In this world we live in it is easy to move between two continents quite quickly, so quickly that one day you can be eating pasta and saying grazie and the next, eating tacos and trying NOT to say grazie because, face it, homegirl, you aren’t in Italy anymore and saying grazie is just going to come off as pretentious, or weird. Never mind that your brain hasn’t caught up with your body quite yet.

Hurtling through space in a tube is weird. Every time I do it, I sort of cover myself in an emotional lip balm, telling myself this is what I have to do, in order to get over, in order to get back. But let’s face it, a day, or a day and a half, or two days, in transit via air is a bizarre way to spend your time, no matter how glamorous or appealing the destination might be. You spend this time in silence with a people you are already suspicious of in the boarding line (are they going to sit next to me? Keep me up all night? Maybe blow up the plane? Will I live through this?) and the workers of the flight, who are always saying hello, thank you, danke, arrivederci or whatever on boarding or departing, but who don’t really have that exact same embracing attitude for the other nine hours of the flight (at least not in coach.) Not to say that they aren’t nice. I probably don’t ask, so I shouldn’t expect.

Sometimes, flying over Greenland or wherever, I wish it was a hundred years ago and I was on a ship going to Europe. The ship would take a week to cross the Atlantic, and it wouldn’t be a tube full of bad smells. But the reality is, I could easily be in coach on a ship (third class) and that would kind of suck. It probably wouldn’t be like all those fun cool peasants dancing on Titanic – it would be a slovenly rat infested pit of hell. On an airline, the classes of service are only differentiated by the airline attendants announcement not to cross over into Business class. But the people in Business have mostly upgraded from coach, or their companies paid for the ticket. The bounderies are pretty loose, these days. I like that the class barrier has almost completely been broken down, unless maybe you are traveling on the Orient Express or something.

But still, in coach, I put myself in a mode that is: just get though it for the next eighteen hours. And then I do and I am home and it is good and like it never happened, but I have also seen some movies I never would have seen, a few that I might remember, a few that I can’t today, even though I flew just yesterday. Valium, red wine, that slow hum. Moving into the unconscience while remaining sort of conscience. That, is flying.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Tales from a Strange Land. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.