Flight anxiety, the good old days and poetry

Some people have never flown. And this surprises me.

I’m still slightly surprised when folks haven’t done something that seems fairly routine to me. You’ve never seen a single Star Wars movie? Never ridden a roller coaster? Never been on an airplane?

Not that the experience these days is particularly enjoyable. In addition to being expensive, it’s a pain to get to the airport, to check luggage, to go through security, to pay $19.99 for a sandwich you could make at home for $0.99 and then to scrunch into a sardine tin with a few hundred strangers for hours at a time.

Flying seemed more luxurious when I was a child. For one thing, security was more lax. I remember walking my dad, who early in his career flew just about every week, to the gate. Not to security, mind you, to the actual gate! And kids would get these wings you could pin to your shirt, plastic replicas of what the pilots wore.

Of course, 9/11 changed all of that. Security, understandably, is much tighter. Take off your shoes, take out your laptop, take off your belt, walk through this machine. Then reassemble yourself with whatever dignity you have left.

Back when my dad traveled for work, I remember he once left his wallet at home. He didn’t realize it until he was about to board, and he raced back home, grabbed it, and drove back to Dallas-Fort Worth. And the flight attendant held the plane for him. What a different world.

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My flying routine is always the same: 

• Leave the house at least three hours before my flight (recently, I started taking the Groome shuttle. I feel less guilty about making folks drive me to a parking lot in Macon than I do asking them to ferry me all the way to Hartsfield-Jackson). 
• Text my family when I’ve made it through security. 
• Walk to my gate for some reason (to see if it’s still there? To see how long it takes to get there from security? I have no idea why I do this. But it just seems like the right thing to do).
• Go get something to eat
• Walk around
• Check my flight app 15,000 times to make sure my gate hasn’t changed
• Download podcasts I probably won’t listen to
• Board the plane

I used to buy a newspaper, too. But it’s difficult to find print newspapers these days, even in airports. I always enjoyed grabbing the local metro paper to get a sense of their design, their news judgment. What matters to this community? How good are their sports columnists? How much local news do they mix with state and national?

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I fly three or four times a year, enough that I have little anxiety about the process. I know ATL like the back of my hand. Security, boarding, the flights themselves, they’re all routine. 

I still get a little bit of a thrill when the plane shudders as it attempts to shake itself free from the ground. And I like to get a window seat. If you’ve never seen a sunset from the air, it is quite a peaceful experience. 

It can be slightly unsettling to see cities from 35,000 feet in the air. All my deadlines and problems and hopes and dreams are down there, tiny, miniscule. It’s a good perspective to have from time to time. 

I tend to read a lot. I just can’t sleep sitting up, but I envy the folks who do. It’s a kind of teleportation, right? Go to sleep in one city, wake up in another.

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I leave you with a poem I wrote in 2016 sitting on a runway at Hartsfield-Jackson. This was four years before I moved to Georgia — I was flying to a newspaper conference in Montgomery, Alabama of all places. We were delayed because they had to fix a lightbulb on the outside of the plane, I think.

This is purgatory

Sitting in an airplane shell

Trying to get comfortable

A stranger beside me

Rain on the windows and

Cracks in the runway