quality to their guidance, like a SCUD missile.

I had been given many ominous predictions about California traffic. To the contrary, I was happy to find myself actually moving on the highway. Every comment I had heard up to that point was that the difference between rush hour and non-rush traffic was that non-rush traffic actually has movement even though it may be like riding the leading edge of a glacier. In contrast the cars emerging from the morning and evening Cal-Lock have on occasion been reported to be covered with something looking oddly lichen or moss like.

So as I rocketed down "The 15" or "The Whatever" I found myself beginning to relax a bit. I had made it through a couple of fairly risky multi-lane changes without becoming a statistic and the miles were ticking off on "The whatever-the-hell-road-number" I was on. I was seeing the same town and exit names on succeeding signs with shorter and shorter distances to the points they marked. That was a good thing it seemed and so I let my mind wander a bit and began to ponder why Californians refer to the state and interstate highways as "The ###"…The 15 or The 415.

Back East we refer to Interstates 95 and 64 as "95" and "64". Adding that extra word, "The" changes it somehow, elevating the status of highways to a sort of imperial level akin in a way to the royal "we". We don't revere them here like they do on the Left Coast. Since Californians' fondness for the cult of the car is well known; perhaps this little colloquialism is consistent with that.

By the time I headed back to Virginia I was prefacing every highway number with “the” but I got over that as soon as I pulled on to Interstate 95 on my way home from the airport. I also left behind my speed demon alter-ego and became once again, a good citizen of the highways. I drove home at a reasonable enough rate that a couple of passing cars even gestured to me that they thought I was the #1 citizen of the highways…that is what they meant, right

After 90 minutes in my very small cobalt blue rented Mitsubishi Something LE (AKA 'my foster car')on California highways, I finally pulled into Alain's driveway, convinced that perhaps there was something worse than flying. At last I was out of the plane and off the road…”laissez les bon temps roullez!” I had cheated death yet again.

 

Comments

[Nikki]

This was great Jim.

You are Linked!

[Jim]

This comment from Terri via e-mail.

"I absolutely enjoyed it. I can appreciate the good citizenship on the airplane because I adopt the same attitude to buy good will of the fates. Upon any flight I become this crazed, anti-social, raging lunatic that says please and thank you to every annoyance possible, all the while smiling a nice little polite how do you do. If it was known, my true feelings airborne, I am sure I would never pass through a security gate again. Good thing our nations leaders haven't been able to invade that personal space or I would be taking many road trips. Hope you are well,"

[Tammy]

Now I understand the REAL reason you won't watch "Lost"!

[ellie]

I absolutely love the term, "heathen hour" Jim. I'm so stealing it. The last time I flew out of LA, we had to be at the airport at 4:00 A.M. Oh, and I suddenly become religious when flying. I even have this little prayer I say inside my head: "Angels, angels, all around. Easy up and gently down." Silly, huh?

Thanks for the great story. Your place on the blogroll has been long overdue, but you're in row 16, right be the window for the best view. ;-)

ellie