Right now I am sitting in a condo in Mammoth while my family braves the cold and wind out on the slopes. I am supposed to be working on my dissertation, but I made some very good progress yesterday and think I deserve a little bit of a break before I jump into it again. So I'm going to finish this entry that I began composing a couple days ago. In fact, I have begun composing similar entries after about every other flight I have taken for the last 3+ years, but not one of them has ever made it past my drafts section. (I think. If I'm wrong, most of you haven't been reading long enough to realize this anyway.)I don't really like flying. It all goes back to a fear of heights, of course - or at least, a fear of falling from great heights, which feels a lot more plausible on a plane than on a roller coaster. I'm not terrified of planes. I can, and do, fly just fine, several times a year. But I always feel just a bit nervous on takeoff, and I am very conscious of every bump and jolt and change of velocity that the plane experiences. (I'm not alone though - according to the ever-reliable google search for relevant statistics, of people who fly once or more a year, 18% are afraid of flying, and 32% are at least bothered by it.)
I have a hard time sleeping in moving vehicles at all, but planes are even worse. Drifting off to sleep means my conscious mind loses the ability to explain patiently to my subconscious mind that planes are built to survive hitting little air pockets, and that pilots always make adjustments in altitude or speed, and that if the engines really aren't supposed to sound like that, the pilot would have let us know by now that something is amiss. Every time I happen to drift off to sleep, the plane will lose a little altitude, or speed up, or hit a bump, and my subconscious will scream, "Did you feel that! We're going to fall out of the sky! And then crash! And then die!" This promptly jolts my annoyed, and much more pragmatic, subconscious out of whatever almost-dream it had slipped into to.
Sometimes even when I'm awake my subconscious is hard to placate. The thing that people who are not the least bit frightened of flying love to explain to people like me who are (even just a little bit) is that you are x times more likely to die while driving in a car than while flying a plane. It's as though they think that upon hearing this I should suddenly realize that my fear is completely illogical and be instantly cured. (Of course, it seems more likely to me that, if fears followed from logic, the natural leap would instead be to instill in me a brand new fear of driving.)
But you see, my fear is a little bit logical. It's not about the chances of crashing, so much as the implications. Fatal car crashes happen fast and close to the ground. They're painful (I imagine), but over in an instant. Plane crashes, on the other hand, involving plummeting from the sky to the earth, and therefore involve possibly several minutes of horrible, horrifying anticipation. It is not the crash that scares me, it is everything leading up to the crash. If you have seen the first several episodes of Lost (which, incidentally, I watched while flying - not a good idea) you may understand.
But flying isn't always a bad experience for me. These days it's one of the few times I can really get in some good, substantial reading time. My flight to California took longer than it should have, but I managed to finally make some serious headway in a book a friend lent me that I have been plugging away at, a few pages at a time, for months (and which I just finished this morning - I hope you have the second one to lend me when I get back, Brady...). I love reading, but lately have been doing very little of it, and the books are piling up. When flying across the country, there's not much to do besides read, and I appreciate being able to really lose myself in a book, instead of just trying to get through a few pages before bedtime.
Also, while, like most people, I'm not one for talking to my seat companion for an entire trip, I sometimes enjoy getting to know the person sitting next to me. On the first leg of my journey on Saturday, to Chicago, I set next to a college-age kid from small-town Michigan who had never been farther west than Chicago in his life, and was flying on a jet for the first time (he had once flown on a crop-duster, around the thumb of Michigan, which I imagine is a very different experience). He was traveling to Fargo, North Dakota, to meet his girlfriend's family, spend Christmas with them, and propose to her, and he was full of questions about commercial flight. He asked how fast the plane goes, and expressed disappointment once we got up in the air that it wasn't going faster. He asked about strange sounds and changes in altitude, and it made me feel just a little more at ease myself to be able to reassure him that these were all perfectly normal. He tapped the tray in front of him and asked if it was some sort of storage compartment. "No, its a tray," I said, lowering mine to show him. "You can put your drink on there when they bring it around." "Oh, I didn't know we get drinks!" he said excitedly, and I then felt bad that the flight turned out to be so short that we only got water. Hopefully he got drinks and peanuts on his flight to Fargo.
The most surprising thing to me was when the flight attendant informed us that they would be giving us important safety information and asked that we follow along on the card in the seat pocket in front of us...and then he actually did. In fact, he studied the card diligently for several minutes after the safety presentation was over. I have flown so much, since such a very young age, that I take every piece of it completely for granted. It doesn't occur to me to even listen to the safety presentation anymore, much less follow along on the card, and so trying to put myself in the shoes of an adult who has never flown before was an interesting experience. If I were flying for the first time, I probably would study the safety card, or at least scan it, and I would certainly listen to the safety presentation. There is not necessarily any reason I should know intuitively that the piece of off-white plastic on the seat in front of me is a tray, and I might very well be surprised that the plane doesn't actually feel like it's traveling many times faster than a car, once you get up into the air.
Anyway, I can't think of a good way to end this post, and I really do need to get cracking on my proposal, so I'll just end it here. I hope everyone made it safely to wherever they were headed for the break, and that everyone has a wonderful Christmas!
2 comments:
The sequel is of course waiting for you back in Michigan. ;)
So, speaking of fear of flying... On my flight last week, I was assigned an aisle seat at the back of the plane. I managed to board fairly early in the pack, and then waited for my row-mates, hoping beyond hope that the empty seats would remain that way.
Eventually, they came down the aisle, and I could tell they were making for my row. I dutifully got up, and the father / daughter combo moved into their seats. Right before they sat down, while I was still in the aisle, from a row or so forward, the wife/mother of the pair calls out "Don't Sit Down! We're going!" And with that, they got back off the plane and didn't reboard. The only thing I can figure is a morbid fear of flying. But to be safe, I didn't steal their seats, just in case they were cursed.
My fear of flying is landing. I have created my own safety zone. It is the point that during the descent if we crashed I think I cold still live. The safety zone starts usually about a thousand feet above ground. Considering this narrow window of safety from the time the plane starts its descent to the time it's a about 1000 feet above the ground I am apprehensive for most of the descent. Unfortunately my window of safety is based on nothing by my own intuition and therefore, is nothing but a placebo.
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