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.
Below 
She is two now and mobile enough to hunker down in the impossibly emerald foliage and chomp a bright red juice-dribbling berry right there in the field for the first time.
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