No Fear of Flying, Part I

I am writing this blog at 10,000 feet altitude and rising… There was a time when I would have been doing this just to keep myself distracted and pretend that I wasn’t absolutely, positively certain that I was about to die in the next 20-30 minutes. Today I am actually not only calm, but I am happy. There is a bit of turbulence right now climbing out over rainstorms in northern Georgia, and I am able to think. I am breathing normally. (OK, more or less normally.) This feels like a miracle.

My fear of flying came on gradually. Like many of my generation, I did not fly at all growing up. The word “travel” meant a trip in the car, and not very far. I was born a white girl in the optimistic suburbs, where cars were loved, polished, talked about, and represented the very best guilt-free toy: necessary for dads to go to work and moms to go grocery shopping and kids to be shuttled to school, yet fun. With their enormous porpoise-shaped fenders and shiny chrome fins and grinning grills, they were the necessary luxuries that in many ways shaped our entire lifestyle. In the postwar relief from rationing, and before the Puritanism of the environmental movement, it was commonplace to go for a Sunday drive. This was our frequent recreational outing—driving up just over the New Hampshire border to see the fall leaves, or visit Storybook Land, or just to look around and come back. At Christmas we would take a drive to see other people’s Christmas lights. “Long” trips were to New York City to see the Rockettes and go to the Bronx Zoo, or to North Conway, New Hampshire, to stay in the Eastern Slope Inn or the White Horse Motel, to go to Echo Lake, and to ride the Skimobile on Mount Cranmore. Once my dad drove my grandmother and me to Boston (just about 12 miles away) where the two of us stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights and I felt like a princess. My most distant adventure, again with my grandmother, was a trip when I was about 14 years old to Washington, DC, where I dragged her through every room of the National Gallery and the Smithsonian, and she showed me her favorite monuments and fountains. I don’t even remember how we got there, but I’m guessing somebody drove.

My first flight was at the end of my freshman year in college. I had fallen in love with a lanky boy from Baltimore, a sweet and innocent art major who made pencil drawings with the delicacy and technical precision of a Renaissance painter. He asked me to fly down for an outdoor 4th of July concert performed by the Baltimore Symphony. I have never forgotten that first flight. I flew in on the night of the 3rd, and as the plane came in over the Baltimore, we could see dozens of local fireworks displays, like tiny illuminated sprays of flowers spreading open and disappearing in the dark. I had no fear at all, just a sense of awe and childlike delight. Our starter relationship turned out to be as ephemeral as the harmless bombs bursting in air, but I still have one beautiful drawing of his fingers playing a flute, and the memory of that first magical flight.

My happy relationship with airplanes turned out to be as ephemeral as well. My next flight was several years later, as I hopped aboard the Eastern shuttle (a now defunct plane between Boston and New York). With all the aplomb and assumed sophistication of a 22-year old singer, I took the quick ascent and descent in stride. I affected the bored familiarity of an unflappable New Yorker, and assumed I’d be doing so for the rest of my life. But my equanimity was short-lived. TO BE CONTINUED…