From the Archives: Two Bodies in Flight
When I fly, I daydream.
I imagine life as it might have been 300 years ago in the little towns below. I picture boozy, corpulent men wearing tricorne hats standing in tavern doorways. I pick a pair of little headlights traveling along the highway and imagine why they are going where they are going and who they are going to see when they get there. I think about how fast they are moving, and how slow it looks from the air. I think about how elegant William Eggleston’s Untitled (Glass in Airplane) looks, and I try to take the same photo, using my complimentary Coca-Cola and my camera phone.
I am never bored on an airplane.
My dad was in the U.S. Air Force, but he wasn’t a pilot.
My dad was flunking out of Louisiana State University and playing in a garage rock band in the late ’60s when he volunteered for the Air Force. He was stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato, Calif., and Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City, Fla. Then as now, he can’t swim, but his brothers told him to lie. He did, and the Air Force put him on a boat.
They did a lot of rescue work; they recovered a lot of plane wreckage during those days.
Nov. 22, 1968, Captain Kohei Asoh landed Japan Airlines Flight 2 in the San Francisco Bay. My dad’s boat went out in the cold bay waters to help with the rescue. Everyone survived.
Asoh had been a flight instructor in the Japanese military. He had more than 10,000 hours of flight time. He missed the runway. He just screwed up.
My dad rarely flies. He’s 63 now. Last year the day before his birthday, he said, “I just looked up one day and I was an old man.”
Another story: My friend Patrick’s mother is a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines.
Patrick can fly anywhere in the world he wants to so long as he’s willing to wait in an airport all day for an open seat that may or may not exist. He pays a fraction of the normal cost.
I traveled with him once. We went to Florida to watch spring training baseball.
We drove several hours to Monroe, La., to catch a connecting flight to Atlanta. There was only one available, and I decided then and there that if we didn’t make it onto the flight, we would drive back to Shreveport, La. where Patrick lives, and get drunk.
We made it onto the flight. Patrick had a Bloody Mary on the plane. I read a book.
Delta started in Monroe, La., though there is little evidence of it there now. It was a crop duster company. Now, they do business from Macon, Ga., with Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at the center of their operations.
Flying to a strange city hoping you’ll reach your destination requires optimism. One-way rental cars are expensive. Terminal seating is uncomfortable. You learn to travel with a flexible itinerary. You learn to play out the options in your head. You learn to think on your feet.
We almost didn’t make it onto the flight from Atlanta to Florida — well, I almost didn’t. They called Patrick’s name to board, but not mine. We decided before we arrived at the airport that if one of us got a seat on a plane — even if it was the only seat available — he should take it. Get anywhere in Florida, and we’ll figure out the rest.
Patrick turned down the seat because I couldn’t make it onto the plane. It was a very nice thing of him to do. When he told the man at the gate he couldn’t really fly without me, the man cheated, and moved my name up the standby list. We made it on the last two seats. People like to help Patrick.
I’m from Florida, but I haven’t lived there in many, many years. I live in Texas now. At the New York Mets’ spring training game, I sat in the same seats I sat in as a boy. I looked at the same scrub pines just beyond the left field fence that I looked at as a boy. They played the same AM gold hits over the loudspeaker they played back then. This time I was a visitor.
Home can be a very unfamiliar place.
We are fickle mammals.
Few horses pack their things into a U-Haul and move hundreds of miles for a change of scenery.
Are dogs nostalgic? Do cats want bigger apartments?
In Kurt Vonnegut’s book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character addresses a convention of science fiction writers. He’s drunk. He thanks them for understanding that “… life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last billions of years.”
I suppose that’s true. We’re all either floating or flying, depending on how you view space travel. The only difference between flying and floating is a purpose, anyway. Some of us are probably doing a little of both.
I am never bored in flight.
