The Joys of Flight

The flight was bad before we boarded the plane, the gate area small and dingy, the once white ceiling panels Van Goghed with some brown leakage, and the Labor Day Monday return crowd milled moodily about, the explanation for the wait that the cleaning crew was taking time, though we could all see the maintenance van on the tarmac, warning lights blinking in the steady downpour of a storm that had not existed when I landed three hours earlier, the layover a building of ominous gray, lightning blinking in the distance. When they finally cleared us to board by zone, crowds rushed the ticket counter, wheeled bags trailing like rotors, taking out the elderly at the ankles, people willfully ignoring the called zone and then smacking shoulders and elbows making their angry way out. I was in the last zone, and waited until the end, where my ticket made a buzzing sound and the agent craned her chin worldlessly to the side, signaling I would have to wait.

“I’m confirmed,” I said. “I’m sure!”

Heavy-bodied and spectacled, her ruddy skin and severely bunned hair giving her the look of an Irish Aunt Jemima, she examined me with the pitiless gaze of a woman with protocols to follow, me now a hopelessly human obstacle to her getting the plane in the air. When everyone was past she ran my ticket by the console at the computer, and tight-lipped, speaking words under her breath which could have been prayers or curses, she began to type, the computer beeping and buzzing intermittently. It was never clear to me what was wrong or if it was fixed; instead, she called the plane closed and then pointed and said, “Hurry before they close the doors.”

In the plane was humid chaos, the ducts attempting to cut the still hot air and so pushing white steam ominously from the wall vents, a man of fifty with spindly arms and absurdly white knees protruding from ill-fitting khaki shorts punching an overstuffed bag into an overhead bin, his pathetic, forceless blows falling frantically, while a line formed behind him in the aisle and a voice came over the loudspeaker that we were to be seated for immediate departure. An attendant swooped in from his free side and took the man’s bag to be checked while he looked on with his hands open, protesting that they never checked it through right, watching her retreating back as if he thought his appeal might take hold through persistence. When I passed him I said, “I know, they made me check my bag in Denver on the way out and lost it,” which was entirely true, the full version that I’d had to attend a wedding meet-and-greet and breakfast in my sweated-out t-shirt and jeans, that he had no chance at all of escaping the fate he knew was coming. When I finally reached my seat, I was inside and everyone had to stand to ensconce me; the woman I was next to had the sour, pinched look of a weary traveler who was a misanthrope on the first sunlit day of Spring, and I didn’t even attempt to speak, just settled into my seat and looked out the window.

I was returned to the world of the plane by the rising voices of the children behind me, their voices loud in my ears. There was an obnoxious boy of three or four who told his mother what to do: “Get my Daddy’s Blackberry,” he declared. “No. Get me my drink. My toy. Now!” His missives were interspersed with kicks to the back of my chair that shook my neck. Meanwhile, wordless grunts and screams, rising in volume, emitted from a toddler who evidently could not speak, or wasn’t willing to try; I glanced back for a moment and saw the poor young mother holding the child, hair bedraggled and makeup smeared from the abuse of the toddler, who tore at her face and hair as the tantrum came on. I met her eyes for a moment with sympathy I both felt and wished I didn’t—hell is surely other people’s children—and then I turned back and realized that we had taxied and now were still, looked out the window to see a line of jets stretching eight deep, waiting for a single runway, and I wondered how it was that man had deemed flight superior to other modes of transportation, that we paid for the privilege of suffering in small spaces, packed overtight, unfed now, our luggage extra, trusting an under-rested pilot to guide an ill-maintained machine over land and sea, that we called such excursions ‘travel’ and referred to it fondly, saved up our time and money to subject ourselves to such torture.

The loudspeaker crackled, and a disembodied voice spoke. “This is your Captain. We don’t know when it will be our turn for take-off, but turbulence can be expected.”

Behind me, kicks thudded into my seat, the older child yelled and the toddler screamed piercingly. The engine idled, and out the window lightning traced the sky, though it was too loud in the cabin to make out the thunder.

The woman beside me tapped my arm, glanced meaningfully at the armrest where I’d set it. “Do you mind?”

I shook my head, cradled my arms at the elbows, and settled in for a pleasant flight.