Flying has become a whole new experience,
I learned recently as I returned to airline trips after a several-year hiatus. And, as all of you know, the changes haven’t
been pretty. The seats are so tightly jammed in that the person in front of me
at times practically pitches back into my lap. Middle seats are never left
empty anymore. On one of my flights, the person to my left in such a seat managed somehow
to turn so his back was to me while he gobbled an eight dollar airplane
sandwich (sticky white bread, wilted lettuce and some kind of meat). He had to be starving to eat something like that
with such relish. No doubt he missed a meal or two thanks to the long lines with
TSA before boarding.
The only food in front of me was the small
packet of pretzels and plastic glass of diet coke that I’d received for free. I
was not about to fork over good money for airline food. People told me later I was lucky to receive
even that. Then there is the sound of
the plane. Once we were up high and cruising, the engine noises became an all-consuming
backdrop. Turns out, my hearing aids added to the cacophony. I could turn them off. But they somehow added
this layer at the top of the sound that I finally decided resembled a heavenly
chorus.
On second
thought, that was something I wasn’t ready to meet. Not yet. I scrunched my shoulder against the hard
plastic of the wall around the window and tried to concentrate on the big sky
outside. Little frissons of frost were forming on the pane. The same thought kept occurring to me. We
shouldn’t be up here this high. The ups
and downs of the sounds. Maybe it really was a holy chorus of some sort.
The crowds,
the hunger, the noises, the bumping along, it all set me to thinking of earlier
better times for airline travel. Like my
first trip ever by air. 1962 and it was special. I was all of 18 and on the way from the
Midwest to the West Coast to spend the summer with my favorite
grandfather. My old Polish grandfather,
John Isidore Romer, almost 80 and no longer able to make the airline trip to
see us like he used to, carrying a brown
sack filled with chicken he’d fried especially for us, grease marks blotting
through onto the paper.
That trip to see him was my first time out on
my own, an adult. I dressed in the only way acceptable for a young lady of
those times: garter belt to hold up nylon hose, little black leather pumps, a
blue pleated skirt and a proper box style jacket and blouse. Dressed up as much as for a dance, dressed up
like I could go to church.
We had to go
out on the tarmac at Billy Mitchell field in Milwaukee and climb up the
aluminum stairs to enter the big Northwest airlines jet. I remember feeling like I was getting into a
rocket. The idea that we would shoot into the air and traverse half the nation
in a few hours. I was most excited to
see the city and then farmland finally give way to the view from the tiny
porthole next to my seat, yes, I got a window seat, of the vast Mississippi
River flowing some 37,000 feet below me. A year of studying geography my first
year in college, I was excited to share with the lady on the aisle, the one
removed from me by the vacant middle seat, what I knew of the river’s
course.
Little stars
of frost on the window. The wonder of it
all, cruising along at 600 miles an hour. Then meals, okay I don’t recall even what we
ate, but I know there were full trays of food served by bouncy young
stewardesses dressed in uniforms that looked like the suits women wore in old
movies.
Then dozing a bit and finally, lowering over the Portland,
Or., area, Mount Hood in the background
and the plane following the Columbia River. We bumped along, my excitement
growing. My uncle was in the terminal,
waiting for me. No big security. My
suitcase, a square beige bag I borrowed from mom, coming around the conveyor belt, no extra
charge.
The wonder
of it all, the feeling I was now a real adult, setting off on a life, albeit
still with relatives watching over me, but setting flight as it were. A nestling on her first flight.
There was
romance to it all. A romance that is so
long gone. The population of the world
has doubled in the last 40 years and what used to be a big occasion is now
commonplace for so many more people flying.
Maybe that is why our airliners have come to feel more like trips by
Greyhound bus than luxury voyages.
No wonder
the airlines have compartmentalized it all, to move so many more of us
along in this cattle call. That was the other thought that
struck me on my return to air travel. We
now get into little boxes to complete this uncomfortable transition of getting
from point “a” to point “b” with the speed of air travel.
The first
big box is the air terminal. In many places it is so large you have to
transition by getting into some smaller box, like an interior train as they
have at SeaTac, to get from one concourse to another. Once you finally find the
part of the airport where you wait for your plane, you are finally jostled forward past the ticket agents to board. Of course, that is another box.
The big rectangular tube with accordion pleats that gets you into the airplane.
You enter the long silver tube of the
aircraft. As many of you as can fit. You still bounce around in this rocket for
hours, blasting out a gazillion bits of carbon dioxide. Only the impact is so much worse, given the number of flights. Some
estimates say by the middle of the 21st century airline travel
will account for 15 percent of global warming.
And when you arrive, you don’t get out on the tarmac, you
unfold in the long exit, row by row, so many jammed in with their carry-ons
smashing into people’s heads. And
through the folding exit box back into the big box of the terminal.
Yes, it is a wonder to travel so far so fast. But the romance
of getting there is long long gone.
