It was four years ago today that my family and I embarked on a cross-country journey from Tampa to Rhode Island: five seats, five people, four pillows, two toy poodles, one massive cat and several tons of luggage. Obviously, it was a bit cramped.
You might be wondering why on earth we chose to drive for two days as opposed to hopping a quick three-hour flight. In one word: planeophobia - not to be confused with plain-ol-phobia, or fear of downright everything.
My mother and my sister, both avid watchers of news and other media that I tend to avoid at all costs, decided that flying was the most dangerous mode of transportation in the world. If we boarded a flight, it would no doubt also be boarded by some crazed terrorist or drunken air marshal or Californian. What could we do to defend ourselves?
I tried my best to argue the virtues of air travel over roughing it in the car, but all to no avail. There was no way I was going to get their butts on a plane, even if the alternative was driving a car through the heart of New York City and Washington, D.C., where traffic can sometimes take hours. The trip turned out fine, and we even enjoyed it enough to repeat it the next year, but what is it about air travel that scares the living bejeebubs out of people?
Well, aside from the threat of terrorism (which in itself is such a nether-menace that I would not even consider it a viable hazard), there is always the whole issue of being several thousand feet up in the air.
Is it just me, or does fear of flying dovetail very nicely with fear of heights? No matter how confident I may be about flying, there is always that moment when we have reached our cruising altitude of around 30,000 feet and I look out of the window to see an entire ocean that looks like a plate of glass or a massive city that looks like an ant hill, and I get creepy fleeting thoughts of balls of fire and twisted steel. The fact that my seat can be turned into a flotation device is no solace. The fact that the oxygen masks will drop from overhead makes no difference.
I take the exit rows seriously. When I am not in the exit rows, I look at the shmucks sitting there and wonder if they are really qualified to save my life in the event of an emergency landing.
Last time I was flying home, I noticed four people seated in the exit rows: one 400-pound man who no doubt would obstruct our path to salvation, two self-consumed teenage boys too involved with their iPods and totally cool beanies to give a damn what happened to the rest of the passengers and a sleeping pregnant woman whose well-being in the event of an emergency I would prefer not to ponder. On this flight, I would have been screwed.
When I board a plane, I find myself subconsciously taking a survey of all the passengers. Yeah, me and that guy. Together, we can take anything on. I find myself giving some passengers the half-nod - the one that is kind of out-of-character coming from a small teenage girl.
I have learned not to profile people, though. I was waiting for a flight to D.C. once with a friend from high school when I saw what looked to me like a very nervous man, talking on a cell phone nearly in tears, speaking in a language I could not understand. He had no luggage other than a sub sandwich and seemed generally anxious.
I asked my friend if she noticed him, to which she replied that he was actually on the phone with his family, telling them in Kudrathi that he would be home as soon as possible and missed them very much. Ever since this event, I do not judge anyone. I have enough friends of Middle Eastern descent telling me about the crap they go through at airports to use racial profiling as an effective defense.
I don't know what gets into me when I go through security lines, but I always feel this tremendous urge to joke around with the security folk. Last time, when they confiscated my entire bottle of sanitizer, pmy erfume and my toothpaste, I told the workers to have fun using them.
I do not believe for a second that they throw all that stuff away. I actually read a report several weeks ago profiling an individual whose sole purpose is to sell the thousands of pocket knives and lighters confiscated in airports each day. Can you imagine the revenue being pulled in from ridiculous security practices like these? It is not a coincidence that after having to throw away my sanitizer I found the exact same bottle being sold in a gift shop for three times what I had paid. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
Despite the pain we go through when we travel, there is something really freeing about being that high in the air, higher than the birds. Eat that, suckers. When you are cruising at 30,000 feet, you are above everything. Literally. You are not in even in the same level of the atmosphere as all your problems: You're in the mesosphere, now, dudes. So buckle your seatbelts, and let's all pray the people in the exit rows know what they are doing.
